How to get visitors to your blog without backlinks

Since Panda, I have been building niches and blogs without using any methods that Google frowns on. Specifically, I have stopped buying or manipulating links to get top rankings in google for my blog. All the amazon niche sites that I have built are done with content and by targeting the right keywords that nobody is bothering to optimise for.

In this post, I want to encourage you to sharpen your SEO skills by not building links. From my past experience, building links makes you lazy as an SEO. Everyone just buys them from places such as trafficplanet.com or fiverr or blog networks. Your whole SEO strategy becomes a routine of:

• using keyword tools such as keyword researcher that helps you identify those long tail keywords and
• buying links to rank all long tail keywords

Take away the link buying option and most folks making money online will suddenly lost their way on how to get visitors to their blogs or niche sites.

If you want to improve your SEO skills, why not learn to build sites without backlinks. If you need some hints, here is what I have been doing to get visitors from search engines without placing links excessively:

How to get visitors: Method 1

Use google news or any rss monitoring tools to see what kind of news are happening in your niche. For example, in my 4 season tent site, I spotted a new trend called glamping tents. This is a new kind of camping trends that combines outdoor with luxury living. Some people hate it while some don't. The key for us is to see how to generate content that spark more interest and searches. Here is the step by step method

• Scan for new terms in your niche
• Identify a few terms and start writing entry level articles that targets beginners wanting to know about these new terms
• Write a couple interesting content that can potentially be shared such as a list post or a contradictory article or even some funny images etc
• Link these new interesting content from the first batch of entry level articles or tell your visitors to search for such information

This method is what I called link and bait. You target the less interesting but easy keywords to pull in visitors and lead them to your more interesting ones so that these can potentially be shared. You can't directly just work on the interesting articles because no one gets to see and share them. You need to build some kind of traffic funnel from the entry level articles first.

How to get visitors: Method 2

Use lots of images that are named and tagged properly with keywords.

A couple of my amazon niche sites are developed this way and have received lots of traffic from Google Image. The good news is that some of them are even buying stuff so image search can be monetised. Remember to use a wordpress plugin that helps to take visitors directly from the image to your post so that your content can be read.

How to get visitors: Method 3

Leverage of popular article directories such as Squidoo to pull in traffic for you. Say I want to build more traffic to my 4 season tent site. I will create a Squidoo Lens that targets a long tail such as the best 4 season tent for 2 people. Due to the authority of these article directories, they can rank without backlinks and pull in traffic from search engines. If the articles have a link back to your site, some percentage of the traffic will click the link and visit your page.

You can do this for multiple long tail keywords and traffic will increase over time.

This strategy was used in the past mainly to get more links but how you should be using it now is to treat the article directories as traffic funnels. This will ensure you write better quality content that will drive folks to visit your site.

Conclusion

Seo might only be about content and links but the way you combine these pieces can lead you to different traffic strategies. If you don't start to explore these different permutations, you will always be one step behind others in terms of your marketing prowess. Time to leave the backlink game behind and see what SEO really can offer.