Your Writers’ Website: Get Links, Get Traffic, Get Hired to Write

You’ve created a website for your writing services. It has several pages, in which you describe the services you provide, display samples of your writing, and also display testimonials.

Great, right?

Yes, of course it’s great. Kudos to you, because you’ve created an asset which will become more valuable over time.

Please don’t stop now, however. While you’ve made an excellent start, you need more than a site. You need links from other sites, so that your prospective clients can find you. The more links, the more traffic you’ll get.

Links: the Good, the Bad, and the Really, Really Ugly

You need links to get traffic, but not just any old link will do. Please don’t submit your site to 1001 directories, and expect to get quality traffic.

Links are not created equal. Let’s look at the differences between good links, bad links, and horrible (dangerous) ones.

Good Links: a vote for you, great!

The best links are the ones you get when people just link to your content because they like it. Ask clients to give you a link to your site from theirs. Many will be happy to do so.

One point: ask them to write a snippet of text (or write it yourself), in which you can embed a text link, so that over time, your site will appear when prospects search for “writer Seattle” or “freelance writer”, or whatever.

Bad Links: the votes you don’t want

If a link is irrelevant to your site, it’s a bad link.

For example, perhaps you’ve asked a friend to link to your site from his online shopping site. Or from his football site, or wherever. A single irrelevant link won’t do any damage, but if you join online linking schemes, you will get busted… Google especially hates anything which looks like link manipulation, so please avoid this.

The Really, Really Ugly Links: why, oh why…?

Ugly links are those links which are irrelevant to the nth degree.

Some writers are prone to getting ugly links. They may have heard that links are a good thing, so they pay for links from link farms, and horrible online neighborhoods. These kinds of links will get your site banned from the search engines.

Apropos of getting banned: avoid trying to manipulate the search engines to get traffic. Manipulation last worked effectively in 1995.

Just last week, a writer asked me to look at her site, and when I clicked “View Source” on her pages, she’d added completely irrelevant keyword meta tags, like “dating, online dating, casino” etc.

Why did she do this? I have no idea. Presumably some well-meaning (or less than well-meaning) friend told her to do it.

It’s easy to avoid getting ugly links: don’t get conned by people trying to sell you traffic. Email messages or websites which boast: “We’ll get you to the first page in Google” are not only spam, they’re also scams.

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