Get Your Site a Top Ranking in Google

There is no secret, but rather, it's just knowing what to do. I've made just about every mistake one can make with a website, but I learned from every setback. If you were only allowed to do one thing to get ranked for your site in Google, without a doubt, all you'd need to do is get links for your site.

Yes, there are many other factors involved in getting your site to a top position. But this is the most powerful way as of this writing to get a top spot in Google. It's not just enough to have links pointing to your site, but you need to have your keyword "anchor linked" to your site. Anchor linking is when you use your keyword phrase as the click-able text for a link. So, instead of saying "Click Here", you would use "Widgets" as the link text.

Now, another point of consideration is determining what keyword/phrase you want to use to get your site found. Most times, people impulsively choose a one word phrase. While this would be a great way to bring traffic to your site, would it bring targeted traffic, with people looking specifically for your product or service? Most times when people type in a one letter keyphrase, they are in the beginning of their search.

They may type in "Shoes", but are really looking for "Running Shoes". So, if you have a top ranking for shoes, do you serve that user's needs? Maybe, but they may also be looking for dress, casual, Women's, Men's, Children's, athletic, girl's, boy's, etc. This is why when you begin to optimize your site, you should focus on more targeted keyword phrases.

Suppose you sell a certain brand name of dress shoes. For this example, we'll call the famous brand XYZ. So, by getting anchor links as "XYZ Dress Shoes", you are already eliminating those users who are looking for another brand or line of shoe. Next, you need to make sure that the page that gets linked contains the on the page content with "XYZ Dress Shoes". If you would link to a page without relevant content, Google would view this link as possible spam, or more appropriately, irrelevant content.

Now, once you have compiled your list of keywords, you need to see which one are searched on the most. The best tool for this is WordTracker, and it is worth the tiny fee you need to pay to have access for one day. There are also free tools online that you can use, but WordTracker will give you the most accurate results.

Once you have run through your list of all your keywords, the obvious choice is to pick the ones with the highest amount of searches (and content relevant to your site!). The next step is to then begin the process of a link campaign. Now, I can already hear you complaining about doing a link exchange. This is only 1/3 of your campaign. The ideal method is to not only engage in a reciprocal link exchange, but to also engage in strategic linking.

Strategic linking is when you get a link to your site without having to return the favor. What's the best way to do this? Write an article just like this one. If I get one website to use this article and have it point to my site, I've just created another link to my site. Pretty easy, eh?

Since you have now engaged in a linking campaign, you should expect to see results in Google in as little as 4 days, and as far as 6 months. All of this is determined by where your links are coming from, and the popularity of the site from which the link came. Next, you need to get as many links as you can pointing to your site with your popular keyword phrase anchor linked to your site.

As I mentioned before, there many other factors that will only enhance your rankings in Google, but the implementation of a link campaign is the strongest method to get your site to a top ranking!


by Paul Bliss at www.seoforgoogle.com

Importance Of Outbound Links

Nowadays most blog owners focus on getting inbound links to their blogs. By having a outbound link to another site, you are somehow voting for that site - thats how PageRank works. So why you should help other sites and link to them? Actually, by carefully linking to other relevant sites, you are increasing the relevancy of your own site. As the search engine spider returns the information about your site to database to be processed in the algorithm, it has pre-sorted some search results based on the links your site points to.

Another benefit of outbound linking is Geo Targeting, or Local search. There is a lot of speculation that local search is the next big trend in Search Marketing. While only time will tell, it won't hurt to have your physical address listed on your website for those who will be embracing local search.

As an experiment, Paul Bliss tells how he created a site with a very unique url (to avoid the possibility of people finding it by accident), and he made it only 1 page long. The only thing the page consisted of were 80+ outbound links to relevant sites in the SEO industry, tools, forums and some tutorials. When the PageRank was first updated for the site, it came out of the box with a PR of 3. It has since fallen to a PR of 2 (now that he has pointed a few sites to it!).

