The Biggest Myths Around Internet Traffic
Building website traffic takes time and effort, but that doesn’t stop persistent myths about developing millions of hits overnight. Having worked on a range of websites in a variety of industries, the paths to creating consistent web traffic vary, but none of the common instant solutions ever work.
Blind Submission to Search Engines and Social Media
There are many companies on the web purporting to submit your site to thousands of search engines and social media sites for some nominal fee. Some of these don’t submit your site at all, but for the ones that do, you’ll likely see no increase in traffic. Why is this?
Web pages have to be optimized for search engines, and while blindly submitting a non-optimized site may get your pages indexed, you’ll likely find your site is ranking in the thousands for most search phrases. Search engine users usually don’t go beyond page one of search results, so if you’re not in the top ten results it barely matters that you’re indexed at all.
Worse still, many search engines ignore bulk submissions for lack of relevance (or they recognize the IP address of the submission engine), and most social media sites will ignore content from spam sites. Since you always need an account in social media, it doesn’t take long for a site to identify those accounts that exist purely to spam their networks.
The reality is that you want to be indexed by Google, Yahoo! and Bing, but it’s better to do this yourself and optimize your content first.
Purchasing inbound links
Inbound links come from third party sites that link to your’s, and they are the lifeblood of website traffic. But search engines such as Google look at the quality rather than the quantity of those links – a handful of inbound links from high quality, authoritative sites are worth infinitely more than hundreds of links from questionable sites such as link exchanges.
Companies that claim to develop links for you are not able to get the high quality links that make this mechanism work, and will invariably use automated scripts (bots) to spam blogs and forums with your URL. Many search engines are capable of seeing this pattern relatively quickly, and will actually penalize your site as a result.
You definitely want quality inbound links, and the best way to create these is to consistently develop high quality content that makes visitors want to link to your web pages.
Buying email lists
Email is still a great tool for promoting your site or business, but taking a direct mail approach is a big mistake. Apart from the legal issues of sending unsolicited email to thousands of recipients (see the CAN-SPAM Act), it’s simply ineffective to expect any result from spamming large numbers of people.
Companies that sell these lists often sell the same lists to large numbers of buyers. Frequently the email addresses are old or inactive, and even those that are still valid are receiving a considerable amount of junk mail from companies that buy the lists, and tune out to the constant noise.
Email lists must be developed organically in order to work. Inviting your customers to join at the point of sale, adding sign-up forms to your website and providing incentives for sign-ups (such as discounts, promotions or competitions) are all tried-and-tested ways to build a quality list of email recipients that won’t ignore your messages or flag your domain as spam.
The common theme to many of the myths is the promise of instant payback for minimal investment of time or money. If these methods actually worked, every site would use them to rank on page one of search engine results. Unfortunately, people who buy into these schemes often have their sites penalized in search engine results, and even alienate potential customers by spamming.
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