SEO is a very time consuming process which may take much longer than it took you to create a web site. Especially link building requires a lot of work and time. What if it were possible to make backlinks multiply automatically, without your involvement! In fact, there are ways to do that. Some of them are rather well known, others less. In this article we will describe such techniques as well as some other not very well known SEO approaches.

The most efficient way for link building is through article distribution. Many already know that but for those who do not the argument is very simple. Instead of just asking a web master to include a link to your site, you write an article which is interesting and will attract visitors, so that web masters will want to put it on their sites. In return, they will link to your site from within the article. There are also automated services that distribute articles to hundreds of web sites. That can save you months of work which you would have to do by submitting to all those sites manually. Such automated services, of course, cost money, although normally not much. But here we want to suggest something that can be done absolutely free using your own web site.

Publishing articles on your own web site can help you in two ways. Firstly, being an expert in your industry, you can write useful and interesting articles which will attract a lot of readers. Among them some may be web masters so, if they are interested, they may link to you then. The more interesting and useful the article is the more backlinks you will get. Do not forget to include also two buttons on each article’s page: a social bookmarking button (like AddThis or AddToAny) and a “Tell a friend” button. Then even those visitors who are not web masters may bookmark your articles on social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook and others and may send the link to their friends. In the beginning the effect will be slow, however, as the links gradually build up, more people will be visiting the page, so the link building will be speeding up by itself. So you just need to write an article and then it will be working for you without you doing anything else. It all depends on how good your article is, so try to write such articles which will generate a lot of interest.

Another approach is to write articles optimized for a particular keyword or key phrase for which competition is not very strong. Suppose you are selling cars. You will not be able to compete for the keywords like “car” or “Nissan” and the like for which the competition is too high. But you may try something like “car repair” or “how to repair your car yourself’. Such key phrases result in much lower competition and still they can bring you quite a lot of visitors. To find best key phrases, you may use Keyword Tool in Google Adwords (you do not need to pay for that, just subscribe to Adwords and pause your first campaign immediately after creating it, then you will not be charged). In Keyword Tool, type e.g. “car” and see the suggestions. For each suggested keyword (key phrase) you will see the monthly search amount so you can choose among those which are searched frequently enough. Then google this key phrase and take a look at, e.g., site number 10. You can check its PageRank and also find the number of backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer. That will give you an idea if you can go into competition with that site or not. You may also like to check site number 20, but going further back doesn’t make much sense as very few people look beyond the second page in the search results. When you find some key phrases with sufficiently high search volume but not very high competition, you can write articles optimized for those phrases. Of course, if your article is interesting, it will also generate backlinks as we have described above.

Finally, let us speak about a different technique which we will call Visitor Optimization. One may say that SEO and visitor optimization are essentially the same because a site with content optimized for visitors is also usually well optimized for search engines. But we are going to speak about something else here. The thing is that not all visitors (in fact, very few of them) eventually become customers. Even if your site is very good, mostly they will not buy simply because they are not yet ready to buy. As Clate Mask writes in his book, “People buy when THEY are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell.” Although they are interested in your product (that is why they visit your site) they may be ready to buy only in a month or maybe in a year. So you need to do something that will make them come back to your site again in the future. Just include a section which will attract their interest and which is updated regularly, so that each time they can find something new. A good idea is to make a page containing news or useful tips. Apart from making visitors come back to your site, that will result in a higher position in the search results as frequently updated sites are ranked much higher by Google. Of course, also don’t forget to include social bookmarking and “Tell a friend” buttons on your news or tips page. Then you will generate higher traffic of both new and return visitors, which will eventually result in more sales.

Thus using these three simple techniques you can make your site work for itself increasing its own popularity, which will result in higher traffic and eventually higher sales.