[Quick Affiliate Tip]If you are honest in reviewing software or tools you will make way more money then if you are dishonest and butter up a really crappy tool[End Quick tip]

But before spending $200 on this tool you need to hear some crucial information… so please keep reading.

As soon as I opened Keyword Elite V2 I noticed the new tabs feature, I was very excited because it now means I can run multiple features, multiple times, without losing my previous reports. You know that feeling when FireFox came out with the tabs and you stopped using IE? (sorry, I am assuming you use FF lol)
Anyways, I can now compare data and use a keyword list I just created using the ‘Keyword Surge’ tool in ‘Adwords Competition Sniper’ or ‘Adwords Time Machine’. So I am very excited about this addition! I was always upset that Keyword Elite V1 made me quit my current project to run a new one. For ME, and maybe your different, but for me this addition alone will save me hours of time… and time is money so I would have to say for me the addition of tabs makes the $200 a small price to pay for me…

Initially my first concern was on the Keyword Surge feature,  previously known as “Create a Keyword List” in Keyword Elite V1- this feature is important to me because with it I have been able to uncover literal gold mines of keywords, so if this feature has gotten any better, easier to use or more exciting, this alone would be worth the $200 to me.

Keyword Surge (Create a Keyword List in Keyword Elite V1)
I went to look at this feature and did a few searches and I have to admit, I really like the new setup, one VERY important addition is the searches/month column immediately available without exporting to option 2 (for those who use KE1 you know what I mean…) – this means I can easily sort the keywords and make quick decisions based on projected search volume without having to run a second report for that data. This saves me a lot of time and helps me quickly decide on what keywords to run with and what to wait on or discard.  Including the addition of search volume to the columns, Brad’s team have also added ‘number of words’ and ‘number of characters’ columns which are also sortable.  I am sure this information is far more important to many other people then it is to me but I guess it could be useful. But what I do like is that all columns have sorting ability which allows me to view reports in many different ways without exporting.

What I also love about Keyword Elite is the ease at which you can eliminate keywords from your list, sort the list and export to TXT… one thing I do wish Keyword Elite had was the ability to export the keywords into spreadsheet format with search volume data but I guess the main idea is to build the keywords and export them to TXT format for an Adwords Campaign or organic SEO campaigns.

Lastly on this feature, you can select the keywords you like and right click and send them to “Market Research Sleuth”, “Search Engine Dominator”, “Adwords Time Machine”,  “Advanced Google Site Targeter” or “JV Diamond Miner”. Something that may seem simple but which saves a lot of time and makes things a whole lot easier.  I can then create my list of keywords, delete garbage or outlandishly competitive phrases (which I already know) and then send my customized list to Market Research Sleuth for further analysis and trimming. This latter feature is where I make ultimate decisions on keywords. So for me this is invaluable!

My only problem with this feature is that in the upgrade somebody felt the # column was not need so in V2 it was disabled. This may seem simple but it was always an easy way for me to determine how many keywords i was dealing with at a time. I hope that in a future update this is added back in. I will send a support ticket in regarding this and maybe they will do that for me.

For simple illustration purposes I did a quick search using the primary keyword ‘web hosting’ using the Keyword Surge tool. Below is a screenshot of that report:

Keyword Surge Feature - Keyword Elite V2

Click here for full image

Market Research Sleuth – (Previously ‘Analyze Keyword Competition’ in V1)
I don’t really see a lot of difference in this feature except a bit more convenience in filtering functionality and the added Search Trends column which I have found handy for many niches.  All you have to do now is click the little ‘filter’ image: and you can sort any column using this method (this is the case with any feature of Keyword Elite V2)… instead of the KE1 method of clicking “edit filters”… so not a new feature just more convenient and pretty. But as far as I am concerned convenience interprets into saved time and time is money… atleast for me it is. I get between $100-250 an hour for consultation so wasted time costs me.

Here is a quick screen shot of the Market Research Sleuth feature and the filtering option:

Market Research Sleuth Feature - Keyword Elite V2

Click here for the full image

The search trends addition is really the only new part of this feature that I noticed however it seems to be more efficient at getting the results then the old version was which is always a big plus.

