SEO is B.O.R.I.N.G but someones gotta do it

[Raiel Schwartz]

Before I start on another long post...

Let me just say that I've NEVER started to take SEO seriously until now. I've had considerable "marketer knowledge" for months now, but I never knew how to efficiently optimize it until recently. I wasn't a google adwords "buff" either - so I use to think that all the time I would setup a site and earn $0.00 that the site was unprofitable.

It wasn't that the site was UNPROFITABLE, it was that I had no TRAFFIC going to it. I think the hardest thing for marketers is to get targeted web traffic - without traffic your sites are worthless, and that's why they say "the money is in the list" because once you are at a point where your list is huge enough - traffic becomes a considerably easier problem to tackle.

I've pretty much mastered how to rank MY OWN DOMAIN (not some High PR Article Directory) on the 1st page of google - in a relatively short time (considering the competing webpages are 1,000,000 or lower - I know - not the most "amazing" feat but still, you hear a lot of marketers only attempting to go for keywords if it's 500,000 or less and that's with a high PR referral page, not the actual domain ITSELF)

How do I do it?

Now I am no SEO expert by anything means, but I've been happy with the results that I've been getting after testing out my "SEO" techniques. Hopefully I'll grow and expand my knowledge and technique so not only will I rank my pages faster but hopefully with less work as well.

Most important thing is that you need: Backlinks to effectively rank your website in google. Depending on how you get your backlinks - and how much you can get of them - will determine how fast you will rank for your chosen keywords.

Starting a Campaign:

Say if I wanted to rank for the highly competitive, and extremely lucrative keyword "Pink Flamingo Training Tips" (I'm joking guys - I don't know if it's highly competitive or extremely lucrative, I'm not liable for your financial success or failures ) what I need to do is basic onsite SEO optimization, and then set up my backlink campaigns.

Basic Onsite SEO: I know this goes without saying, but you should try to include your keyword in the title of your website. Onsite SEO is not of paramount importance in your overall rankings, but you do what you go to do to help, even if it's only 5%. Of course, google placement means nothing if your site isn't pulling in visitors - so your title should be catchy enough to include the keyword in the title, and entice visitors to visit your site. Sometimes there's compromise

Now also, what you want to do (again - if possible) is include your targetted keyword in a header font on your website. It may be a myth, but I haven't seen negative results from doing this, so it can't HURT if you try it. Again Onsite SEO only helps - it supplements your backlink campaigns - but it won't make or break it.

Backlinking:

Many Warriors here are members of Paul and Angela's backlinks. I recently signed up with their packets myself to see if all the hype was worth it - and I do have to say, their backlink packets did get me to RANK when I used an article for a hubpage. Sometimes even rank for keywords higher then 1,000,000 competing webpages - however I noticed using their backlinks ALONE made it hard to rank on a NO PR "newbie" domain. I would definitely move up in placement but it would be from page 500000 to page 2 or 3. Sure it's an improvement - but lets face it - if you anit on page 1 you anit worth jack-quat.

So how did I start building backlinks to my website?

1) Angela and Paul's Packets: Yes I did use these, but it's not the ONLY thing you have to do.

2) Article Marketing: I've become lazy the past few days and haven't submitted any new articles, but what you need to do is write an article for the purpose of BACKLINKS not traffic. I use ArticleMarketer to distribute my articles for me - but there are a bunch of other services out there that may or may not be better - I don't know, I haven't tried them. I DO recommend however, that you do use some form of article submission, wether a bot, outsourced, or a service like article marketer. You will get a mammoth amount of backlinks to your website, and even if google only is able to index 1/100 of them within ~2-3 weeks (the timeframe I set for myself to dominate the first page) you are getting backlinks nontheless. Shoot for distributing at least 1 new article for 30 days.

NOTE: Manually submit to Ezine Articles as they are usually more strict. You may want to submit to Ezine Articles FIRST with your article, and wait until it gets approved on their site before you use that same article on multiple directories. Sometimes Ezine Articles is picky with "duplicate content"

3) Create a blog: Great way to represent your site as an authority site and to build content. Create a blog on your domain and try to update it with a relevant post daily. You CAN (and I recommend) that you use the articles you use for article marketing (just to ease the pain). There are an array of helpful FREE plugins that you should install as well like the SEO plugin, Headspace 2, and Please Link To Me (along with more).

