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.

In this tutorial, my aim is to cover everything you need to know about SEO link building, including ways to build backlinks and common questions you may have.

Before I begin, let’s me quickly go through some fundamentals.

- Link building is about building links FROM other websites to YOUR website, not from YOUR website to OTHER websites. You may laugh, but many newbies can’t even get this idea right.

- Next fundamental. In the SEO world, we often use the word backlink, which refers to links from OTHER websites TO your website. If you link to other websites, that’s NOT a backlink to you.

- Last fundamental. SEO link building is not just about building backlinks. It’s about building SEO backlinks. (Read this article on the difference between a backlink and an SEO backlink.)

Once you are clear on the fundamentals, let’s move on to the exciting part……

Ways To Build Backlinks

1) Google’s answer to link building

Officially, Google wants you to create great contents and/or services in your website, so that people can see the value in your website and link to you.

If you strictly follow this strategy, it may take you a long time before you can see any result.

But there are ways to accelerate the process and I shall list them below:

- Create link bait. For example, write an article on 101 ways to do something or a long list of resources. This kind of article will usually arouse people’s interest within your niche and thus link to that article. If you have a blog, put your link bait article in the Popular Article listing. The idea is to get more people to read that article and link to it.

- Provide a useful online application on your website, so that people will naturally link to you in their blogs or forums.

- Distribute free templates or scripts of any kind, such as Wordpress theme, website template, free script, free plugin etc, with a backlink to website. When people use them, they will have to link to you.

The rest of the methods are not recommended by Google. But they are proven to work and are very likely to continue working for many years to come.

2) Effective textbook ways to build backlinks

Just pick up any SEO ebook and you’ll see these link building strategies:

- Distribute articles to article directories, aka article marketing.

- Post comments in blogs.

- Post in forums.

- Create pages in Blogspot, Squidoo, Hubpages and other social networking sites.

- Adding stories to Digg, Propeller and other social bookmarking sites.

- Press release.

- Submit your link to non-reciprocal link directories.

- Exchange links with friends or other webmasters, through article exchange or blogroll exchange. Though Google doesn’t like reciprocal links, reciprocal links still count. Just don’t over do it. What Google frowns is EXCESSIVE reciprocal links.

3) Other seldom-mentioned but effective ways to build backlinks

- Create accounts in social networking sites and membership sites that show your profile in public (there are thousands of them out there, with high PR) and include backlinks in your profile. You can create as many accounts as you like. (This method is extremely spammy, but it works.)

- Create your own linking network within your domains. This is applicable to those with lots of domains. You can divide your domains into groups and cross link them. Just make sure that they are not reciprocal links. (This method can be very powerful!)

- Create a simple software and submit it to hundreds of software directories, with a backlink to your website. Most software directories have high PR. These are great backlinks for you.

4) Buy links

Although Google says “do not buy links”, buying links still work. If you want backlinks from high PR web pages (not website), buying links seems to be the only option for most people.

But use it at your own risk. I doubt Google has an algorithm to catch you. In most cases, websites are caught because someone reports it to Google.

5) Participate in link building systems

- Link exchange networks

This is the earliest form of link building system, where webmasters create a link directory on their websites and link to one another. Such links are categorized under reciprocal links (i.e. I link to you, you link to me).

This kind of link building system is infamous and Google hates it because it doesn’t provide any value other than boosting search engine ranking.

There are rumours that Google ignores exchanged links (or reciprocal links). I doubt it. Google may discount reciprocal links, but it doesn’t ignore such links.

Honestly, I am not a fan of link exchange and have never tried any. My advice is stay away from such networks because there are better and safer linking systems out there.

- 3-way link networks

Instead of “I link to you, you link to me”, 3-way link networks work by linking A to B, B to C and C back to A. To Google, these are not reciprocal links.

This is my preferred link building network and I have used it for years. The only downside is such a linking network can only build backlinks to the homepage. If you want to build backlinks to internal pages, aka deep linking, you’ll have to resort to the 3rd option.

- Content syndication system

In such a system, you will post articles to a network of blogs or websites within the system. You can view this as another form of article marketing, except that the submission process is much simplified since you are doing it through a centralized system. This is my favorite link building strategies because I can build unlimited backlinks to unlimited web pages.