The whole point of this experiment was to see how outbound links affect your own rankings of your site. Paul was able to generate a PR of 2 based entirely on linking to authority sites in the SEO industry. So, take the time to link to some relevant sites, the big names (if any), and enjoy the power of the easy, outbound link.

33 Ways To Get More Visitors To Your Site

Here are some tips that will give you a good start of your new site.

1. Join Link Exchange Broker.
2. Submit your site to Yahoo.
3. Submit your site to DMOZ, and hope it get's listed before the year 2337.
4. Submit your site to MSN.
5. Get back-links.
6. Submit your site to Google, though back-links will do way more good than submiting your site.
7. Include RSS feeds.
8. Write Articles and use that by-line spot for back-links.
9. Submit the articles to article sites/directories.
10. Mailing list - Send out an E-mail atleast once or twice a month.
11. Have Contests and include a 'Subscribe to our mailing list box'.
12. Viral marketing - Make something that has your site info and give it out free.
13. Scripts - Include a link to your site in the footer. Require the link to stay there unless they pay for a version with the link taken out.
14. Site of the Day - Make a site of the day award, and as more sites add the award to there site with back-links, you get visitors. Just make sure it's a high quality image.
15. Include a message board/chat room. If thew site is new, start out with just one board. the last thing you want are dead message boards! Do anything you can to get visitors to come back day after day.
    
16. PPC - If the visitors are worth it, pay for them to come to your site. Then try to keep them and turn them in to repeated visitors.
17. Mailing list special - If you sell stuff, include deals in your mailing list.
18. Polls - Have a poll of the day or week.
19. Content - Content - Content - It's king. 10,000 pages of pure content will generate way more visitors than 1,000 pages of it will, once it's indexed in search engines.
20. Public Domain Content - If you get the right stuff. ie content that can't all ready be found on 1,000 different sites, like Wikipedia content.
21. E-mail signatures. Include your site link there!
22. Make a directory, and require a back-link to get listed.
23. SEO your pages. place your keyword in the title, header, and content. You can also place it in meta tags, but some search hardly use them, like Google.
24. Advertise on TV, sell shirts, give out business cards, do an IPO....(This all counts as one cause 95% of us'll never even do any of this stuff!)
25. If you make programs, make deals with other programmers to include each others products. Now you got other sites giving out your programs.
26. Submit your programs to program directories.
27. Make your URLs search engine friendly with mod_rewrite.
28. Write FAQs - Include links to your site in the by-line. For example, read the first reply after the mod_rewrite FAQ, then look at the last paragraph in the FAQ.
29. Include a link section on your site, and offer to place the banner of another site up if they place your banner on there link page. (Make sure it's a quality site, so you don't get penalized for linking to them!)
30. Get out of the sandbox! ie don't be the 6,857,834th listing in Google!
31. Register your domain for more than one year.
32. If you sell products, set up an affiliate program. All those affiliates that become active will be giving you visitors.
33. Message board signatures. The more you post, the more back-links you get. 1,000 quality posts will get you way more than 50 quality posts. Or you can live down at the Off-Topic boards all day! Search engines can also find your site from them, though they don't generate PR.

Via User "Nintendo" at DP Forums.

SeoQuake - Great Firefox extension for SEO

This is my favourite extension for Mozilla Firefox for web masterswho deal with SEO and Site Promotion. Seoquake allows to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly, save them for future work, compare them with the results, obtained for other, competitive, projects.

It consists of two functional parts. The first one is SeoBar. The second part is the computation of the parameters for search results and its inclusion into search engine result pages – SERPs – for the most popular search engines.

• SeoBar

SeoBar can be described as an additional toolbar, which shows the values of selected parameters for the page currently opened in the browser window. Set of parameters shown by SeoBar is fully customizable by user.

• Inclusion of parameters in SERPs

After submission of the query into the search engine user is presented with SERP with search results. SeoQuake shows values of the parameters for search results under each search result shown on SERP. Set of parameters shown is fully customizable by user. Loading of parameters can be handled in two different ways – simultaneously with the loading of the SERP or after SERP loading, by user demand. Ranking of the results by selected parameter in ascending/descending order and storing results in file are available features.

