I have almost covered all you need to know about SEO in Part 1 to 5 of our Free SEO Tutorial series.

Today will be the last episode.

The best way to sum up this tutorial series is to give you an SEO case study of successful website. A good example I can think of is Ezinearticles.com.Unless you are very new to the IM industry, you should know Ezinearticles.com. You probably also know that the articles in Ezinearticles get very high ranking in Google search results.

But why?

As the old saying goes, “success leaves tracks”. Today, let’s try to find these tracks! If you found any tracks that I missed, feel free to add them in the comments section.

1) High Site Authority

Ezinearticles has a high site authority. As discussed in Free SEO Tutorial (Part 1), when you have a high site authority, anything you post will turn gold! A little exaggerated, but you get the idea.

What really makes it an authority site is everyone’s guess. But these are some of the clues we can gather:

i) Age. Checking on whois.net, Ezinearticles.com was created in 1999. Google.com was created in 1997. So Ezinearticles is only 2 years younger!

ii) It has a PR of 6 now. It means it has lots of backlinks to the site.

iii) It has lots of contents (some unique, mostly duplicated due to the nature of its service).

iv) It has lots of backlinks to its internal pages, i.e. the article pages.

All these are the known factors that contribute to a site authority, and it has all of them!

2) Relevant Webpage Content And Links

The article page in Ezinearticles is keyword focused. If you go to an article about dog, you will notice that everything on that page is about dog. That includes all the internal links.

If you are a blogger, this is an important clue for you. If you are blogging everything under the sun (which is okay), please avoid plugins like popular posts, recent comments etc. This is because the randomness nature of the content generated by these plugins will dilute the relevancy of your blog post. Instead, you should use plugins like related posts that will show only related articles. Always ask yourself, how can you become a mini Ezinearticles?

3) Lots Of Keyword-Focused Internal Links

Having relevant internal links on every webpage is not good enough, you need lots of them! Go to any article page on Ezinearticles and count how many internal links there are. Besides the standard navigation links, it has 45 other internal links all linking to other webpages in the same niche!

You see, Google Search’s objective is to return the most relevant resource that people search for. If your webpage has lots of internal links to other webpages related to the searched keywords, your webpage looks like a great resource center. That’s what Google likes!

4) Lots Of Keyword-Focused Internal Links

Same title as point #3. It’s not a mistake.

There is another benefit of having lots of keyword-focused internal links. It has to do with content duplication.

Since Ezinearticles allows webmasters to publish its articles on their websites, it naturally creates duplicated contents. But with 45 other links on every article, they effectively turn every article unique!

A simple word count on the titles of 45 links shows that they can easily amount to 500 words! Ezinearticles articles are usually 250 to 1000 words long. So even if we take an article with 1000 words, with 500 other ‘keyword-focused’ words, that article is easily 50% unique compared to the same article published elsewhere!

Some of you may ask, doesn’t Google check content duplication sentence by sentence? It doesn’t.

Let me point you to another successful website that does a similar trick - BigResource.com.

This site is doing very well in Google. But it doesn’t have any ‘unique’ content. It simply syndicates all kinds of questions posted across many forums on the net, reorganizes them according to their title keywords. When you go to a page, it will show you one of the posts and tons of other links with similar keywords.

Google loves this site because of point 2, 3 and 4 that I just explained. I love this site too because it does provide me convenience in seeking the answers that I want. I think it’s a great idea.

5) Keyword Focused Title

Thanks to its SEO savvy authors, most of the articles posted on Ezinearticles are search engine optimized, with keywords in the title as well as meeting other fundamental SEO factors.

6) Its Ability To Build Tons Of Internal Backlinks

The last killer factor that makes Ezinearticles successful is its ability to build tons of internal backlinks to its article pages.

First, Ezinearticles has an API technology that allows developers to create applications that can easily draw contents from its database. That provides great convenience for genuine users as well as spammers! (Guess what, some spammers are using it to churn out tons of content sites and sell them as made-for-Adsense sites.) Whatever the purpose may be, the end result is there are tons of backlinks flowing to its internal article pages!

