Wendy Piersall of eMoms at Home blog has a great guest post over at problogger today. In the "Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love," Wendy explains that it isn"t just the big links that pay off for your business. She also offers up a fantastic collection of articles that have been written on the topic of link building in the past year.
My personal favorite part of the post?
Quite frankly, there are four compelling reasons to care about "little links":
- Little links can turn into big links. One of my top referrers of all time, Steve Olson, linked to me in the fourth post he wrote. His blog has grown so big that this post still sends me consistent traffic to this day, and we’ve become great friends in the process.
- Technorati. If the A-Listers only had links from A-Listers, they wouldn’t BE A-Listers!
- The long tail of referring domains. If I added up all of the referrals from domains that sent less than 4 people a week to my site, together they would be my fourth largest source of traffic.
- Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first. (Rather shallow of them don’t you think?!)
I especially love the point she makes about the long tail of referring domains. I was talking about this just a few weeks ago with Matt Bailey when we were planning our ClickTracks seminar. As we started diving further into the log files for the Lactivist after the whole National Pork Board incident, it was interesting to see just how long that tail was when it came to referrers.
Sure, sites like Digg and Netscape and even Search Engine Guide sent large amounts of traffic, but they still each accounted for a small portion of my total traffic. If I look at the stats for the month of February (the pork incident began on February 1st), my top ten referrers (and the percentage of total traffic) were as follows...
1.) Google - 12.4%
2.) Netscape - 4.3%
3.) Metafilter - 4.3%
4.) Digg - 4%
5.) Reddit - 3.7%
6.) Yahoo! - 3.6%
7.) Babycenter - 2.3%
8.) Mothering.com - 2.1%
9.) Bloglines - 1.2%
10.) iVillage - 1.2%
If I take out the two search engines on that list, those links account for 23.1% of my total traffic. Now that"s a pretty good chunk, but that"s certainly not all of it. In fact there were literally dozens and dozens of sites that send between 25 and 50 visitors. There were hundreds that sent simply a handful. That traffic adds up.
>>Source Link
>>Blog: Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
>>Publish Date: 4/5/2007 8:02:07 AM
>>Keywords: traffic links
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