You must have heard it said many times over that traffic is the lifeblood of any internet business. Of all traffic sources, search engine optimization (SEO) is about the most enduring and effectively, cheapest means in the long run. In comparison with pay per click for example, the traffic the marketer generates from search engine optimization (SEO) recurs unlike pay per click where the traffic generated virtually grinds to a halt as soon as the marketer’s expenditure on his advertisement stops. This makes search engine optimization a much sought after means of traffic generation by most marketers.
However, “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Search engine optimization is a very painstaking and relatively long term method of generating traffic. In brief, search engine optimization involves on page and off page site optimization. This again can be looked at from the angle of content creation and optimizing as well as generation of backlinks. All these enable the small business owner to improve page rank of his site.
The question now arises as to which approach is best for the marketer to achieve effective search engine optimization for his site such that he obtains reasonable volume of traffic to enable sales and profit within the shortest possible time?
Some marketers would say just more and more content published on your website or blog will achieve the objective. Others would say, emphasis should be on gaining as many backlinks as possible. Let us be practical. Can any small business marketer hope to effectively compete with the relatively larger companies in terms of content generation? These companies can afford to employ freelance writers on a permanent basis to regularly churn out relevant and unique articles for their website’s use. Some of these companies even go to the extent of utilizing bots to generate articles for their blogs/sites.
The alternative to generating huge content left for the small business marketer is duplication of content which may not favor the marketer as a lot of his duplicated content may end up not being indexed by Google and other search engines.
The other approach is in regards to gaining backlinks. Hitherto, this could also effectively be dominated by relatively bigger companies who could afford to finance the use of bots to spam many sites with a view to gaining backlinks. The possibility of this is however now curtailed with the introduction of captcha by many websites.
Combined with this is the fact that here, the “river is very wide and available for all to swim”. A small business owner can effectively research his own set of keywords which may not be in use by the relatively bigger business marketer and so optimize for these and begin to point massive backlinks towards these set of keywords.
The small business marketer can even create very few high quality unique content in form of “link bait” which can attract backlinks on its own merit.
In summary, the best approach for the small business marketer to improve page rank and achieve search engine optimization (SEO) for his website within the shortest possible time and thus reap the relatively free targeted traffic therefrom, is through relatively much more focus on backlinking, possibly self-generating, through link baiting as opposed to massive original content generation which can take ages.
