Alot of people talks about content as the driver of organic traffic. I have a website but don't participate in PPC and I don't advertise. I want to get traffic by being knowledgable about the products I recomend. I post product reviews, comparisons, and have links to the product manufactures site, but will this get me anywhere? if I keep reviewing TVs and have all the new products available will I get traffic on that alone? I know to research keyword occurance and if I'm promoting TVs I want "TV" to be on the webpage somewhere, but that's about all I know I'm a total newbie. I understand backlinks too, but don't feel like hustling around to get my website posted on other sites. If I'm not doing the right things I would appreciate help.
You can't ignore backlinks. That is half the ranking battle. Unless your content is extremely high quality, you won't get traffic based on content alone. Your content would have to be good enough to generate backlinks on its own. If you don't feel like hustling around for backlinks, you have two choices: 1) be extremely patient and wait years for traffic to build up naturally 2) hire someone else to hustle for you The biggest factor in google rankings is backlinks. Without backlinks, you can't expect to get good rankings for any moderately competitive keywords.
Thank you for the feedback. I understand the importance of backlinking as a free marketing tool. Your saying if I'm reviewing TVs I could go to a high traffic electronics forum and post a link to a great site I found, which is my site. It sounds like I should do this, so I will. I also read that I shouldn't have links to other sites becasue it lowers my PR. An example being if I review and recommend people buy Panasonic TVs that I should not include a link to the maufacturer's website. Is this correct?
A link or two every post won't hurt. People have become overly protective of their PR. You do not lose it by linking to other sites. You are simply sharing some of the passable PR that also goes to your internal pages. If you are worried about that you can make such external links nofollow. Browse this forum and other seo forums/tutorials for other link building ideas. Links are like ranking votes. The more quality links you have, the higher you can rank. Ensure you use your keywords in the link anchor text. Posting on electronic forums & blogs is a great place to start. It can get you some direct traffic and it will help search engine rankings.