Second, thanks to the popularity of Bum Marketing, many marketers are using Ezinearticles as a platform to promote affiliate products. The idea is to prepare a keyword-focused article, post it on Ezinearticles and then build some backlinks to it. Leveraging on the authority of the site, that article quickly raise to the top in Google and hence receive traffic. Some traffic may eventually go to the marketers’ websites and purchase the product they are promoting. In the process, these marketers have helped Ezinearticles to build backlinks.

That concludes our SEO tutorial series. I hope you have learnt something from this series.

In this tutorial, we will discuss some of the common SEO myths that are pretty important and you should be aware of. Without further ado, let’s start……

1. You need to post new articles to your website regularly

Google loves new contents? Yes. That’s not a myth. But that doesn’t mean Google hates old contents. On the contrary, Google loves old contents even more!

Truth is, I have many websites that I hardly touch for years. Yet they are still getting traffic from Google, and the traffic is increasing as the website ages, because AGE is an important factor in SEO.

The notion of Google loving new contents is because Google will give new contents a search result boost, based on the assumption that new content has some kind of ‘news value’.

For example, if you post a new article to your blog, that article may quickly appear on the first page of Google for the keyword you’re optimizing. But a few days later, that article will lose its ‘news value’ and it will have to compete with other webpages, based on the amount of backlinks and other SEO factors.

An advantage of posting new articles regularly is that it will increase the frequency of the search spiders visiting your website. That will affect how soon your new content is indexed, but it will not affect your search engine ranking at all.

2. You need ‘quality’ backlinks to succeed in SEO

If you have been reading blogs from official SEO experts, they will all tell you the same story. Get quality backlinks!

How on earth can you find so many quality backlinks? Try asking someone with just a PR3 website to link to you and see if you can get any reply from him. Even if he does, try doing it for 100 of your webpages!

The only workable way to get quality backlinks seems to be buying links, assuming you are superbly cash rich. But link buying has been condemned by Google. Try it if you dare. I’m serious. You may not be caught.

The truth is you don’t need quality backlinks to succeed. Rather than spending your time seeking or dreaming of quality backlinks, spend you time to try out tools and systems that you can leverage on to build more “legitimate” backlinks with less effort from you.

3. You need to post ‘quality’ articles on your website

Though I believe Google has a way to identify junk content, I don’t believe that it can differentiate between a “grammatically-correct” article and an “award-winning” article.

What I mean is you don’t have to insist on writing all the articles yourself if your sole purpose of the article is to get traffic from the search engine. Outsource article writing to save you time to do other things. You just have to make sure that the article is grammatically correct and is search engine optimized.

4. Google penalizes websites with duplicated content

I think I explained this before. Google doesn’t penalize websites with duplicated content. It will just ignore websites with duplicated content, if that website is not ‘important’, i.e. very few backlinks.

Say if you syndicate the same article on 200 other websites, maybe 50 of the articles will be indexed. The other 150 may be ignored by Google. Officially, Google says it will show the result from the most relevant website. But my experience tells me that it will show the result from websites with more backlinks!

Some common question relating duplicated content:

Is it okay to use duplicated content on your website? My advice is no, because you are risking your content being ignored. You can always get someone to rewrite the content before posting it on your website.

Is it okay to syndicate an existing article on your website on other people’s websites? My advice is no, for the same reason. Rewrite that article before syndicating it.

Is it okay to buy those made-for-adsense websites that come with lots of articles from article directories? Again, my advice is no.

In short, although Google doesn’t penalize website with duplicated content, you would want to avoid duplicated content if possible.

5. You need to have certain keyword density in your content

If you happened to read an SEO book that says you need certain keyword density for your article, that book is outdated! You need to include a few keywords in your article, but the actual density is no longer an important SEO factor.

6. Search engine traffic is free

Search engine traffic is free in theory, not in practice. You need to spend money on outsourcing work, such as getting people to write articles. You also need to spend money on link building.

Though it’s not free, it is cheaper than most other traffic sources. More importantly, the traffic is very targeted.

