A trap SEO professionals and their clients can fall into is focusing too much on getting the number one spot on Google. It’s easy to see how it happens: we monitor our progress by watching websites move up the rankings, with the top slot marking a natural finish line. If all we focus on is building to get that top spot we can lose sight of opportunities to provide better ROI for our web marketing and SEO efforts.

Today I’ve gathered a few articles from other blogs that highlight a few of the different options available for promoting your website besides building backlinks. While I tried to cover many bases, this is by no means an exhaustive list. The key to remember in all this is that any time you find yourself feeling like there’s nothing to do but throw links at your site until it reaches the top, take a step back and see if there isn’t a better way to use your time and budget.

First, we look at a unique plan to get more content on your site and more visitors to your pages. This post comes to us from the CEO of SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin. In this article, he talks about the cost of direct link buying versus purchasing the whole site. In his example, he talks about buying a link on a blog, or just buying the entire blog and migrating it to your business site. The case is well laid out and makes a lot of sense. Anyone looking into a big paid links campaign might want to rethink it after reading this post.

Link: Buying Links is Shallow, Short-Term Thinking. Buying Blogs? Now that’s a Strategy.

Next up we have a post from Miranda Miller, a staff writer at Search Engine Watch. This one is all about Pinterest. If you run an e-commerce site and don’t have Pinterest integrated, you are already behind the curve. For an e-commerce site or a brick-and-mortar store, Pinterest can drive massive amounts of traffic. For some people, it’s bringing in more than search engines and PPC. This post walks you through a great case study and then some simple tips to get started. If you’re looking to get more traffic and better conversions, then Pinterest is a useful place to start.

Link: Pinterest Marketing Tips & Tricks to Drive Targeted Traffic

For our third entry, we look at a post on community building by Thomas Høgenhaven, creative director at Chrisper Economy. Here we get actual statistics about the use of community building to drive traffic and interaction on a website. The best way to describe this entry is with a direct quote:

“In this post I focus primarily on community building. At SearchLove last year, Rand had a slide stating a 34% growth in 4 months, primarily from Q+A, YouMoz, the blog and user profiles. Add to this that community members are some of the best link builders you’ll ever find. Getting community right is a huge win.”

Link: What Community Builders Can Learn From Research

The final thing we should all be looking at after reading and possibly implementing any of the methods above is Analytics. Avinash Kaushik, a co-founder of Market Motive, has put together a great set of tips for getting the most out of your Google Analytics data. This article is a must-read for anyone who uses Google Analytics on a regular basis.

Link: Google Analytics Tutorial: 8 Valuable Tips To Hustle With Data!

That’s it for this week. I hope you read these posts and implement as much as you can!