Building Your Site's Pages For Search Marketing

Rather than racing around trying to collect back links (like most of our competitors prefer to do), we emphasize search marketing that attracts links while simultaneously building search marketing by adding quality content, which is the essence of search marketing.

Back links are really no different from internal links pointing from one page to another page. More specifically, a back link is a link pointing from another page to the page you are currently studying. In popular SEO parlance, a back link is a link pointing from another web site to your own web site. However, this is only half the truth. Internal links, links from other pages on your own web site also work like back links, a fact most web masters and SEO experts overlook. Those who do not overlook this fact still tend to discount it, arguing that external back links are more valuable. We do not overlook the value of internal links, however, and we do disagree that they are less valuable than external back links. To the contrary, we believe they are more valuable.

In truth, it is very rare for a link from another web site to be worth more than a link from a marketing page on your own web site. This is mainly true because of the fact that webmasters wear out their search marketing efforts by getting links from a limited pool of other sites owned by people who have better things to do with their time than to build a link from their site to your site, and so the search marketing webmasters on the prowl end up acquiring tend to be what we call "junky".

Their reasoning for their approach is understandable, if a bit short-sighted. It goes:

  1. There are a lot of web sites out there.
  2. Getting a bunch of links from a bunch of other web sites is a lot easier than writing pages and adding content to your own web site.
  3. There is only so much marketing content you can add to your web site anyway. After all, how much can anyone reasonably want to know about your topic? If you're a business person, all you really want is for the visitors to call you, so you can talk with them directly. So why bother spending endless amounts of time and marketing money building more and more redundant information into your site that none of your future clients will likely never read in the first place?
  4. Therefore, it makes sense to spend most of your time search marketing via other web sites rather than adding pages to your web site.

Is their viewpoint correct? We say that it is not correct! There are three reasons why.

First, when virtually everyone with a web site is scrambling to get other web sites to link to their own web site, the laws of supply and demand (not to mention the principle that no one has time to waste!) dictates that there is a shortage of available time to track down people willing to link to your web site. Despite this fact, millions of webmasters invest huge amounts of time, money, and effort in their quest.

Second, it turns out that it actually takes a lot less time, money, and effort to add pages to your site than to try to acquire back links from other web sites!

Third, it turns out when we examine typical search marketing results for various searches that the really successful sites, the ones that most often end up at the top of the rankings, get there precisely because they spend their time, money, and effort adding pages to their own web sites rather than trying to acquire back links from other web sites!

Do you think we just made that fact up? No, we really did not! Here is proof that it is true.

Pick a popular search term. It doesn't matter what it is. Just pick a keyword that you are fairly certain will have a lot of competitors trying to be at the top of the rankings. Just for fun, let us pick the search term "iPad". Clearly, this is a very popular keyword, because millions of Apple iPads get sold every year. The iPad made Steve Jobs a very wealthy man before his untimely death.

Depending on when you do this search, you may be slightly different results from what we found when we did the search. Search marketing results change all the time. Nevertheless, the principle of what we are going to show you here remains the same.

When I searched on "iPad" just now, not surprisingly the top result was Apple's web site. Second on the list was Wikipedia's entry about the iPad. Third was a review of the iPad from a web site call gizmodo.com. What do these three web sites have in common (besides an interest in iPads?

Answer: they are all HUGE web sites!

Apple's web site, according to Google, consists of 57 million pages. Wikipedia's web site consists of 38 million pages. And gizmodo.com's web site consists of 604,000 pages as of the date I'm writing this article.

So clearly building your site into large quantities of pages makes a big difference. Does this mean that the biggest web sites always win? No. The fourth place finisher was cnet.com, whose web site has 23.5 million pages. Clearly, page count is important, but how did gizmodo.com sneak in there with a site that is admittedly quite a bit smaller than the rest, even though it is comparatively quite large compared to most with 604,000 pages?

It turns out that there is another marketing factor equally as important as building a large site. That factor is relevance, also known as market "niche". The more relevant the linked pages are to the page in question, the better this page does in the rankings. Thus, while CNET's web site is considerably larger than Gizmodo's web site, CNET focuses on a far wider range of computer-related products and services, whereas Gizmodo focuses much more closely on tablet computers in a larger proportion of their site. Thus, Gizmodo is enabled to sneak in ahead of CNET for the keyword "iPad", despite the fact that Gizmodo's web site is something like 40 times smaller than CNET's web site.

So what happened to back links in search marketing? Good question. Clearly, in light of what we now know about site size and niche relevance, they do not seem to be quite as important any more, do they?

Does this mean you also have to build a web site with hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages in order to compete? Not at all. The trick is to understand where you are in your own market. If your market is huge, like Apple's is, you focus globally. But if you sell iPads in your local store, you're not so concerned about matching Apple's market share. All you need is to reach your own customer base, and there is still room for that even with a smaller web site. You just have to know how to pick your keywords and how to focus on them within your own web site. We are very good at that!

More About SEO

Back Links in Web Search Meta Description Length in Search Keywords in Links Keyword Tag in Search Nolan Chart Web Site Success Search Keyword in SEO Cloaking in Web Search Title Length