4) Link-Wheels: This is nothing new, but some may consider it more boderline-blackhat. Don't want to write a whole post on the theory (because there are free eBooks on it) but basically you will sign up to 6-24 authority websites (with High PR, some may do more - it gets hard to manage after 24, plus you want to start things out slow so you don't get flagged as a spammer as google and risk getting your site banned). On each authority website, you will have an anchor text back to the website you want to rank for, and another anchor text to the separate authority site.

In theory, each authority site will link to another authority site - and back to your domain name with your anchor text.

Why link back to another authority site? High PR sites are already "juiced" up - think about if you had 24 high PR sites sharing their power off of each other and then all linking back to your site with the keyword you are targeting.

Power stuff - I kid you not. Just be careful, start things slow and don't be a moron

5) Bookmark: I would also bookmark each Link-Wheel site, as well as any articles you submit to GoArticles or Ezine Articles. Any additional article directories may not be worth your time (but hey - if you have a lot of time who am I to be your judge.)

6) Blog Commenting: Cool trick I use for blog commenting is that for the NAME field, I use the keyword I want to target, and for the website, I link back to my website. In the actual comment field, I write an honest, relevant comment. Why do I do this? Simple, because your NAME will still become a link, and it will be going back to your website. Blogs also delete comments if they appear as spam, so instead of putting the backlink in the actual comment - you can put it in your name and actually have your comment stick on the blog.

So yes, if you follow the above process, you should be able to rank for a "mildly" competitive search term - in this example, I would hope to get "Pink Flamingo Training Tips" on the 1st page within 2-3 weeks, preferably within the top 3 spots. If you are on the 1st page - but not on the top 3 spots then you need to follow the above process, but scale it up.

Also, I wanted to add that there are software out there to help you automate some of these tasks. If you were to do all of this manually and by hand - you are in for hours of terror.

I will learn by trial-and-error so if I see more effective backlink techniques, I will definitely post them. Right now these have been working for me and it allowed me to rank on keywords with my OWN domain - not using the PR of another domain.

Post comments/questions - I'll answer to the best of my abilities

[Ludovic]

Hi, I would like to comment on a little analysis method I use to achieve backlinks, whether it be quality or not.

One of the easiest ways is to research the backlinks of your top competitors. The theory is that if the sites that are top of the pile have links from a specific set of sites, the chances for your site to reach the top (or be near the top) will be much higher if you get links from within the same set of sites. I've planned out two ways of making list:

Each top ranking site backlinks – this is a technique of finding the top 100-200 backlinks for each top-ranking site and putting them onto your list (making sure to avoid duplicates).

Backlinks that are common – sites that are linking out to one or more of your competition are important – these links would easily link to your would or would have a high probability of doing so as well of achieving a high value-link.

One way to do this is to use the Yahoo Site Explorer (Site Explorer - Yahoo! Site Explorer) and note the sites linking to your competition. You can also export the backlinks of any website into a document, making it easy for you to refer to the list later on.

For common backlinks, there’s a tool providing by We Build Pages (Serious Internet Marketing Services. Link Building, Web Content Provider, and SEO Company) called Common Backlinks (Free SEO Tools, Internet Marketing Tools and Backlink Checkers.) can give you the common backlinks for up to 10 of your competitor sites.

Definitely an easier way of doing things than matching backlinks manually.

[internetmarketer99]

Originally Posted by Craig.Michaels

Before I start on another long post...


Basic Onsite SEO: I know this goes without saying, but you should try to include your keyword in the title of your website. Onsite SEO is not of paramount importance in your overall rankings, but you do what you go to do to help, even if it's only 5%. Of course, google placement means nothing if your site isn't pulling in visitors - so your title should be catchy enough to include the keyword in the title, and entice visitors to visit your site. Sometimes there's compromise

Now also, what you want to do (again - if possible) is include your targetted keyword in a header font on your website. It may be a myth, but I haven't seen negative results from doing this, so it can't HURT if you try it. Again Onsite SEO only helps - it supplements your backlink campaigns - but it won't make or break it.

