I just recently built a e-Commerce site. Only about 20% of the products are up but we decided to launch it. It was time to start getting links and making sales. The domain had no links pointing to it. We had paid for no advertising yet.

As the owner browsed to Google, he said, “I just want to check something.” You see, the domain was a keyword based one. What he was checking is if we showed up in the SERP‘s. I just couldn’t understand why.

How is it so hard to explain this? It doesn’t matter if you have a website. Building a web site is the first part in a long process. I turned this over and over in my head last night, because I had told him and others before about the concept of internet traffic. But I guess I needed a better explanation because obviously he did not get it. But maybe the concept wasn’t as easy to understand as I thought. So here goes what I think I should have said:

“You have owned brick and mortar stores before, right? Okay. What if I told you I was going to build a store in the Sahara where there were no roads? Not smart, right. Well, we do have an advantage with the internet. We can build that store in the Sahara. But we have to build our own roads. And those roads are links. What you just did was this: You just checked if we had the possibility of getting visitors before any roads were built. And those roads are links.

You see, I am an underground SEO. I have to do that work on the sly. While those who I have built sites for sit smiling thinking that they have this awesome site that just absorbs visitors by osmosis, I rob time to build links and rewrite parts of the site. Oh yes, some of them know enough about keywords. “Is this a good keyword? Is this a good place to put it?”

But links are the megaphone for that keyword. Do you want it loud or just whispering in the background? It’s your choice. And while you can fiddle with your keywords, it will have no effect if there are no links pointing at those words. And while you think it is what you have told me to do that has been the cause of all the resulting effects, I can tell you that a large percentage of those effects have been the links I have been building whenever I get a spare minute. Why do I do it? Because my name is on this site in one way or another. And it may go down because of ignorance, but not because of mine. So I will go behind your back give you the traffic you want although you may never understand what I did or the true value of my work.”

But, of course, I couldn’t say all that.

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