7. You need an expert to help you succeed in SEO

This is what SEO consultant wants you to believe. If you can do everything I say in this SEO tutorial series, you too can become an SEO expert.

8. Google is always changing its search algorithm

Obviously I can’t say that’s a myth. But to me, search engine optimization hasn’t changed since Google revolutionized it.

I am still doing what I did 5 years ago, except that now I employ more leverage.

My point is, Google will continue to evolve and improve. But whatever it does, its primary objective is still the same, i.e. to provide values to their traffic and advertisers. Don’t be caught up with the latest development. Don’t be lured into some blackhat technologies.

Focus on the basic and it will lead you a long way. The basic is to build search engine optimized websites that provide value and focus on link building strategies that provide some form of value too, such as distributing articles, web templates or something of value in exchange of backlinks. You simply can’t go too wrong if you focus on providing values.

In this tutorial, my aim is to show you how to SEO a website from scratch, with step-by-step guide that you can follow.

Before I begin, I want to say, “forget about how to SEO a website”. You never SEO a website. You SEO a web page. When every web page on your website is optimized for search engine, the website is considered optimized.

I’m not trying to play around with words. It’s important that you understand the difference.

Now let’s move on to the step by step guide….

Assuming you have a new website or blog, with a homepage and a couple of other content pages. Here’re what you need to do to SEO your website or blog:

1) Set your target

Remember this: You will never know where to shoot if you do not have a target.

In SEO, your target is your keyword phrase (aka anchor texts). This is where keyword research comes in.

You need to decide what keyword phrase you want to optimize for every web page that you wish to rank in the search engine.

Every web page, including the homepage, should be optimized for one (or at most three) keyword phrase. Be focused.

If you want to target more keyword phrases, you should add more web pages to your website, instead of trying to make one web page optimized for different keywords.

2) Get the fundamentals right

Check and make sure that the followings are correctly done for every web page:

- Keyword phrase found in title tag
- Keyword phrase found in description meta tag
- Keyword phrase found in the url (if possible)
- Keyword phrase found within the content

Read Free SEO Tutorial (Part 1) - The Fundamentals for details.

3) Build backlinks to the homepage

The strategies to build backlinks to the homepage is different from the strategies to build backlinks to the internal pages because of 2 reasons:

1. Some link building methods can only be used to build backlinks to the homepage. For example:

- Submitting your website to link directories
- 3 way link

2. Some link building methods are too tedious and it’s almost impossible for you to do them for all your web pages. For example:

- Press release
- Many other methods explained in SEO Link Building - Free SEO Tutorial (Part 3)

Regardless of how tough or how tedious the method is, do all of them for your homepage. You need to give your website homepage a backlink boost in order to build up your website authority as explained in Free SEO Tutorial (Part 1) - The Fundamentals.

4) Build backlinks to the internal web pages.

It’s almost impossible to build backlinks for every internal web page, unless you run a popular site with lots of people pinging and digging your pages.

So let’s be realistic.

Personally I will start with 5 internal pages and build backlinks to them.

I prefer to build backlinks to internal pages via just one method - article marketing. (I’m not too keen on other spammy methods).

Choose 5 internal pages, prepare 5 new articles, submit them to hundreds of article directories and build backlinks to these 5 internal pages. (Note: You should have done this for your homepage in Step 3. If not, make sure that you do it for your homepage too.)

If you have an account with ArticleMarketer, LinkVana and/or ezArticleLink (coming soon), life will be a lot easier.

Whenever time allows, find 5 other internal pages and repeat the process.

5) Be patient and spread your eggs

Search engines trust aged sites. Unless you buy an aged domain, there is nothing you can do about the age of your domain. All you can do is Step 1 to 4 and then….. wait, trusting that things will happen eventually. Like it or not, waiting is one of the most important process in SEO, that’s why it’s our Step 5!

In the mean time, if you are building niche content websites, continue to build more sites and rinse and repeat Step 1 - 4. Some websites will turn out to be winners while some may just survive. If you only plan to have one website and  intend to live and die with it, then while waiting, you should establish other ways to get traffic. The whole idea is to spread your eggs.