One key to good search engine traffic to a website, is more backlinks, from high quality content. This strategy also brings more direct referrals to your primary website also. There are many tactics for achieving this, but three commonly mentioned ones are, blogging, article marketing, and either adding additional pages to your existing site, OR, creating a separate website.

I’ll cover each of these topics briefly, because the one you choose will place demands on you, which you must be able to meet, and while each will achieve approximately the same thing, some methods have additional benefits, or will work better for specific needs.

1. Blogging. Blogging is fast. Your blog can get indexed and get traffic within days. But it is also demanding. Search engines seem to give equal weight to pages, whether they are in a regular website or not, according to some experts. Others say that blog pages get demoted faster with age. Either way, if you need a boost fast, blogging gets it quickly, but ONLY if you use the blog well, and only if you do the networking that you need to in order to get good traffic to the blog. You must blog no less than once a week to have any traffic at all, and at least twice a week to have steady traffic.

2. Article Marketing. It is a nice way to do things in your own time. You can create the articles from anywhere, at any time, and nobody cares if you publish late. You really only need to publish to a few directories, but if you want to benefit from the viral effects of article marketing, you MUST create highly interesting articles. Keyword stuffed same old same old just doesn’t cut it!  You should still produce about 2-4 articles a month for it to work, but it is a little bit less pressured than blogging.

3. Additional pages in your own website. This gets additional content, and can get you some very good long tail keyword search traffic. As such, it can be very powerful. But too many pages in your site will become a mire for visitors to navigate, so make sure what you put in is of value to the PRIMARY purpose of the website. More isn’t always better!

4. Additional websites. The theory here is two-fold - additional linking power, and long tail keyword traffic. Choose a topic related to your primary site topic, but approach it from an objective perspective. If you sell exercise equipment, then you might produce websites on the topics of weight loss and heart disease, exercise and osteoporosis, or exercise and diabetes. You would not produce a site about choosing weight loss equipment - that is obvious self-promotion, and there just is not enough scope for a whole site. With the other topics, some of the pages may not, in fact, relate directly to your main website, but enough will to bring in long tail searches. Placing your equipment site as a resource link in the sidebar of every page (along with other good resources, such as nutritional supplements, diet information, or the ADA, AHA, or other organization websites, gives balance and helps it be more helpful. The advantage is that you can explore as many peripheral topics as you choose, and each website takes on a life of its own and grows to continue bringing in traffic. You can do it on your own time, without a demanding schedule. The down side is that you do have to create a new site for each one - but many articles of this type (if good… like article marketing, they must be INTERESTING!), will get backlinks and take you places you could not plan.

It doesn’t really matter which strategy you choose in building additional content and backlinks. The point is that you choose what works for you, and what meets your marketing goals.