This post is about the importance of Link Building. If you don’t already know Link Building is the process of getting other people to link to your website. It is incredibly important because links generate visitors to your website and help your site rank higher in Google.
From 10 to 100
I was about to write a blog post last week about how important link building was, because after gaining a particular link my web traffic jumped from an average of 10 visitors a day to 100. That’s a 10 fold increase! From One link.
From 100 to 1000
Well I’m glad I didn’t get time to write that post because my site traffic has now increased from 100 visitors a day to 1000. From the same link! The initial jump in traffic seen in the graph above is now dwarfed by a second jump in traffic.
But, as someone once said “My overnight success took about 20 years”. Although this one link had such an impact it was only one of about 500 I’ve got into my website over the last 3 months.
A big factor in the increased traffic was Twitter. I’ve been a big naysayer about social media, doubting the results you get over the work you have to put in. However the jump from 100 visitors to 1000 was owed to a single Tweet by a very popular user account @smashingmag who currently has 376,490 followers.
Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud
The downside is that all of this traffic is from a technical audience who are only interested in the PieTimer jQuery Plugin I wrote. None of these visitors will be interested in buying from me because they are all web designers themselves.
The Good News
Google have confirmed that Twitter links have a direct impact on search rankings even thought they are tagged as nofollow. Given that the link has now been ReTweeted about 50 times so far it should give me a good boost in the search rankings.
Also Google puts a lot of emphasis on how “trustworthy” a site is, and seeing a lot of people tweeting about my website will help increase Trustworthiness.