I will write another post on each individual feature and how to use them later on, but at this point I am basically trying to give you a honest comparison of each of the features to the old version and give you an unbiased opinion of whether or not you should buy Keyword Elite V2. I hope to soon have video tutorials of the tool…

Adwords Time Machine
Actually a really useful and interesting feature of Keyword Elite V2 is the Adwords Time Machine which gives you 6 months history on the top Adwords campaigns for your specified keywords.  Allowing you to quickly note if your competitors have changed their campaigns recently, what doorway pages/affiliate pages they are using to convert traffic and their exact ad copy.   I did a quick test of this tool this morning and found the information quite useful.

There is a blue blob (please note screenshot) for each month that a specific advertiser was running a campaign for said keyword. A orange star lets me know quickly that the advertiser changed the ad copy for that specific month compared to previous months. For advertisers this information could prove useful because of how easily it can be obtained.  I do comparatively little PPC advertising to Organic search engine optimization so I am not the best person to comment on this feature, but for the little I do,  I am pleased with the simplicity of it and how useful it could prove to be.

Adwords Time Machine - Keyword Elite V2

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Search Engine Dominator
This is probably the most useless feature of Keyword Elite V2, in fact I am surprised Brad made such a big deal over it in one of his clips on the tool.  The information provided in this feature is largely outdated SE techniques, probably the most important of the data provided being that of the backlinks of each of the competing pages.

Basically what this feature does is provide information about the top 10 organic competitors for Bing, Google and Yahoo. It sounds good on paper but when it boils down to it, the information provided is largely useless and outdated. It provides keyword density information which we know most search engines don’t even factor in anymore… the truth is, if any of this information is used in the factoring of search engine ranking it is very minimal. (excluding of course backlinks)

Now I know saying this won’t earn me points with Brad but I am not promoting this tool for Brad, I am reviewing it for my readers… and so I am going to give you the lowdown on everything because you deserve to know what the tool really does… and what it doesn’t do.

HOWEVER if you buy Keyword Elite V2 you will (for a short time) get Seo Elite V4 absolutely free. Seo Elite has a feature which analyzes the top competing sites and is actually very useful. It provides good information on how many and what type of backlinks each of the top sites has. Not sure why Brad didn’t just integrate this right into KEV2. But as far as I am concerned SE Dominator is useless and don’t buy KE for this feature or you will be disappointed.

But if you only knew how much money and time i have saved by using Seo Elite’s Analze Competitors Backlinks feature you would buy Keyword Elite V2 just for that bonus. When in consultation I do a lot of manual work but my first action is a quick run of this feature in Seo Elite. So if your looking for something like Search Engine Dominator promises to be then you might buy it for the Seo Elite free bonus.

Search Engine Dominator - Keyword Elite V2

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Adwords Competition Sniper
I don’t have a lot to say on this except that it allows you to monitor competitors campaigns yourself  and discover keywords they are repeatedly running. The idea is that if they keep running a specific campaign then it must be effective and if they drop others then they, consequently are probably less effective.  I have not had enough time to properly test this, so I can’t honestly rate this feature.  I can however see where it could prove to be very useful, especially if used in conjunction with Adwords Time Machine data. I might try and run some video tutorials on this feature soon to give you  a better idea of what it can do. For now just look at the screeshot or feel free to drop me a line with questions on it.

Adwords Competition Sniper - Keyword Elite V2

Click here for full image

Advanced Google Site Targeting
This feature allows you to find niche sites that are using Adsense. That way you can use Google Adwords Site Targeting feature to advertise on these sites for more targeted advertising. This would primary be useful for Adwords advertisers however the data could also be used to request one-way links.

I can’t see myself using this feature too much unless it proves to be useful in finding potential sites to get one-way links from.

Advanced Google Site Targeting Feature - Keyword Elite V2

Click here for full image

JV Diamond Miner
This feature is actually pretty cool and I have found it very useful although it isn’t perfect. The idea is that you enter a keyword and the tool looks for related sites that are ranking at the top of Google who send out mailing lists.  You can then contact the owners and see if they might promote a product/tool or website for you in their mailing list.