Common Questions About Link Building

1) Do nofollow links count?

No. Here’s what Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, wrote “The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.”

So when you build links, make sure that that link is not a nofollow link. You can easily identify nofollow links using Firefox plugins such as SearchStatus.

2) Do links from PR 0 sites count?

Yes. There is a myth going around saying that links from PR 0 sites don’t count. It’s a myth. What doesn’t count is if that link is from a web page that is NOT indexed by Google. If a web page is indexed by Google, it doesn’t matter whether the web page has PR 0 or PR 10. They will all help in your search engine ranking, but to different degrees of course.

Some experts say you should only post articles to popular article directories. I say NO. Distribute your articles to as many article directories as possible. I’ve gotten websites into top search results solely through article marketing alone. All links count, even if they have no PR.

3) Do links from unrelated contents count?

Yes. This is another common myth. Links from related content MAY score better, but links from unrelated links definitely counts.

4) Do links from duplicated contents count?

Yes. Links from unique contents MAY score better, but links from duplicated contents definitely count.

The only concern here is because the content is duplicated, Google may not index that the web page. As I said, links from un-indexed pages do not count.

“Kenneth, are you trying to say  Google penalizes duplicated contents?”

I wouldn’t say Google penalize duplicated contents. What happen is when Google indexes many web pages with the same content, it will only show some of the web pages and keep the rest in its sandbox. The priority usually goes to those websites with high PR. So let’s say you distribute an article to 300 article directories, probably only 200 of them are indexed. The other 100 may not be indexed and thus those links are not counted.

5) What is the relationship between PageRank and link building?

Technically, PageRank (PR) is like a vote. If a web page with high PR links to your web page, that link will carry more votes and thus add more to the PR of your web page. 0 PR doesn’t mean that web page carries no vote, it just carries lesser votes.

One thing to note is PageRank is web page specific. A PR 8 website doesn’t mean all its web pages have PR 8. So if you happen to buy links, make sure you pay for links from web pages with high PR, not just websites with high PR.

6) When submitting to link directories, can I go for reciprocal link option?

If you have done submissions to link directories, you will know that there are 3 options, free, reciprocal and paid. Don’t go for the reciprocal option. This is because over time, some of these directories may close down and you may end up having lots of bad links on your website, which can harm you SEO ranking and even get your website delisted.

I think I have more or less covered all you need to know about SEO link building. If you have other question about link building, just post your question below.

In this article, I’m going to document some important SEO mistakes that I came across. Visit this page regularly because I’m going to update it from time to time. Whenever I come across a new mistake that worth noting, I will list it here.

Simply avoiding these mistakes can drastically improve your search engine ranking.

Let’s start with the most common mistake of all……

1. Going after competitive keywords

General keywords are usually competitive keywords. If you do not conduct any form of keyword research, chances are you will think of keywords that are too general and hence too competitive.

For example, if a person runs an internet marketing related blog, he may want to optimize his blog for “make money online” (which has 149 million competing webpages!!). Someone running a Forex website may want to optimize his site for “forex trading” (which has 11 million competing webpages!!).

Aiming for competitive keywords with huge demand is not wrong, but it’s too ambitious. You may be building links like mad, but still wonder why you are not seeing any improvement in your search engine ranking.

The secret here is to go for keywords with some demand and low competition.

I’m not going to go into the details of how to do keyword research because I’ve written about it in Long Tail Keyword Research - A Step-By-Step Guide.

2. Optimizing for too many different keyword phrases per webpage

Don’t be overly ambitious and try to optimize too many keyword phrases for one webpage (including homepage).

For example, I’ve seen a marketer trying to optimize his homepage for “make money online fast”, “affiliate marketing for newbies” and “internet marketing strategies”.

Assuming the keywords have low competition “which I doubt so”, how is he going to include all these keywords into his title tag, which is an important factor in search engine optimization (Read SEO Tutorial Part 1 for details)?

The story will be different if he tries to optimize for “proven ways to make money online fast”, “ways to make money online”, “ways to make money online fast”, “make money online fast”. In this approach, it may seem that he is also trying to optimize many keyword phrases, but technically, all the keyword phrases are linked.

