If You Build It They Will Come. True? - By: Lee MacRae

Remember that 1998 Kevin Costner movie entitled Field of Dreams? That's where that now famous phrase "if you build it they will come" originated. And many people believe that about a website on the the World Wide Web. If you build it they will come. Unfortunately, that's simply not true. You need some way to let people know about it before they can come.

In the days of newspaper or television and radio advertising, stores would run advertisements either telling you about their store, their location, the hours they're open or perhaps about a sale that they have coming up. This was the way to attract customers. On the Internet you can't really run advertisements that way. True, there are a lot of banner ads flashing and blinking at you on every website you see and there are some advertisements on the side panels but for the most part we become blind to them. It is extremely difficult to advertise anything on the Internet with any great success today.

Instead, you need to build back links. These are links from other sites that go to your website using some kind of anchor text. Along with relevant information on your website, the number of links you gather will put you higher in the search engine results for the keywords you optimize for. If you go to Google and type in the keyword "news" you will get a list of websites like CNN, Google News, Fox news, ABC or CBS news. In other words, you get all the news sites coming up at the top of your search. If you then enter in the search box links: and then the site you want to look at like cn n.com you will get the number of back links that Google has recorded for each. CNN has 4,530,000 links to their site, Fox news has 747,000 links, CBS news has 1,990,000 links to their website. Is it no wonder they're considered authority websites? Is it no wonder they came people can find them just by typing in a generic word like news?

And here is another interesting thought. Go do all of these news websites [include looking at newspaper websites like the Washington Post] and you find something very interesting. They can all have reports on the same news items, and in fact can even have the exact same article they use from one of the news services. Is this not "duplicate content"? Why are they not all penalized so heavily that they disappear from the search engines? Well, the fact is duplicate content is a myth and Google is already debunked it. But people keep repeating it. Don't make this mistake. Yes, original fresh content is a good idea and can help you to rank in the search results for your keywords. But it isn't the end-all and be-all. Without those all-important back links to your website you will probably still be found in page 1,777,000! How long do you think it will take people to find you then?

Start a link building campaign today if you are not already engaged in one. This is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Don't be like those who still believe "if you build it they will come".

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