Link Blog

While "dejunking" my inbox after this long weekend, I ran across an email from one of the newsletters to which I subscribe. Usually they have pretty good stuff, but hey we all gotta eat, so more and more frequently they are sending advertisements instead of news. Anyway, the subject line was "Get Top Google Rankings". I am always interested to hear other people's ideas and advice (I am not too old to learn something new) so I decided to read on.

Typical sales hype, "Yadda, yadda, yadda". Of course I understand that this is a sales letter and the whole idea is to get people to buy their service, but I was sincerely disappointed to read this line, "The reality is if you're not on top of Google, Yahoo and MSN you are essentially invisible."

Yes, I know what a top placement in these three engines can do for your traffic levels, but invisible seems ridiculous to me. I have a little hobby website that has a few placements (very, very few) on all of these engines, but it is a new site so it is not placed very well yet. This little hobby site of mine is generating about 2500 uniques a month. I know, I know this is not a huge amount of visitors, but for less than three months online without any real promotion, I am pretty pleased. You might be surprised to learn that 85% of my traffic comes from other websites and bookmarks, NOT from the search engines. In fact search engine traffic only accounts for 3% of those unique visitors.

You wanna hear something even more amazing? I have never requested one single link from any other site, with the exception of one directory submission to List My Niche (If you want to count directory listings). Now in all fairness, when I created this little site my whole objective was to be able to generate traffic through a community and not have to depend on search results.

The site is a portal dedicated to a very small niche. By listings other webmasters in the directory and sending an acceptance letter to the webmasters I choose to include the site has gained its links, without ever having to ask. These days people understand the importance of links and generally will provide one if you have done something for them.

Ok, I am getting a little off topic, my whole point for this post is that just because you are not top ten for your target keywords in the major search services, does not mean you are invisible! To me, this is antiquated thinking and borders on a blatant lie. It is unfortunate that people are still using scare tactics like that to make a sale. So be weary of people that tell you things like that, because the web is evolving and this is not true. You can get better quality traffic by working through your community and it won't cost you an arm and a leg - just a little work.