He can have a title tag of “proven ways to make money online fast”. For link building, he can start with “proven ways to make money online fast” and “ways to make money online fast”, which may be an easy target to shoot. Then he can challenge harder keywords such as “ways to make money online” and “make money online fast” and eventually “make money online”. The best part is, his link building effort will help to prove the ranking for all the keywords.

Let me share with you a real-life example. For LeadsLeap.com, our aim is to get to the top rank for “lead generation”. But we started with a longer keyword phrase of “free lead generation system”, and then slowly work our way up. When building links, we began with “free lead generation system”, then move on to “lead generation system” and then to “lead generation”. See the point?

As of today, we are in the first page for keywords like “free lead generation system”, “free lead generation”, “lead generation system” and even “free lead system”. We can optimize for several keywords at one time because they are all related, and we start with long tail keywords.

Lastly I want to emphasize that a website can be built to target unlimited keywords, but EACH webpage in a website, including the homepage, should only be built to target limited number of keywords, preferably linked keywords. If you have 2 keyword phrases that are totally different, you should prepare 2 articles and build 2 webpages for each of them.

3. Poor onpage optimization

This is usually a newbie’s mistake, where his webpage is not optimized for the keyword he is targeting. For example, the title tag may not include the keyword he is trying to optimize, or worse still the content doesn’t have the keyword at all. (Read SEO Tutorial Part 1 for details).

4. Dynamic links

You may want to note that search engines treat dynamic links as unique webpages.

For example, to Google,

http://domain.com/blog/?p=1 is one webpage;

http://domain.com/blog/?p=2 is another webpage.

This may seem obvious since default Wordpress links look like this, but not so obvious in some cases.

A typical scenario is when you want to track the click-through. For example, if you post an article in Ezinearticles and you want to track the click-through, your link may look like this:

http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234

To Google,

http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234 is one webpage;

http://domain.com/my-article.php is another webpage!!!!

So from link building standpoint, you are building links for http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234, not http://domain.com/my-article.php.

5. SEO unfriendly website structure

Lastly, you may want to note that what you see on your webpage may not be what the search engine spider sees.

Case 1 - iframe

Some webpages are built using iframe. Without going into the details, iframe is simply a html code that allows a webpage to show contents from one or more webpages.

For example, webpage A may be full of contents, but if you view the source code, you can only see two links, one to webpage B and one to webpage C. What you see in webpage A is actually contents from B and C. To search engine spiders, webpage A has no content!

Case 2 - javascript

Similarly, some webpages may be drawing contents through javascripts. To site visitors, the webpage is full of content, but if you look at the source code, the webpage is just a bunch of javascript codes.

This is common in some plug and play systems, where you are promised to have instant online store or instant website, but those kinds of websites are only good for advertisement-generated traffic. They cannot be optimized for search engine traffic at all! Be careful when you buy into such a system.

Case 3 - excessive use of Wordpress plugins

For those of you who have your own self-hosted Wordpress blog, you will know that the market has tons of plugins that you can use on your blog, and some of them claim to boost your search engine ranking.

My advice is, know your fundamentals well before using them.

I have seen a blog with 2 different title tags, 2 different meta descriptions and 2 different meta keywords for every webpage. I believe they are generated by different plugins. The blogger may have installed 2 SEO plugins and both are trying to “optimize” the page.

I have also seen a blog with an “index,follow” meta tag and a “noindex,nofollow” meta tag, both on the same page! No one in his right mind will do that, but it can be possible if you use different kinds of plugins that work independently from each other to achieve different objectives.

Ok, that’s all for today. I’ll continue to add more common SEO mistakes when I come across them.

Next week, in Part 3 of our SEO tutorial series, I’m going to discuss ALL ABOUT LINK BUILDING.

If you have any questions or doubt about link building, post them below before next Friday. I will try to cover them in the next post.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to establish a free SEO tutorial series in our blog. Today is part 1 of the SEO tutorial. I hope this free tutorial series will give you a clear idea how to get your website rank top in Google search engine.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Practicing SEO means getting your website to rank top in the organic search engine result for a particular keyword phrase so as to get endless flow of free traffic to your website.