It is a interesting feature and I have found it very useful in the last two days I have used it…  you can go 200 deep into the Google results for your specified keyword however for most cases you will want sites that rank high so may not go that deep. I have used this feature already to contact potential partners and already have gotten a few favorable responses for the few I have done. So I can see myself using this feature quite often and of course reusing the reported data for years to come… so this could prove invaluable.

I am not sure this feature alone is worth the $200 that Keyword Elite costs for the average person but it definitely is to me and I am sure if you have any kind of marketing experience you can make your $200 back in no time, with this feature alone.  Don’t underestimate the ability to use your competitors to promote YOUR agendas.

Below is a screenshot of a simple report I did for illustration purposes, results can (as usual) be sorted by Alexa, ranking, domain name, page PR(the actual PageRank of the page), and whois info can be found by clicking a link next to each url – definitely not as convenient as live but it is available.  What I would really like to see is Brad integrate email reports and export options for this feature… it would make it much easier if I could just email myself a report for my archives and future reference…

JV Diamond Miner Feature - Keyword Elite V2

Click Here for full image
CPA Magnet
Perhaps more than anything else this is a teaser for Brad’s Affiliate Elite program (which by the way is AWESOME) but it is, like the JV Diamond Miner feature, a really cool addition to the tool. If there is anything better then a good tool it is a couple of great tools all coupled together.  And I guess that is what Keyword Elite is… If nothing else the CPA Magnet feature gives the user a VERY quick method of finding potential affiliates. As is the case with all of the features of this tool, you may sort the results by each column, for this feature the primary columns would be highest payout, lead and sales/percentage… providing you easily a great deal of data on which of the results will best suit your purposes as an Affiliate marketer.

I must say that if your serious about affiliate marketing this feature is but the tip of the iceberg, I would however recommend you spend the $4.95 and get Affiliate Elite because it is worth every penny you will pay.

And that wraps up the individual review of each of the features. My final opinion? Buy Keyword Elite V2, it is worth every penny you will pay and even if you already have Keyword Elite V1 you will find the new upgrade very profitable… within a few hours of purchasing while just testing the tool for review I made back my whole investment.

I have absolutely no doubt that someone who is serious about Keyword Research and SEO will find this tool worth every penny of the asking price. But if you should buy it and decide differently you have 8 weeks to get a full no-questions asked refund. So I recommend you make the purchase and see what Keyword Elite can do for you. If you have already purchased Keyword Elite V1, please email me at randy(at)1strankings[dot]com and ask for a coupon code that will save you a considerable amount on the purchase of V2.

Please watch for future articles featuring video tutorials of Keyword Elite and more in-depth tutorials on using each of the features of the tool.  Please post your comments and experience in using the tool here, I would love to hear about your experience.

Copyright © 2005-2009, 1stRankings Co in partnership with 1st Search Engine Rankings
This article may NOT be redistributed in any way, shape or form. If you would like to link to the article we would appreciate it but republication in part or in whole is strictly forbidden and 1st Search Engine Rankings will file legal suit due to any illegal reproduction of its content. Use of a small snippet as reference is allowed and recommended when referring to articles from 1st Search Engine Rankings Seo Blog. All articles are unique to 1stSearchEngineRankings.com, please inform us if you see one of our articles published on another blog.

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The answer to achieving that coveted ranking is actually very very simple, the only question I have is, are you dedicated to REALLY taking on that competitive keyword? – if so then lets get started, lets learn the TRUE secret to stealing ANY top Google ranking… are you ready?

When I share this secret with you, you will ultimately do one of two things… you will either say “ohhh that makes sense” and you will begin to implement it into your SEO campaign or else you will assume its either too easy or too hard (likely the latter) and move on. The truth is that in some cases it is very very easy and other times it is quite hard, but if you stick with it and follow this method completely through it will work.

A few years ago I was working on a site for a retailer, I was using my typical link building techniques and was making progress however I learned something through that campaign that reshaped how I do SEO.  I discovered that the owners of the websites where friends with numerous people who owned the top positions for the keywords they were targeting. So I thought to myself, if I can get links from all these sites I can take out the top position and hold it easily. So I set out to do this and, belive it or not, it was actually very easy to do, I was able to take out the positions they desired and firmly place them in control of many rankings which they have ever since effortlessly held.

