Somewhere along the earlier stages of my blogging life, I decided that blog gurus are not telling me the truth about building traffic to my blog. They are adamant that if you write good quality articles, every thing esle will fall into place. People will start spreading the word around that you have a good blog. Contents is King, they say. You do not need SEO. SEO is not important.
I am happy I digressed early and I have been telling people who comes here the contrary. Search Engine Optimization IS important if you want to build up your traffic from scratch. It is THE only free way to get traffic if you are not prepared to pay for it. With good SEO you can even write crap and still get the traffic flowing in day in, day out. Not that I advise this though. At least write something presentable.
Many a times, I try to stop short of calling all those successful bloggers hypocrties for telling their audience they do not need Google or Yahoo. Sometimes I fail, for they are indeed hypocrites. They are SEO experts, when the blogger’s mask is taken off.
They know the importance of Search Engines and the potential of good traffic that these search brings. They know every trick in the books about building backlinks and about SERP rankings. They own the best SEO tools to do their research and ‘analyzations’ of sites that they are competing with. They will try their best ot out rank them with SEO, not with their superior quality contents. The fact is superior contents CAN NOT compete with SEO and they know it.
For the past 2 weeks I have seen 2 very prominent bloggers go back on what they have been preaching all along. One just started a membership site for people who are interested to have their post checked for good SEO practices. Members are required to pay something like more than 47 bucks monthly, if I am not mistaken, to have their script do an run down of what you have done wrong with your post and what could be done to improve the SEO of that post.
Another did a post today on How To Optimize A Single Post On Your Blog For SEO, which is a shrewd cover up post for selling a SEO software called Market Samurai. I have no problems with that as I too have heard of good feedback for this software. The only thing holding me back from getting it is because I have already spent a few hundred bucks buying SEO Elite and Keyword Elite some years back. I still use them, but that arsehole stopped upgrading it!
Anyway, like I said, this a clever cover up post for an affiliate product and if you read the comments, you will see he is going to make quite some sales from that post. AND, I am guessing this post is just a small warm up for more SEO products to come.
Call me anything, but I am not linking to these 2 famous bloggers. Everybody reads them anyway, so whoever is reading this will know who I am referring to. The issue is, why are they propagating SEO now when all this while, they have been telling all to pay more attention to the quality of their contents? I’ll let my favorite four piece answer that.
*clap* Someone had to say it
I have a question for u, how important is the age of the site.
Because I feel I have optimized everything to the fullest, and only 2 weeks ago Google actually started sending targeted traffic and now it’s the #1 traffic source.
Is 6 months old just not old enough for Google?
Age is VERY important. The older your site, the more trust Google will have in you.
6 months is just about right for Google to start sending you traffic. In case you do not know, when you start a new site, Google puts your site in something people refer to as a ‘sandbox’, When you are there, you become the last choice for getting searched. so unless you have something that no one else in the world is writing about, they will not be looking at your site.
It takes 3 to 6 months of hibernation to prove to Google that your site is a legitimate one and not a some site that has been set up to make a few quick bucks and then gets abandoned. It is only after that period that Google will start ranking your keywords.
What we do to overcome this is we try to buy aged domains or domains that are more than 3 years old and have been given up by the previous owner. That’s another long story.
For new domains, the only way to get out of the sandbox fast is to get some really good quality links for your site within the first few days or weeks after you launch. If yo have trusted sites linking to you, Google will know the site is legit, even if it is new and you can expect some search traffic within a two weeks or a month.
Since you are receiving traffic from Google, Congrats! you are officially out of the sandbox. It will keep increasing if you keep posting good keyword related post.
Yup I was expecting something like that, about the age
And yeah I read digital forums daily about all of the stuff you mentioned but it’s a long story 
So basically, you can say that the real reputation starts now, once out of the sandbox.
Or you can say, the real work starts now.
The more links you get for your blog with the right anchor text, the higher your post will rank.
Would that mean, spend more time building related links than posting content?
I agree that there are some misguiding experts out there … but most of them who say focus on your content are not wrong either .. it’s just that extra ordinary content makes the SEO work just so easy and when the content is not good enough SEO becomes a very tiring task … however, whoever said that website can grow solely on basis of good content, was absolutely wrong. SEO is mighty important.
@Mitco,
It’s up to you. If your keywords post don’t have much competition, you can spend less time on link building.
Tell you the truth, I don’t spend one second building links to this blog. All comes naturally from people who links to the articles they find interesting and from people who uses the my Themes.
If I was to have a blog like yours, I would concentrate on the words, “soccer bettings” and “UK football betting”
Just the words ‘football betting’ is too broad as US also bets on their version of football. Your blog is about the ‘soccer’ kind of football which is not popular in the US. That’s why you see high search hits in the Google Adword Tool for the keywords, ‘football betting’.
If you place your attention on ‘soccer betting’, ‘sports betting’ or any other kind of ‘bettings’ that you have as your keywords now, you are going to receive a lot of irrelevant traffic once your blog starts to rank for those words. If you run affiliate Ads concerning the UK version of football, it will not receive a lot of interested clicks.
Might get some clicks if you run Adsense though.
It will be good if you have ‘soccer betting’ or ‘UK football betting’ as your anchor text when you get your backlinks. Get enough of these two anchors and your blog will have a good authority on that niche. Might be tough so go for long tails first like ‘UK premier league football betting” or so on and so forth. You get the idea.
Just my amateurish observations.
yup I see what you are talking about. Adsense TOS does not allow sites with gambling related material
I have started recently to use titles a Football Predictions For Barclays Premier League, English Premier League and etc.
The thing that worries me is that UK football betting or UK premier league football betting sounds too Googlish oriented
Sorry missed this one.
Anyway, I don’t think your site is about gambling. You are just giving your predictions which in all sense is very informative for people who are interested in football.
Having “Googlish” titles is also not a crime and I think even Matt Cutts said saometime ago that we should have titles that are clear and precise so Google knows what your post is about.
That is another brownie point for you.
I see, I get you now. Basically be specific, don’t try to generalize.
I spend over 50% of my time on SEO related activities. Content is great, but backlinks are the key. I have found article submissions to be the best backlink strategy, but there are definitely many others that provide value. Thanks for the great info!
“Backlinks is the key”
Agreed.