Imagine if you sell gifts, and you rank #1 in Google’s search result for “buy cheap Christmas presents”. What can that do to your sales?

Different search engines have different search algorithm. In the SEO industry, we are mainly concerned about getting top ranking in Google because Googles owns more than 80% of the search engine market share.

Who am I to teach SEO?

If you are new to this blog or LeadsLeap, you may be wondering whether I’m qualified to teach you anything about SEO. If you have the same doubt, just google for “free leads generation system” or “leads generation system” and see who is in the top 10. These are just two of the thousands of first page I have on Google.

How to get my website rank top in Google?

This is the most common question, but it is a poor question. Why? Because you are likely to be ranking top in Google already. Just type your entire domain name in Google. Is your website in the first page? Better question please…..

How to get my website rank top for a particular keyword phrase in Google?

Technically, you can get any web page (not just website) into the first page of Google by building lots of backlinks to that web page using that particular keyword phrase as the anchor text.

For example, if you want to rank top for the keyword phrase “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you need to have lots of backlinks to your web page using “buy cheap Christmas presents” as the anchor text.

For more understanding, read this classic example.

If so, can I forget about all other things and just focus on link building?

You can, but if you work on ‘other factors’ at the same time, you don’t have to build that many backlinks. And the ‘other factors’ are definitely easier to accomplish than link building.

What are the ‘other factors’?

The ‘other factors’ basically involve making your web page more relevant to the keyword phrase you are optimizing.

By the way, did you notice that I always use the word web page instead of website?

Google views every web page as independent content, meaning technically, if you have a website about dog, you can add a web page about stomach pain and get that web page to rank top for stomach pain, even though your website is about dog!

Don’t agree? Just look at Wikipedia.com and Ezinearticles.com. They have articles in all kinds of categories. But almost all of them are ranking well in Google.

Ok, back to the ‘other factors’. Here are a list of the other factors that are fundamental in boosting your search engine result.

‘Other factors’ #1 - The title tag

In a html source code, a title tag looks something like this:

<title>Title of your web page</title>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the title tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

‘Other factors’ #2 - Keywords in the description meta tag

In a html source code, a description meta tag looks something like this:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your Description About The Page.”>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the description meta tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

‘Other factors’ #3 - Keywords in the url

The best is to have a website named buycheapChristmaspresents.com. But if you have many keywords to optimize, buying a domain name for each of them can be very costly. If so, you should at least name the web page as yourdomain.com/buy-cheap-Christmas-presents.html

‘Other factors’ #4 - Keywords within the content

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, try to include “buy cheap Christmas presents” at least once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and a few within the content.

Actually there is no strict rule on this but minimally, you should include the exact keyword at least once in the entire content.

 ’Other factors’ #5 - Website authority

If you have been reading up on SEO, you must have heard of Authority Site. The idea is if your site is an Authority Site, the search engine will send tons of traffic for all kinds of keyword phrases to you, pretty much like what Wikipedia and Ezinearticle have established now.

Website authority is at domain level. Meaning if your domain is an authority site, all other web pages in this domain will benefit.

2 important factors that affect website authority are

1) The age of the site

There is nothing you can do with the age of your site. You just have to be patience, and you need to have a long term vision for your website. Don’t build one site, chuck it away after 3 months and start another one.

2) The amount of backlinks to the homepage and internal pages, especially backlinks from other authority sites.

The difference between SEO backlinks (as discussed earlier) and backlinks for site authority (as mentioned here) is that the former is keyword specific, i.e., you have to include the keywords in the anchor text. For backlinks to boost site authority, any dofollow backlink will count. They can be keyword-specific anchor link or simply a URL link. Of course, all the SEO backlinks that you’ve established will help to boost your site authority.

Fundamentally, that’s all you need to know about SEO. I’m serious! Armed with these basic knowledge, I already gained hundreds of top positions in Google.

In the next SEO tutorial, we will look at some common SEO mistakes webmasters make. Who knows, you can be making those mistakes too.

First thing first, what is an SEO Backlink? How is it different from backlink?

Quoting the definition from Wikipedia, “Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page.”

