Website Traffic Improvement Claims

Posted at 4:33 AM, Apr. 11, 2006

Some web offerings claim to offer higher placaement from search engines.  Watch out - some can actually hurt you.  I've spent some time looking into this to understand how it works for someone else, and file this report:

The sites set up a ton of domains that are really bogus (no business function) then put links to your site in all those bogus sites. One key that search engines look for is how many other sites link to yours. However, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Google are no dummies and while you may get a temporary bump, once they catch on your site will be black listed and you'll find yourself on page 99 forever.

There are however some firms that market software programs who will scan your site and give you tips on how to make your site more attractive to various search engines. Note that what might be good for Yahoo, may not be good for Google. I think these can be useful. These programs are pretty cool.

Let's say I wanted to get people interested in my town, Rockaway, NJ. One might think that I could fill page after page of the phrases "Rockaway, NJ" & "real estate" - nope the engines are too smart for that. OK, so I'll write a long paragraph, or copy it from some verbose website in Rockaway and then create a page on my site, THEN copy that page again and again on my site under different links - nope the engines are too smart for that.

However, if I find article after article that contains information about Rockaway, and create my won pages from it and have literally 100's of them, now I'll get some attention. But then I've stolen others content.

What this software does is analyze your site and make suggestions about how to make it more visible to the search engines. Obviously the more content you have which uses the key words you wish to be searched on the better.

One of the most useful things to do is swap URL's with other site owners in related industries, other agents from this forum, finance companies, furniture companies, etc. They are more valuable than your "friends" sites, but a link from a real website is still a link and the more you have the better you are to the search engines.

However, IMHO watch out for those sites that claim they can get you to page one. IMHO, it's the same as paying for leads. But on this one, once you are caught - you're dead. May just as well get a new domain and start over.