Search engines are widely accepted as the best way to drive low-cost visitor traffic to your website, and on-page search engine optimization is the best way to make your website as visible as possible to the major search engines.

But keep in mind that search engines, even the largest ones, are nothing more than websites themselves. There is plenty of traffic available from other sources, and the effort to gain links from third-party websites (and even from offline advertising such as direct mail, newspaper and magazines adverts) can pay off handsomely.

Many experts position link building as the major ‘off-page’ search engine optimization strategy, and there’s plenty of evidence to support this. Simply put, link building is a process where you encourage as many incoming links (that is, other websites linking to your website) as you can. Here are some of the activities that will help:

• Social bookmarking websites allow people to flag their favourite webpages. By providing great content that’s accessible and relevant, others who genuinely value your work will ‘vote’ for you on web sites such as Digg and Technorati (we don’t encourage any form of self-promotion, as this can easily do more damage than good).
• Article marketing involves the creation of new, original content in the form of online articles, making them available for publication on third-party websites. As the author, your link (to your own website) remains intact. Often maligned, article marketing can generate thousands of new visitors to your website.
• Search engines love blogs (when they are configured correctly). By launching a blog, you have your own place to present your opinions, offerings, features and benefits in the way you feel is best. Blog content is favoured by search engines because it changes often, and the ability for visitors to leave comments adds a two-way dimension that’s not present in traditional websites.
• Leaving comments on other blogs and online forums is a simple and effective way to attract new visitors to your website. Although very few blogs nowadays are configured to pass any link value (that is, the link from your comment back to your website doesn’t pass search engine value), curious readers will often follow links from insightful and original commentators.
• Podcasting, in both audio and video formats, is a fresh way to get your message to a wide audience. Podcasting is all about distributing your content in alternative formats, and many websites depend on the immediacy and entertainment value of audiovisual media for their continued success in highly competitive markets.

High quality incoming links (not every link is high quality, by the way) help your own website’s relevancy, and the links themselves will bring traffic directly. At Stratify, we like to see around 50% of traffic from search engines, and 25% each from direct entry (where a visitor has bookmarked your website, or they type your website address directly into their browser) and referrals (from other non-search engine websites).

A link building strategy requires a good deal of work over an extended time period, but the impact can last for years.