Very wrong, very bad information. Onsite factors are extremely important, often far more important than backlinks. They are what tells Google what your page is about and what keywords/phrases to index the page for. Most important:

URL
Title Tag
H1 tags


Mark

[Raiel Schwartz]

Originally Posted by internetmarketer99

Very wrong, very bad information. Onsite factors are extremely important, often far more important than backlinks. They are what tells Google what your page is about and what keywords/phrases to index the page for. Most important:

URL
Title Tag
H1 tags


Mark

Mark, that is why I included the information. Perhaps I misjudged the importance of onsite SEO (because you obviously are saying it's extremely important) but that is why i recommend you optimize it anyway.

Any basic marketer would try to get his primary keyword(s) in his domain, I recommended doing the same thing with your title and using an headline (h1 tag)

The way you made your response made me feel like all the other information I posted was irrelevant/wasted simply because of my opinion on onsite SEO

Originally Posted by Ludovic

Hi, I would like to comment on a little analysis method I use to achieve backlinks, whether it be quality or not.

One of the easiest ways is to research the backlinks of your top competitors. The theory is that if the sites that are top of the pile have links from a specific set of sites, the chances for your site to reach the top (or be near the top) will be much higher if you get links from within the same set of sites. I've planned out two ways of making list:

That is another good trick, if you have ALL the backlinks your competitors have + your own then you should be able to outrank them. Only thing is - that will take a long time depending on how many backlinks they have, how they got them, and a bunch of other factors.

[Ludovic]

Originally Posted by internetmarketer99

Very wrong, very bad information. Onsite factors are extremely important, often far more important than backlinks. They are what tells Google what your page is about and what keywords/phrases to index the page for. Most important:

URL
Title Tag
H1 tags


Mark

I do agree with mark about onsite factor. I usually focus more on the following:

Semantic Structure (very important) - because search engines use header elements to determine the context and purpose of your Web page. Headers provide semantic structure and meaning to Web pages, and search engines, like Google, give preferential treatment to Web design that use headers properly.

My page content - I create enough content pass to 300 words

Obsolete and Deprecated HTML - Focus on building website with validated xhtml and css. This decreases web page downloading time, because all styles have been stripped from the XHTML and placed in the CSS and seo in all places (such as robot friendly, search engine reads through pages) easier. Also, it has cross browser compatibility.

Improper use of tables - DONT USE NESTED TABLES (commonly use in regular html) - nested tables breaks up the semantic order of a webpage. use tables controlled by your css.

Inline styles - keep all styles intact with css (id,class,etc.)
total page size - i try to optimize thethe size of my html, images, css, and scripts.

outgoing links - which i believe google changed its effect on seo just recently, so it might not even matter as much anymore.

Well, I guess you can say my explanation of on factor seo is based really on seo designing.

[Ludovic]

Originally Posted by Craig.Michaels

Mark, that is why I included the information. Perhaps I misjudged the importance of onsite SEO (because you obviously are saying it's extremely important) but that is why i recommend you optimize it anyway.

Any basic marketer would try to get his primary keyword(s) in his domain, I recommended doing the same thing with your title and using an headline (h1 tag)

The way you made your response made me feel like all the other information I posted was irrelevant/wasted simply because of my opinion on onsite SEO



That is another good trick, if you have ALL the backlinks your competitors have + your own then you should be able to outrank them. Only thing is - that will take a long time depending on how many backlinks they have, how they got them, and a bunch of other factors.

well in most cases, you can check the most important backlinks, and get the job done much faster. Plus, checking a backlink, especially a common one, really shouldn't take a long time.Well at least from my experience. It really just depends on what type of website your competitor acquired the backlink from. Like, if its in a form of a blog platform (common). Then, it should be easy.

[Ludovic]

also, I notice one of my competitors in the wso forum achieving a high ranking in google for a certain keyword I've been focusing on. I've notice the mass amount of backlinks were coming from the wso forum. He had about 1,000 something post with the keyword he was ranking high in. Hmm, I guess its something you can think about.

[jimbo21]

This thread rocks. Thank you for the great information.

