‘Referral Traffic’ is the technical name for links to your site. A referral is when someone on another website clicks on a hyperlink to your website and lands on one of your webpages.
Links have formed the basis for determining “trust” on the internet for much of its existence. It was, in part, Google’s use of link analysis that allowed Google to revolutionize search engines and dominate the internet.
Though Google has claimed that links play much less of a role in determining search results than they used to, most people in the SEO world strongly suspect or believe that links are basically as important as they’ve ever been.
The long and the short of it: if you can’t get direct traffic, you want referral traffic. It’s the second best type of traffic. (Arguably the first in many ways.)
- Links send people to your site from other sites
- Traffic through links indicates to Google and Bing and others that your site is valuable and trustworthy
How to Get Links
More has been written on how to get links (“link-building”) than any other topic in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are more guides than any one person could ever read or, probably, count. So I won’t give you a guide here, but instead just outline a basic process:
- Create something people might want to link to (“content”)
- Put that content up online
- Tell people about it.
- Get links.
That’s it. It sounds very simple but, because people have been doing this for 20 years, there’s a lot of competition, probably even in your niche of your industry.
CREATING CONTENT
Creating content for the internet is a topic in and of itself. So here are just the briefest of guidelines:
- It has to be interesting to your potential visitors/clients and to people who might want to link to it
- It can be an article but it could also be an embedded or hosted picture (“infographic”), video or audio file, with your business name on it
- If the topic has already been covered online – especially if it has been covered online by lots of people – your take on the topic has to be unique and, ideally, better than everyone else’s
- It should be “evergreen” – i.e. it will remain relevant in the coming months and years
Doesn’t sound so easy now, does it?
PUTTING YOUR CONTENT ONLINE
- If you’ve written an article you need to upload it to your site in a way that makes sense with what is already on your website. (If you’re a wordpress user: Is it a post or a page?)
- If you’ve made an infographic, you should embed it on your site with some text, but you should also put the infographic on social media with links to its original home
- If you’ve made a video or audio file then there’s controversy about where to store it – teach the controversy!!!
I cannot stress enough that, wherever you put it, the content has to be accessible by users and robots.
Because the internet is now quite graphic-driven, as people are visual, written content without graphics is going to struggle, all other things being equal, so having some graphics is a big plus.
Your content should be added to your sitemaps and, if it’s a page rather than a post, it should also be added to your homepage or wherever your directory of pages is.
TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT YOUR CONTENT
The process of letting people know about your new content is part of “content marketing” – using your content to drive sales – but also part of link-building.
The easiest way of telling people about your content is posting it to social media. This won’t help with links unless you get lucky. In this case, getting lucky means:
- Your content is shared tons of times (goes viral) and the likes and shares keep it prominent in social media feeds, causing your post(s) to, in essence, be a link to your site
- Someone sees your post and decides to write about your content, creating a link on their site
If you have a newsletter, this is a relatively simple way of telling people who already know your business about your content, though it won’t help with links unless those in your newsletter list have sites of their own, or they share your newsletter with people who do, and those site owners choose to link to your post.
If you are a member of a forum related to your business, and that forum allows commercial posts, you can post links to your content in the forum, following the forum’s guidelines. This is an actual permanent link, so it’s better than the above two options.
Depending upon the type of content, you may be able to post it on certain other sites that fall somewhere between forums and social media (Reddit for example) or in a directory-type site which compiles links to content like yours. You may have to ask for permission depending upon the site’s policies.
But none of this is really going to get you links quickly, unless something you created goes viral (or you’re followed by people who really want to link to your stuff).
SO HOW DO YOU GET LINKS?
As I said, there are link-building guides everywhere – many of which are much better than anything I can tell you – but the short answer is: you ask for them.
- You make a list of websites you think would be interested in linking to you. You do that by:
- Searching your keywords for your content and finding non-competitors who might be interested in your content
- Seeing who links to your competitors
- Finding broken links on sites related to your business.
- Advanced Strategies: https://gaps.com/advanced-link-building/
- And then you contact those websites and ask them to link to you.:
- You ask webmasters if they would be interested in linking to you
- You ask webmasters with broken links if they would like to replace their broken links with your content
- You ask webmasters (if you’re really brazen) if they wouldn’t want to link to your content instead of your competitor’s (your content must be better to do this!)
It’s time-consuming and disheartening but it works much better than posting your content on facebook and hoping that someone who sees it will write a post on their site linking to you content.
Moz’s list of Stupid Myths About Link Building