Technically, a backlink looks like this:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com”>whatever text or can be the url itself</a>

Backlinks are important, especially in determining the PageRank of your web page. But to rank high in organic search result, especially in Google, the most popular search engine, you need more than just backlink. You need SEO Backlink.

The difference?

Here’s my definition of SEO Backlink: “SEO backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page, with keywords in the link title (a.k.a anchor text).”

Technically, an SEO backlink looks like this:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com”>keywords to rank in search engine</a>

For example, a website may have lots of backlinks but it may not be able to rank high in Google for any keyword it wishes. To rank high for a particular keyword, say “buy iphone”, the website needs to have lots of backlinks with “buy iphone” in their anchor texts.

A Classic Example Showing The Power Of SEO Backlinks

In the SEO world, there is a classic example that can quickly show you the importance of SEO backlink.

The example is…. “click here”.

If you haven’t known the answer, guess who ranks #1 in Google for the phrase “click here”?

It’s the Adobe Reader download page.

If you study that download page, you’ll realize that you can’t find the phrase “click here” on that webpage at all, not in the meta tag, title tag or within the content!

So why does this webpage rank #1 for “click here”?

There is only one reason: tons of other websites are linking to this webpage with the anchor text “click here” or “click here to download”.

By the way, the #1 position for “click here to download” is also the Adobe Reader download page.

Are you seeing the light now?

Get Ready For A Revolutionary One-Way Link Building System

Over the past 1 year, I’ve been working extremely hard on a powerful one-way link building system that can help you to build not just a few hundreds but unlimited backlinks for unlimited domains. (You know that I run hundreds of niche sites. If this system can satisfy my needs, I guess it can satisfy most marketers’ needs.)

The system is now completed and it is now undergoing beta testing with some 130 LeadsLeap members. Thanks to all the feedbacks from the beta members, we’re busy improving the system. I’ll keep you’re informed when the system is ready.

Yesterday I received a demanding question in our support ticket. Here’s the question:

“I want to start to promote product, i have decided to start to promote your product but i want you to teach me free of charge step-by-step guide that i can take on how i can create blog/review/report for your products that will make the blog/review/report that i will create for your products be listed on the first page of google search engine under 24 hours. Please, include any details that can help me to achieve that very fast so that the blog/review/report that i will create for your products will be listed on the first page of google search engine very fast under 24 hours before any other person do so.”

Initially I didn’t want to reply this question because it’s really out of the scope of our support. But on second thought, I decided to write the answer in our blog because it will be useful to our members.

Now let’s get into our discussion today: “How to get your product review page listed on the first page of Google search engine under 24 hours”.

Step 1: Decide what keyword phrase you want to rank for

Anyone with some knowledge in SEO can easily rank first in Google for the keyword phrase “pineapple durian cookie” because there is virtually zero competition for this keyword phrase.

But what’s the point? No one will search for this phrase.

So the first step is to find a keyword phrase that is low in competition but with good demand. How to do it? Well, I wrote the step by step instruction in our blog some time back. Read long tail keyword research to find out how.

For product review, a common practice is to target the product name. For example, if you are promoting LeadsLeap, you can target keywords like “Leadsleap review, Leadsleap scam, Leadsleap proof, does LeadsLeap work” and the LeadsLeap.com version of the four.

Step 2: Find an authority site

Assuming you found your million dollar keyword phrase, if you want to get listed on the first page of Google within 24 hours, your webpage must be hosted on an authority site. An authority site is a well-established, high PR site with great contents. For example, LeadsLeap blog is well established and whenever I post a blog, that blog will usually be in the first page of Google within 24 hours.

If you don’t have an authority site, you can leverage on other authority sites that allows you to post articles to it. Some of the famous ones include Squidoo, Blogspot and Ezinearticles. I recommend Squidoo and Blogspot. Ezinearticles.com has many constraints and it’s difficult to expand in the future.

Step 3: Write an article

After finding an authority site, your next step is to write a review or article about the product you are going to promote and publish it on the authority site.

