The Secret to Getting Traffic: Link
May 9th, 2008 by MattForget all about PageRank. Fill your posts with links to related posts, on your blog, and more importantly, on other blogs. Don’t hoard PageRank, and try to keep visitors on your site. Send them to other sites, and hope they come back. If you have a good blog, they will.
A little counterintuitive, isn’t it? You send your visitors away, in order to get more?
Yep. It works because, by linking to someone, you’re ending up on their proverbial radar. If they notice that you’ve linked to them, there’s a good chance they will read your post, and possibly link back. If everyone was stingy with their links, the web wouldn’t work very well, would it? You wouldn’t have traffic from people linking to your posts. As a reader, even, you would have a much harder time finding things, and would miss-out on posts that you would find useful. Without links, the web wouldn’t be the web.
But the New York Times doesn’t ever link to anyone!
No, they don’t. Most of the Dead-Tree Media (or Dinosaur Media) don’t really understand the web. They don’t really like it much either. They would prefer to hang onto their existing, failing, business model. Since they can’t do that very well, they try to “break the web,” and make it work the way they want. They hoard PageRank, and try to keep people on their site, where they’ll be bombarded with ads, and help to inflate their traffic stats. Oh, and sometimes they don’t like it when you link to them either…
Link, and you will get links. That’s how the blogosphere works.


Check your blog’s statistics. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they mainly typing-in your blog’s URL, coming from search engine results pages (SERPs), or are they being referred to you from other sites?


I’m still kicking myself over a big mistake I made recently. A few months ago, I made some major changes to The Site of Requirement, my Harry Potter analysis and news site. I installed a copy of WordPress, moved all of the content into it, and reworked the design to take advantage of CSS instead of tables. After a few weeks of work, it was running smoothly again. My mistake? After finishing all of that work, I didn’t back it all up. I neglected to make a new backup over the following months as well.







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