• Parameters

While having a wide range of default parameters, SeoQuake also gives users the opportunity to create their own parameters and also group them into presets and switch between these presets on the fly, during the work.

General set of parameters consists of such parameters as Google PR (Google PageRank of current page), Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version), Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain)), similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

There is also a tool for creation of custom parameters at user’s disposal. These parameters can be saved and used for future research, whatever it may be.

All SeoQuake parameters can be turned on/off to be shown in SeoBar or on SERPs.

• Miscellaneous

SeoQuake submits a query to search engine every time when it needs to obtain a value for a new parameter (that is not in a cache yet), defined by this search engine. Frequent use of big amount of the parameters may lead to the ban of user’s IP address from search engine. In this case, you will need to delete cookies or change proxy server.

Full description of all SeoQuake functions and parameters can be found on official site of addon: http://www.seoquake.com/index-en.php
Warning! Extension is using the advertisement block in results of search engines. Please, read Privacy Policy, before install http://www.seoquake.com/policy.html

Selecting a Topic for Your Web Site

Selecting a good topic is the first step to building a successful web site.

You should select a topic which you find interesting, as you will be devoting thousands of hours of your life to this topic. It does not necessarily have to be a topic where you are deeply knowledgeable today, but it does have to be a topic in which you are interested in becoming deeply knowledgeable.

It should also be a topic in which other people are interested. No one wants to build a web site only for themselves. Your topic should be broad enough to appeal to a good audience, but narrow enough for you to be able to cover it comprehensively. Many successful web sites initially focus on a very small niche’, grow to dominate that niche’, and then branch out from that niche’ into related topics.

It should be a topic with economic value to an advertiser. Some topics are very interesting as hobbies, but do not do well at generating income. For example, the War of 1812 is fascinating, but is not something which will interest many advertisers.

Finally, the topic for a new web site should be one which is not too competitive. If there are already a hundred great web sites on your chosen topic, you should choose a new topic where you will be able to add something new to the Internet.

How to Determine if Other People are Interested in your Topic

One easy method of determining if other people are interested in your topic is to use the Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/). This tool will show you rough numbers which represent what people on the Internet are searching for. These numbers come from the Wordtracker and Overture tools which we will discuss in the section on keyword selection.

Enter possible topics into the Keyword Suggestion tool and you will be able to get a rough idea how popular your topic is – as compared to other topics. The actual numbers are irrelevant; the important thing to note is how the numbers relate to one another.

Today, the term “arizona” scored 265 on Wordtracker and 492.4 on Overture. The term “chicago white sox” scored 511 on Wordtracker and 755.1 on Overture. From this data, we can see that more people search the web for information on the White Sox than on the Cardinals.

How to Determine if Advertisers are Interested in your Topic

One of the best methods for measuring advertiser interest in a topic is to find out what it would cost an advertiser to purchase a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisement on that topic. This can be done using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

Enter the topic you are thinking of as a keyword and click “Get More Keywords”. Change the value of the “Show columns” dropdown list to “Cost and ad position estimates”. Enter an unrealistic value as the Max CPC -- $50 should work fine. Click the “Recalculate” button.

When we try to search for “white sox”, our search fails. This is because AdWords does not allow advertisers to key on Trademarks. Therefore, we search for other terms which will be found on our web site. For example, a search for “baseball” shows that “baseball” currently has an average CPC of$1.07. This is a good CPC and tells us that this is a site idea that we might be interested in.

How to Determine if your Topic is too Competitive

NicheBot (http://www.nichebot.com/) is one useful tool for roughly determining the competitiveness of a keyword. Enter your prospective keyword and click the “Search” button.

If we search for “white sox”, we see that “chicago white sox” was searched for 40,537 times. That is excellent. Lots of people are interested in this topic. However, we also see that 19,100,000 pages on the Internet include the phrase “chicago white sox.” That gives us a ratio of 471.17. 471.17 generally means that a search term is very competitive. I recommend competing for search terms with a ratio of less than 10.

