Getting traffic to your website is becoming more and more difficult as the number of websites on the internet continues to increase at an incredible pace. You probably know by now that the key to getting long term traffic is to get your website ranked in the top page or two of the major search engines for at least some search terms. And the key to getting this ranking is to get as many good backlinks as possible from other websites.
There are many ways to get these backlinks: article marketing, directory submissions, forum posting, blog commenting, or participating in link building or exchange networks. Getting backlinks through these techniques can be very time consuming, and the search engines have started to devalue many of these links because they are fairly easy to get.
The sort of links that the search engines value the most are links from regular websites where the link is embedded within content that is relevant to the website to which the link points. In particular, the search engines seem to love links from a blog post in a blog that is regularly updated and that is related to the website. So one great strategy for getting long term traffic is to get as many of these blog links as possible.
So how do you get these blog links? There are two main strategies. The first strategy is to use free blog sites like Wordpress and Blogger. You can find many such free blog sites by searching the web. On any of these, you can set up as many free blogs as you want without having to purchase your own domains. The domain of your blog is just a subdomain of the blogging platform website. If you post regularly to this blog over a period of time (many months) the blog itself will start to generate pagerank and links from this site will have some link value.
The second main strategy is to create your own network of blogs on your own domains. Many webmasters feel that this is an even better technique than the free blog route, because the search engines recognize that anyone can create a free blog website but it takes more dedication to create a standalone website on a separate domain. But there is a special trick to creating a network of blogs that you must use if you want to get the search engines to value these links.
Search engines realize that if a person owns two websites, then a link between these websites does not mean much. After all, it is easy for anyone to give a link from their own site to another one of their websites. The trick in using blogs is to have the search engines believe that each of your websites is actually owned by someone else.
To understand how to make this happen, we must look at IP addresses. An IP address is just a sequence of four numbers called octets, each octet ranging in value from 0 to 255. Search engines generally use the rule that any websites that exists on the same IP address are probably owned by the same person. In fact, search engines generally use the rule that any websites that exist on IP addresses where only the fourth octet is different may well also be owned by the same person, so even these links are devalued.
To get the most value out of your blogs, it is necessary to put your blogs on different IP addresses where both the third and fourth octets are different. If you look around, you can find so called SEO web hosting packages where you can get 10 or 20 different (unique) Class C IP addresses, where "Class C" just refers to the fact that the third octet (and probably fourth octet as well) is different from one IP to the next.
Once you get web hosting with unique Class C IP addresses for your blogs, start writing blog posts. If you continue to blog for several months, these blogs will gain in pagerank and links from these sites to your main website will have a great deal of value. This is a technique that takes some work and a bit of money to overcome the more substantial costs of special SEO hosting, but it can yield great rewards over time, especially when used with other techniques for getting as many backlinks as possible.
These days, backlinks are king. Get as many as you can and the traffic will follow.
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