The article should meet the following criteria:

- It must be optimized for the keyword phrase you’re targeting. (This is called onpage optimization. I’m not going to talk about onpage optimization here. It’s very standard and you can easily pick up an ebook to learn about it.)
- It must be convincing. (You have to put on your marketing cap when writing the article.)
- It should provide proof that the product works.
- It should give some kind of bonuses for those who purchase from your link (Optional, depending on the product you’re promoting.).

Step 4: Write another article

Next, you have to quickly write another article. This article is for link building purpose. It should be different from your main article and should discuss something more general.

For example, if you are promoting LeadsLeap, you can write an article about “3 easy ways to generate leads for your business”. In the article or in the resource section of the article, you should provide a link back to the main article, using the target keyword phrase as the linking text.

Step 5: Publish the articles and build links

The last step is to publish both articles and build lots of links to the main article.

Say if you publish the main article in Squidoo, you can post the second article to Blogspot, Hubpages, Ezinearticles and other established article directories, linking the second article back to your main article in Squidoo. You can also bookmark your Squidoo page as well as the pages with your second article in social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Propeller.

You should be able to complete Step 1 to 5 within a day.

Assuming you complete all these within a day and sleep through the whole of the following day, on the 3rd day, that is 24 hours after you completed Step 1-5, your Squidoo page should be listed in Google. Whether it’s on the first page depends on how competitive your keyword phrase is. If you’ve chosen a long-tail keyword with low competition, your Squidoo page should be listed on the first page of Google.

(Optional) Step 6-999: Keep building links

What if your main review article is not listed on the first page of Google? Well, just keep building more links to that article. Search this blog for more link building strategies.

It’s no longer a secret that the way to get good ranking in the search engines is to build backlinks. But besides backlinks, there are two other SEO tricks that are important but often overlooked. These two factors can play a significant role in getting SEO traffic.

Today we are going to discuss these 2 overlooked SEO tricks that can easily double your search engine traffic.

1) Title That Clicks

If you are a blogger or content website builder, besides choosing the right keyword and optimizing it, you should spend some time to come out with a title that will entice people to click.

Think about it. Even if your website rank #1 in the search result, if the title of the link is boring, people will just skip your link and move on to the next result.

This is commonsense, but it’s often overlooked, especially for those who outsource article writing.

Personally, although I outsource article writing for my content websites (aka Adsense websites), I still put in the effort to rewrite every title personally. This is because freelance writers are good in writing, but they are often not good in writing juicy title.

I run a program where I help members to promote their Adsense website (membership closed). The method I use to promote their websites is the exact same method that I use to promote mine. But strange enough, my Adsense websites perform much better than theirs. Honestly I can’t think of a logical explanation except for the fact that my titles are juicier than theirs!

2) Turn Every Webpage Into A Resource Center

If you haven’t noticed, besides backlinks, Google has been putting more weight in the ‘resourcefulness’ of a webpage.

Note that I say resourcefulness of a ‘webpage’, not ‘website’.

The idea is this:

If your webpage is about headache, regardless of what your website is about, it would be good to have lots of other headache related articles (from the same website) linked to this webpage. This way, this webpage looks like a good resource center for headache.

Let me show you an interesting website that demonstrates this point:

Take a look at this webpage from Bigresources.com. This webpage, as well as other similar webpages in this website, has the following characteristics:

- All of them rank well in Google, especially in long tail keywords.
- None of them are unique content (they are syndicated from different forums).
- Every webpage contains lots of other internal links. More importantly, the links are in the same topic as this webpage. (In the example, this webpage is about javascript, update, div, frame. You can see that all the internal links in this page are related to these keywords.)

To Google, every webpage on this website looks like a great resource center where visitors can look for more information on the same topic.

Actually this is the internal linking strategy that Wikipedia adopts and it’s doing very well in the search engine. The difference between wikipedia and bigresources is that Wikipedia has unique content whereas Bigresources uses primarily duplicated content. But does Google care?

Understanding this point, when you design your website, you should make sure that the articles in the same topic are linked. This way, every single webpage in your website can look like a good resource center for that topic. For those who use Wordpress blog, this can be done by adding a ‘related post’ plugin. For static websites or other content platforms, you’ll have to think of ways to achieve the same effect.