[ChrisBa]

Thank you for the post. I am a ppc'er getting into seo recently as well

[Rich Currie]

Originally Posted by Ludovic

I do agree with mark about onsite factor. I usually focus more on the following:

Semantic Structure (very important) - because search engines use header elements to determine the context and purpose of your Web page. Headers provide semantic structure and meaning to Web pages, and search engines, like Google, give preferential treatment to Web design that use headers properly.

My page content - I create enough content pass to 300 words

Obsolete and Deprecated HTML - Focus on building website with validated xhtml and css. This decreases web page downloading time, because all styles have been stripped from the XHTML and placed in the CSS and seo in all places (such as robot friendly, search engine reads through pages) easier. Also, it has cross browser compatibility.

Improper use of tables - DONT USE NESTED TABLES (commonly use in regular html) - nested tables breaks up the semantic order of a webpage. use tables controlled by your css.

Inline styles - keep all styles intact with css (id,class,etc.)
total page size - i try to optimize thethe size of my html, images, css, and scripts.

outgoing links - which i believe google changed its effect on seo just recently, so it might not even matter as much anymore.

Well, I guess you can say my explanation of on factor seo is based really on seo designing.

All very well said! Took the words right out of my mouth! There is no doubt that the way the site is built and the keyword testing is much more important. In fact if you really nail this you can rank very well in a large market without backlinks. I am NOT saying you don't need backlinks, I am just saying the proper onpage SEO and site building is very important.

[Ludovic]

Originally Posted by Rich Currie

All very well said! Took the words right out of my mouth! There is no doubt that the way the site is built and the keyword testing is much more important. In fact if you really nail this you can rank very well in a large market without backlinks. I am NOT saying you don't need backlinks, I am just saying the proper onpage SEO and site building is very important.

Lol, I appreciate the comment mark! Thanks a lot!

[Raiel Schwartz]

Just wanted to add - bookmarking not only your link-wheel but ALL your sites (article submissions, video submissions, web 2.0 websites, etc) will improve your results substantially.

I think it's about time I invest in a good bookmarking tool.

[amitcor]

Originally Posted by Craig.Michaels

Before I start on another long post...

6) Blog Commenting: Cool trick I use for blog commenting is that for the NAME field, I use the keyword I want to target, and for the website, I link back to my website. In the actual comment field, I write an honest, relevant comment. Why do I do this? Simple, because your NAME will still become a link, and it will be going back to your website. Blogs also delete comments if they appear as spam, so instead of putting the backlink in the actual comment - you can put it in your name and actually have your comment stick on the blog.

Thank for the great info.
I just didn't understand something about blog commenting:

in the name you are putting just your keyword like: HOW TO TEACH YOUR CAT TO FLY ?

then in the website you just write: www (dot) flyingcats (dot) com ?

no anchor text?


is this considered as a "strong" backlink by google? i would have thought that google will only like a regular anchor text backlink.

please explain...

Thank again




PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait...wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...
[IMG]chrome://seoquake/content/skin/close.gif[/IMG]

[Raiel Schwartz]

Originally Posted by amitcor

Thank for the great info.
I just didn't understand something about blog commenting:

in the name you are putting just your keyword like: HOW TO TEACH YOUR CAT TO FLY ?

then in the website you just write: www (dot) flyingcats (dot) com ?

no anchor text?


is this considered as a "strong" backlink by google? i would have thought that google will only like a regular anchor text backlink.

please explain...

Thank again

Yes, in the name you will put your "keyword"

I honestly can't comment if Google will make it a "strong" backlink or not - I just know that it appears less "spammy" to blog owners when you use your keyword in your name w/ a link back to your site rather then actually posting it in a blog comment.

You don't need to put an anchor text in the website field because the name (or keyword in this case) will become a clickable link with whatever site you put in the website field

[flaminjo]

Craig, i have read an ebook on SEO and that is how strated, i have no previous experience of this. but so far, i have been enjoying whatever little i have been doing in SEO, i love forum/blog posting, enjoy writing artcles for isnare, link wheel is relatively a new term for me. i have done the on page optimization my self, which i found really boring, but off page is something i am really enjoying. i havent started writing for press releases, but will start pretty soon... may be after an year or so i will say that it is boring...