It’s been a little over 2 months since my last progress report on the Cheap Electricity Options blog. The blog is now just over 4 months old. This is what it looks like now:

I’ve added a couple of more plugins to the site to help in getting more backlinks:

Indexing Tool Plugin: This is a commercial plugin ($47) that aids in getting backlinks by getting the articles you submit to article directories and blogs indexed. Rather than repeating information here, you can read my review of the Indexing Tool plugin here.

Pingback Optimizer Plugin: This is an alternative plugin to the Index Tool above but, since both plugins use different methods for getting the search engines to spider pages on external sites, I use both together. There’s more info on Pingback Optimizer here.

Web Traffic Genius Plugin: I was already using this plugin on the site but the developers released a new version a few weeks back that adds even more RSS aggregators so the RSS feeds it creates for each new post added to a blog can be sent out to those extra aggregators. This results in even more backlinks and visitors.
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If you do article marketing, your articles will be added to numerous blogs, especially if you use a service like Unique Article Wizard (UAW) or Article Marketing Automation (AMA). But, generally, once the articles are submitted, we all assume it’s job done and move on to something else.

Each article submitted will have a couple of links in it to your site and if there are several hundred versions of an article submitted to services like UAW or AMA, then that’s several hundred backlinks we’ll get as a result. Right? That’s what I thought but it’s not the case.

You only get the backlinks if the page on which your article is published is indexed by the search engines (i.e. the search engines know it exists). And not all your submissions will get indexed. This even happens with the likes of EzineArticles and GoArticles. They may be high PR sites and there’s an assumption that submitting articles there will get you guaranteed backlinks with high PR juice. Yes, that may happen but it’s not guaranteed.

So, in order to get the backlinks and the benefit provided by them, as many of your article submissions as possible need to be indexed. And that’s where the Indexing Tool comes in.
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I was about to head over to the WarriorForum to check out the new posts when an email dropped into my inbox from EzineArticles about an article I’d submitted to them a few days back. So I opened the email, assuming it would contain an acceptance notice. It didn’t. Hmmm…

The article I had submitted was about the problems I’ve been having with the WordPress “Missed Schedule” posts on some furture-dated blogs and directing people where to find solutions (they’re listed on this blog). So it came as something of a surprise to see this the content of their email:
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Every website stands or falls on the traffic it receives, regardless of the tool you use to build the site.

A first step is to submit your site’s sitemap to the search engines (SiteBuilder Elite does this for you) but it is only a first step. You can also submit sitemaps through Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The search engines love active sites (especially Google); that doesn’t just mean the number of new pages added to a site on a regular basis, but the number of inbound links to the site. If a site keeps getting new inbound links (links from other sites pointing to it), then it must be popular, and that’s reflected in the page rankings in the search engines. Higher page ranks mean higher positions in the search engines and more traffic coming to your sites through natural searches.

However, getting traffic isn’t enough. You need the right kind of traffic and you need to give that traffic some useful information. Basically, you should think of yourself and your sites as being in a service industry that provides information to people. The better the information, the more likely people will revisit and the greater the chance that they’ll buy products or click ads listed on your site.

So if submitting a sitemap is just a first step, what other methods are available for getting traffic?

In this post, I’ll look at the free options (the next post will look at paid options):

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