Great SERP Rankings Aren't Always Necessary

People have unnecessarily believed that it is necessary to get top search engine rankings, while I find this only partially true. As you create content on your site, you will find that more people are returning and visiting multiple pages per visit. Through search engines, it is almost always difficult to get people to visit multiple sites, unless they are clicking the relevant links under your title (and, this would mean that you have a well-indexed site).

For those of you who think that the only way to get a good source of income from search engines is to "dominate" the rankings, this might be a wake-up call: search engines aren't everything. Looking at income sources, yes, they do account for between a quarter to half or more of your traffic, but just because it is an easy way to get traffic, you have to realize that the visitors aren't necessarily looking to stay on your site.

Going elsewhere, the best place by far to get traffic is through links within other sites. By targeting sites that may be of interest to your visitors will provide a continuous stream of fresh traffic, from people who wouldn't have normally found your site.

Having high search engine rankings can do you well in the beginning, but over the long-term, you want to focus on the traffic that has the lowest bounce rate, highest return rate (low number of "new" visitors), and traffic/people who stay on your site for more than a few seconds.

Google has a system in place that rewards sites that might not do as well, and gives them a better ranking on the SERPs than sites that "game" the system, injecting a large number of keywords throughout their site. Using this to your advantage is key, as you won't be able to see the traffic until you are able to get at least a few of your pages indexed and ranking well.

The key in all this is to focus first on search engines, targeting keywords that will bring in the most traffic, then later focus on building links and traffic sources that won't go away, no matter what type of content you publish.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this and how you build traffic through search engines or other natural sources.