However, if we look down the list of suggested keywords, we see that “white sox jersey”, “white sox jerseys”, “chicago white sox jersey”, “chicago white sox jerseys”, “chicago white sox jacket” and “chicago white sox hat” all have ratios below ten. This tells us that a web site dedicated to Chicago White Sox clothing could potentially do very well.

Checklist for Topic Selection:

• I am interested in this topic
• Other people are interested in this topic
• Advertisers are interested in this topic
• This topic is not too competitive

Article by Will Spencer at DigitalPoint Forums.

Increase Traffic with Squidoo

For those who don't know about Squidoo:

The site allows anyone to make a special webpage that focuses on some subject that you are an expert in. You don't even need much expertise to create a "lens" on Squidoo.

A Squidoo lens is a webpage that focuses on a particular topic. For example you could make a lens about a hobby, sports team, your great grandmother, or even a product that you are selling. I make a lot of lenses on items I want to make money with and it works!

The interesting thing is Squidoo pages (lenses) are getting high placement in search engines for many keywords. Awesome!

Go to Squidoo.com and set up a free lens on your favorite subject.

The set up is easy and there is plenty of help on how to do it if you get stuck.

When you make your lenses, add as many keywords (tags) as you can that are related to your topic to bring in more traffic.

Treat it like blog and update it daily and you'll begin to see lots of traffic to your sites, not just your Squidoo pages.

The best thing is Squidoo lets you earn royalties from the traffic and clicks to your Squidoo lenses since there are Google Adwords on your Squidoo Pages. You can also add Ebay, Amazon, CafePress and Netflix modules that you can make money from too!

Make Money Online with John Chow Review

John Chow dot Com is a blog that helps you make money online. He is offering to link to your blog if you review his blog. His blog is PR6 with very high traffic and lots of RSS Subscribers. John Chow is one of the best bloggers that write about SEO, affiliate programs and money making opportunities. He is owner of the The TechZone which is one of the largest hardware tech sites on the net averaging more than 200,000 pageviews daily (WOW). I personally visit his blog regularly reading posts about SEO and blogging tips. One of the best things about his blog is that he shares exactly how he is making money, giving tips to newbies. There is always much to learn from professional blogs like his.

Visit John Chow's blog and learn how to make money online.

12 excellent tips on link building

A very good friend of mine wrote an excellent article about link building techniques. He has listed places you can promote your site/blog for free and they are sorted by Page Rank according to last Google PR update.

The article covers all popular link building methods like Directory Submission, Link Exchange, Article Submission, Press Releases, Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Edu/Gov Backlinking, Link Baiting Techniques and many more.


You can read it on DigitalPoint Forums or on his ForexAdvice Blog.

Keyword Selection and Competition checking

I would like to pay attention to Google Adwords External Keyword Tool.

It is maybe the best tool for keyword selection. You can see the search volume and competition for particular keyword or phrase. Combined with Google Trends you can make marketing research for any niche. Maybe thats the first thing to consider when you are going for a new site and optimization. A big limitation of this keyword tool is that you can view search volume of the current month only but sometimes thats enough to get a overall picture of the market situation.

Projects I work on

Lately I've been working on SEO & Marketing on some of my sites. So far I have participated in DigitalPoint forum which is good source of useful information and resources on that topic. This forum helped me much but I am not fully satisfied with my achievements. I need more quality backlinks to my sites and more attention-grabbing content.
So far one of my sites averages 150-200 unique visitors per day, generating little adsense revenue (1-2 bucks a day). This is my most visited site. Most of the traffic is organic from google search queries which is great, also I am well-ranked for some popular keywords. I need to work toward next level and target 500 visitors a day for this site.

Current: 200 visitors/day
Target: 500 visitors/day

My plan is to:

• add more quality articles with good keywords
• post regularly to social bookmarking networks
• generate backlinks from good PR domains
• be patient and wait for the target to happen

Thats what I am concentrating on lately. This is my main project and I keep working on it.