| By :
Steve Weber
Almost all Internet marketing beginners have a pie in the sky dream of "build it and they will come" when it comes to the websites they build. With today's Internet, the process is much more difficult to get traffic to a website than ever before. There are countless millions of web pages now days competing for first page rankings for virtually millions of short and long tail keywords. It takes more than a pretty site and wishful thinking to attract traffic to websites in even moderately competitive areas. In the past getting the attention of the search engines simply required placing quality content on the site's pages. However, this was very easily manipulated by spammers and the search engines had to find a better way of judging the relevance of websites and how they should be ranked. The next criterion that was implemented was a term called backlinks. These backlinks occur when another site out on the web places an active link to another site. Google especially considers these to carry much weight when it comes to how the sites are judged. If all things are equal, a site that has more and better quality backlinks will rank higher. The term "higher quality" means sites that have great backlinks linking to their site. In the past, reciprocal linking was a method of getting these links. However, Google now discounts all reciprocal links. They no longer provide a good indication of how relevant the site is which is being linked to. One-way links are what really help sites now days. Very young sites can begin building some backlinks simply by submitting original articles to article directories, posting comments to do-follow blogs, and participating in do-follow forums in areas similar to that of the website. However, now Google has added a third indicator of relevance. This new addition is called "site activity". This simply means how much traffic is actually going to the site. Google figures that a site could have great content, great backlinks, but still get little or now traffic. They believe that a site which is getting traffic surely must be more relevant than sites getting little traffic. That may be true, but it may be a catch 22 situation that only participation in social media can remedy. There is no reason to build a site unless a plan for acquiring traffic is in place. Before one minute of work is performed on the site, the question of how to get traffic to the site must first be answered.
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