Recently a partner of mine had 3 of his content websites delisted from Google search results and he asked for my advice. As a result, I did an extensive study into the possible scenarios where Google will delist a website from its search.

Instead of keeping my findings in my memory, I think it’s better to pen them down in this article so that you and I can refer to it in the future.

Here are some of the ‘proven’ reasons why a website is delisted from Google:

1) Repeated spelling and syntactical errors

It has been confirmed by Google spokesman that a website can be delisted from its search engine due to repeated spelling and syntactical errors.

Here’s what Google spokesman, Artie Su, said “When our systems syntactically analyze the words on a page, it’s very easy to determine whether correct grammar is being followed. When it isn’t, particularly if the errors are consistently repeated over a period of time, the site gets downgraded. That’s because most spammers and creators of junk commercial sites don’t do any kind of quality control. Grammar check is an easy way to spot them.”

If your website repeatedly contains a particular misspelled word, or it’s primarily made up of junk content (such as those computer generated content), you are at a high risk of being delisted from Google search.

2) Adding a large number of external links in a short time

If you, for whatever reason, add a lot of external links to your website, you can be delisted from Google search.

One possible scenario is where your server is hacked and spammers add lots of links to your website without you knowing. Most of these links are hidden. You won’t see them unless you study the source code.

Another possible scenario is when you are too active in link exchange. Let’s take link directories for example, most link directories will have an option for you to link back to them. If you spend one whole day exchanging links with 200 link directories, your website is at risk. (Note that I’m talking about external links from your website to other websites, not incoming links from other websites to your website.)

3) Sitemap error

This is a rare problem but it can happen. Your server may block Google bot from crawling your site. If you realize that all your websites in the same server are delisted from Google, this may be the reason. To solve the problem, you’ll have to inform your server about it.

This is a technical problem. If you want for info, it’s better to read this article: http://beecherbowers.com/2009/02/03/google-sitemap-timeout-errors/

4) Hidden links

Hidden links can get your website delisted from Google.

A typical trick to hide your links by making the color of your link same color as the background, so that your visitor cannot see them but the search bot can.

Another common trick is by putting the links in an invisible <div> tag.

5) Doorway pages

The idea of a doorway page is to present one version of the page to the search engines while showing another version to the visitors. This is against Google’s principle, which is “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

I’ve just started to explore the issue of being delisted from Google. In the next few weeks (or even months), I’ll be doing several things to see if I can get the 3 websites listed in Google search again. As usual, I’ll keep you updated on any interesting discoveries.

Last but not least, I’ll end this article with 2 useful links from Google:

What to do if your site isn’t doing well in search
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34444

How to ask Google to reconsider your site
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843

In the past, we have been talking about keyword research, link building and other search engine optimization techniques. Today, let me illustrate to you what I mean by search engine traffic.

For example, last week, I posted an article titled “4 Essential Tools To Create Traffic To A Website“. Similar to many other LeadsLeap blog posts, the title wasn’t plucked from the sky. It was the result of careful keyword research.

Here’s a screenshot of the keyword research result:

As you can see, the keyword phrase “Tools To Create Traffic To A Website” is searched 32 times a day. That’s close to 1000 searches a month!

There are two ways to tap into this traffic. One way is by paying the search engines (i.e. Adwords etc). Another way is by getting to the top of the generic search result, through search engine optimization.

Both the paid ads and generic search result for this keyword phrase are shown in the screenshot below:

Can you see who is sitting at the #1 position of the 30,000,000 search results? Yes, it’s LeadsLeap.

The article we posted last week is now in the #1 position of Google search result.

With close to 1000 searches a month and being the first in the listing (after the ads), you bet we’re going to get some traffic from there.

That’s what search engine traffic is all about!

Before I end today’s article, let’s do a quick summary of what it takes to start getting traffic from the search engines to your website.

1. Keyword research (to find the right traffic generating keywords to target)
2. Search engine optimized content (to please the search engines and human visitors)
3. A website with lots of quality backlinks (to greatly increase your chance of getting the top ranking.)

Alternatively (or should I say ‘Additionally’), post your ad in LeadsLeap. Some of the traffic we’ve generated may click your ad and go to your website.