By Kirk Bannerman


Traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything.

You have no doubt seen dozens of offers similar to "10,000 hits
per hour driven to your website!". This type of website traffic
is completely untargeted and will undoubtedly result in a very
low conversion ratio. It"s basically "throw it up against the
wall and hope something sticks". The big incoming numbers give
the illusion of progress, but you will achieve better results
with a lower volume of highly targeted traffic.

I speak from experience because in the early days of developing
my home business, I went for the big numbers instead of focusing
on targeting prospects. It took me a while to appreciate the
importance of targeting (quality) instead of just going for the
big numbers, but it was a lesson well learned.

Exchanging links has been an important part of generating website
traffic for quite some time, but the vast majority of people
looking to trade links don"t understand that just wildly swapping
links with any willing webmaster is not the way to go.

For the last few years, most webmasters have been in a "pleasing
Google" mode since Google had such a dominant position. Now that
challengers are emerging, most notably Yahoo, MSN, and Ask
Jeeves, the search engine ranking landscape is becoming much more
complicated than just marching to the tune Google played.

Many website owners seem to be of the opinion that the sole
purpose of exchanging links is to try to improve the search
engine ranking position of their website. While it is true that
links pointing to your website can help your search engine
ranking, the reason for obtaining inbound links goes far deeper
than that.

In my opinion, the targeted traffic that relevant links pointing
to your site will bring can be as important as the traffic that
comes to your website from people using search engines. This is
where linking philosophy comes in. If you limit yourself to
exchanging links only with websites that have a theme highly
relevant to your own, the traffic you receive from those links
will be far more targeted (valuable) than traffic you might
receive from links with websites that have nothing to do with
your theme.

Not only do highly relevant links bring you more highly targeted
traffic, but they also play a "customer satisfaction" role for
visitors to your website who arrived there as a result of a
search engine query. If someone arrives at your website after
performing a search for, lets say "work at home" and then finds
your website full of links to a bunch of off topic sites (Viagra,
online casinos, hotel reservations, sports betting, etc, etc)
the impression is often not favorable and may actually drive
your visitor away before they consider whatever it is that your
website itself is offering.

Keep your eye on the bullseye and develop highly targeted traffic
by having good content on your website and exchanging links with
highly relevant sites that also offer good content. Remember,
traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything.