A History of Getting Traffic to Your Website

Back in the old days, getting traffic to your website was easy.  You just mass-mailed a bunch of people in AOL, put up a link in the chat rooms, and you were good to go – Instant traffic.  Nowadays, things are a bit more complicated.

Enter the Search Engines

After a phase of mass-mailing to get traffic, a new technology called “search engines” emerged.  No longer were users limited to what AOL advertised.  Yahoo Mail and Hotmail came along, as well, and the game seriously changed for marketers.

The first thing we wanted to know was how to win rank on the search engines.  Was it a matter of page design?  Was it a matter of content?  What exactly drove the search engines’ ranking systems?  Someone discovered that “keywords” were how web pages were ranked, and so everyone tried to jam as many of these keywords on their pages as possible.

Google Dubbed Keyword Stuffing “Black Hat”

Eventually, keyword stuffing created a lot of problems in the Internet marketing biz.  Some people began posting pages that were nothing but keywords.  Google decided to put an end to that, coined the term “black hat” for this kind of marketing, and began de-indexing these pages.

Seeking ways around this de-indexing, many marketers changed the ways that they stuffed keywords.  They would match the keyword text to the background.  When that quit working, they created doorway pages (pages that were stuffed with a keyword which disappeared almost as soon as you entered a page), and continued to keep stuffing keywords.

Google’s Black Hat War Necessitated Social Media Marketing

As time went on and the rules for ranking on Google and the other search engines got more complex, someone got the brilliant idea to start marketing on social media.  It had been known for awhile that backlinks, as well as keywords, were essential to boosting page rank.  Most people didn’t bother too much with backlinks, though, since they were so hard to get.

This is where social media marketing, aka Web 2.0, changed the rules.  Now you could generate almost as many backlinks to your website as you could muster and boost your page ranking that way.  Of course, this was subject to abuse, and many social media sites began implementing the nofollow tag when you put your website link up.  Ultimately, what this means is that the search engine spiders no longer count the link to your website.

And so, here we are now.  The latest hot topic in marketing is the microblogs like Twitter and Facebook.  Almost every day, there is something new in how to draw traffic to your website through these sources.  In fact, directing traffic from these sites has almost replaced vying for search engine ranking for many marketers.  After all, if it’s harder to drive traffic from Google than from Twitter, it almost seems natural to use Twitter and forget Google.