I have been building websites for over 10 years. In that time, I’ve created a slew of ugly designs. I’ve also used un-search engine friendly ways and means when I didn’t know better, like intro or splash pages, poorly generated/coded image maps, Flash, and content management systems that generate all sorts of ampersands and equal signs (whoops, still doing that), amongst other things. But if there’s one thing that happens to all of the sites I build, it’s that they receive traffic.

Now, I could tell you that my friends and family all visited my sites and be done with the story, right? Truth of the matter is, I never told my friends or family about many of these sites, and didn’t link them from any main personal site or profile. So what’s the secret I used to reach thousands and thousands of web surfers? Links to my site.

When I build websites off client hours, I build resources. People seek advice online in all forms, so writing content that helps solve a problem or fill a gap online has never failed in gaining links to my content. A combination of on-page SEO and off-page SEO is all it took, every single time, with an emphasis on off-page SEO.

If you had to boil down your website’s success to one thing, what would it be? Let me know in the comments.

Filed under: SEO on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 by Jacob Wolfsheimer | No Comments
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