A great deal of effort and time can go into improving a website’s rank in search engines, with a majority of the tasks potentially taking days or weeks depending on the size and nature of the pages in question. These large, monumental tasks are a necessary part of any SEO plan, but there are also several smaller, more compact tasks that you can preform for an hour a day both during and after your site’s SEO overhaul that can cause a large jump in your page’s rank on the results pages of several search engines out there.
These ‘hour a day’ tasks focus on ‘off the page’ factors and the creation of inbound links that generate traffic.
One of these ‘hour a day’ tasks is contacting other websites requesting inbound links. In return, there could be some form of payment negotiated or you could return the favor, linking their site from yours. While link swapping can be useful, it should be known that they can have a negative effect if overused. This is thanks to spammers abusing this method of traffic generation in the early days of the Internet. Trading links with a site known by search engines can also have a negative impact on your SEO efforts, but such sites are usually very easy to recognize. As long as you pay attention to who you’re dealing with, this potential pitfall can be easily avoided.
It is also worth mentioning that inbound links from sites in the same field of business or study as yours can boost your rankings the most, as search engines interpret such links as a ‘vote of confidence’ from knowledgeable sources. Having a site about physics and the material laws of the universe link to your site about alternative cancer treatments would not benefit you much, or vice versa.
Getting your site listed in directories is a good way of generating some traffic and increasing your search engine rank, and there are directories focused on every topic imaginable. These, along with the more board directories that host a variety of sites, give you plenty of options for generating inbound links. As with most services on the web, there are directories that will host a link free of charge while others require payment.
Soliciting links from blogs is also a brief, hour a day task that can potentially yield massive benefits. This is more true of highly viewed and respected blogs that cover the kind of service your website offers.
The performance of these tasks can fit into any schedule, and the benefits such tasks can yield are very much worth the hour you should spend in doing them. Not only are such tasks an efficient use of time (and therefore money), but the continuing positive results can give you the motivation to continue working on your personal site, or make holding your job easier if you are working on a client’s site.
