By now you probably realize that getting traffic is easy, but knowing how to convert traffic into sales is harder!

In today’s blog, I’m going to share with you some practical tips on how to convert traffic into sales.

First, what sales are we referring to?

Are we talking about ad clicks, as in the case of Adsense click-through? Or we’re referring to product sales, as in the case of affiliate sales or sales of your own products or services?

Since they require different techniques, I will discuss them differently.

How To Convert Traffic Into Ad Clicks

The “prerequisite” of any ad-clicks is targeted traffic. Whether you’re getting traffic from search engines, PPC or other advertising channels, the traffic must be interested in the content on your webpage and hence the content of the ads. Without this prerequisite, nothing else can work.

With that prerequisite in mind, let’s look at the strategies to convert traffic into sales (ad clicks in this case).

1) Place an ad above the fold

Don’t worry about making your webpage ugly. Be focused. You want ad-clicks! Just get it.

One of your ads, such as an Adsense ad, should be above the fold (i.e. can be seen without scrolling) and located right in the middle of the webpage. Usually, a good place to put it is immediately below the title.

2) Place an ad near the action button or action link

If you are running a forum or any website where people tend to click on buttons or links to take some actions, place an ad near the most used button.

3) Place an ad at the end of the article

If the visitors happen to read the content on your webpage, you’ll want to offer them something to do after reading. And that something is of course… an ad!

4) Don’t frame the ad!

Don’t frame the ad with borders. Remove any border.

In the offline world, retail shop owners are adopting an open concept, removing glass panels and walls because they realize that this will increase the traffic flow to their shops.

Same goes for the virtual world. Borders prevent people from clicking the contents in it. No borders please.

5) Build instant trust

Nowadays, people are more and more web savvy. You can forget about the old tricks of camouflaging your ad and misleading visitors into clicking your ad. (That is against Google’s terms by the way). If your visitors ever click on your ad, that’s because they want to get the info and they know you’ll make money out of it.

Instead, what you should do is to build instant rapport with your visitors. Make them feel that your website is trustworthy, not a made-for-Adsense site.

No, I don’t mean you have to start writing every article yourself and putting a personal touch in every article. That would be crazy, especially if you have hundreds of niches.

The trick I use is to place a ‘personal’ photo on my niche site, so that visitors can feel that what they are visiting is a little personal site of mine and I am the little expert in that niche.

Of course, I’m not going to put my real photo! You can find tons of free photos here.

That ends part 1 of How To Convert Traffic Into Sales series. Next week, we will continue to discuss how to convert traffic into product sales. Stay tuned…

Take a look at the screenshot below. This is what I mean by dominating Google’s first page.

Out of 10 results in the first page, 9 are articles from the same author, syndicated on different websites.

The last result is a YouTube video, which is something Google tries to include in every result page.

In fact, for this particular search term, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th page of Google are mostly dominated by the same article.

Interested to know how it’s done?

In today’s blog, I’m going to show you exactly how it is done. Yes, I know exactly how it’s done because I’m the person behind it.

What happened is this article is an article submitted by one of the members at ezArticleLink, our new link building system.

The article gets published in hundreds of other domains in the system, over a period of time, so as to get backlinks to that member’s site.

Now, the question is, if you write an article and publish in hundreds of article directories, will you get the same result?

Not likely, because most of the articles are buried deep in the directory and more importantly, there is no backlink to those articles.

Then what makes this article different?

I’m not going to hide anything. Here are the reasons:

1) Unique article

The article has been spun according to our spinning requirement. This ensures that every published article is unique (at least in the eyes of Google).

To ensure good user experience, Google does not display duplicated contents. It will only choose the most relevant one (usually the one with the most backlinks) and show it.

For Google to show all your articles in one page, that article must be unique. So to Google, it is showing 9 different articles.

2) Highly relevant content

Google’s objective is to return the most relevant webpage for a given search term.

By means of relevance, I mean…

i) The title of the webpage must be relevant

As you can see from the screenshot, all the titles contain the search keyword, except for the 9th listing, which is something else (actually an error with that site that cause it not showing the correct title and the problem has just been fixed).

ii) The content in the webpage must be relevant

In this case, every webpage you see in the screenshot above has content related to the keyword. NO OTHER miscellaneous content or randomly generate content in it.

iii) The internal links and outgoing links in the webpage must MOSTLY be relevant

Except for some standard navigation links such as home, contact, privacy etc, ALL the links in the above webpages, be it internal links or external links, are about ETF, stock or forex trading.

3) Highly relevant backlinks

This is the most important factor.

Each of these webpages you see in the screenshot above have highly relevant backlinks from other unique webpages from different domains. This is possible because of ezArticleLink’s auto link building system.

When I say highly relevant backlinks, I mean 2 things:

i) The anchor texts of the backlinks contain the search term.

ii) The backlinks are from webpages with relevant content

That’s all. When you have all the 3 ingredients in one place, plus if that search term isn’t too competitive (in this case, there are 62k competing sites), you get amazing results like this.

This is a good example to show you how to create webpages that Google likes. Take note of these factors when you create your next webpage or website.

In this article, I will share with you some of my recent experiences in finding JV partners.

As you probably know, we’re nearing the launch of our new link building system and I’m dead busy preparing for the launch. One of the things I am busy doing is to find JV partners for the launch.

Getting Big Names To Be Your JV Partners

Thinking that I have a good product and some reputation in the market, I thought maybe I can try sending a JV proposal to some of the big names out there. So I did.

I sent out about 10-15 emails either to their email addresses or via their online support. The result? None. Either they reply with an industry standard reply “My schedule is full” or there is no reply at all.

Kind of expected, but I thought no harm trying my luck.

The lesson? Don’t be disappointed if you are rejected!

Getting Big Names To Be Your JV Partners - The Correct Way

Alright, above is a negative demonstration. Here’s the correct way to do it.

Over the past years, I was acquainted with other big names and have helped them either in their product launches or in other aspects.

This time, when I sent them a JV proposal, most of them respond favorably.

You see, big names are busy. They have their own businesses to run and are not in any need to promote any product. The only reason they will consider your JV proposal is because you’ve done them a favor in the past.

So before you even think of approaching big names as JV partners, you probably need to start building rapport months or years ahead. If they have a product launch, help them in the launch and be one of the top sellers. Get them to know you in person. This will dramatically increase your chance of getting them to help you in your product launch.

The Ultimate Way To Find JV Partners

As I always emphasize, whether it’s through advertising, JV partnership or other “instant” traffic approach, the traffic is short-lived. Ultimately, it is your viral system that multiplies these instant traffic into long-term passive traffic.

The same principle applies to finding JV partners.

Take our new link building system for example, the beta members and other invited JV partners have brought in hundreds of other marketers for the launch. This is something that I can’t possibly have done with my own effort.

You may think these marketers may not be those big names with big list. But never underestimate the power of small-time marketers. Although those super affiliates can bring in lots of sales as an individual, as much as 80% of the total sales are usually generated by the mass of small-time marketers who can only generate a few sales per person.

Well, that’s my personal experience in finding JV partners. I would love to hear your experience in finding JV partners. If you do, please share it with us below.

By the way, if you are keen to join us for the launch of our new link building system on 22 Feb, this is your last week to join. Just drop us an email at ezjv [at] leadsleap [dot] com. We will send you the details rightaway!

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.

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.