Perhaps your puzzled and wondering what I actually did. Well it is very simple, I decided which rankings we were targeting primarily, I then went to each webmaster on the first (sometime the second) page of Google for that term and found a way to get a link from them. Some of these sites were provided products by my client so I was able to use this to get a link, I used other methods to get the remaining links. It really doesn’t matter how you get them, you can request them politely (does still work),  you could offer to pay for the links or you could use my first method… we will discuss each of these methods in detail.

I want to move through each of these methods step-by-step and give you an idea how to handle each request you will make, if you focus EVERY ounce of your link building energy to using this method you will achieve that coveted ranking, I have not found one case where it didn’t work. But it takes dedication… like ANY real SEO achievments will.

So here are the methods:

#1. One hand washes the other
The goal using this method is either to use something you are doing for the webmaster to get a link or to create a situation where they are obligated to give you a link or at least feel like they are. This can be as simple as you providing the webmaster with leads, this is a excellent way of getting a link and is how I got some of the links for the aforementioned client’s site. It may be providing the webmaster with a bit of exposure in a way your business would have an advantage. This has to be adapted to the specific niche your in, you will need to think this out for each site… believe me though, it is well worth it to spend the time for each of the first page sites. These links are worth their weight in gold.

If the webmaster y0ur attempting to get a link from does not really owe you anything or even worse doesn’t even know you then you may have to “buy” your way to getting that link… and I don’t necessarily mean monetarily.

#2. Linkbait – they’ll swallow it hook line and sinker
I firmly believe that there is a way to get a link from nearly every authority site, however that is easier said then done… however I recommend you atleast look into finding ways of link baiting for specific sites or groups of sites which you desire a link from. You will have to research what will effectively bait a site.  It may be a tool, generally a tool, if correctly developed will generate hundreds if not thousands of links however one or two links from first page ranked sites may be worth numbers of regular links to that tool. So make sure you specifically use link bait to get links from high ranked sites, don’t just hope that they will see it and link on their own.

An article is also very good link bait, I have done numerous research articles and these can turn into powerful link baits. If you do your research thoroughly this can prove to be a super valuable link bait development method.  But again, remember to target your article to the specific sites you want a link from. If you can get those links, all other links your article might attract is just the icing on the cake.

#3. Simply request a link
Sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer… just asking for a link can sometimes get you that link.  But sometimes you have to pay for the link. Whether its a set fee for a “permanent” link or a monthly agreement it does entail risks.  I do NOT recommend link exchange at all, instead if you have linked to a site and desire a link back from them, I recommend you email them in a way that in NO WAY even hints at the fact that you have linked to them or at all smells like a typical link exchange request. Find a way of buttering the recipient up, comment on an article they have written, provide a honest and detailed testimonial of a software they sell etc.  These are much more successful attempts at gaining a link back and are much more “natural” to Google. No need to tell them you linked to them, if the link is worth anything they will notice… if not what makes you think they will be impressed because you inform them of it? I’d be insulted…

Whatever you do to get these links, you should never ever spam webmasters in any way, if they have do-follow open comments or a forum, do not use this to spam for a link. The link you do get, should the webmaster not remove it, will be worth far less than a naturally placed link on a quality relevant page by the webmaster. I can’t overstress the utter worthlessness and waste of time it is to try and spam for links.

Perhaps you had hoped for some pill or miracle drug which would give you super SEO powers but if this article has seemed a let down in anyway you need to re-read it and seriously consider using these methods. I use these methods all the time and it has turned out to be the best way to start my SEO campaigns.  I have kept it simple because the method is simple, whoever said SEO was rocket science anyways?
Obviously there are certain niches where this method would be hard and in such cases you will need to continue beyond just trying to get links from the first page for your primary keywords, because in some niches many of the first page-ranked sites will not even link to you… you should ultimately go after every site ranked in Google for the keywords you are trying to rank for. If you actively proceed with this method you will ultimately rank for the terms you desire… but again this is no miracle work. Like all the methods I use and recommend, they take time and patience however the results are well worth it.

The purpose of this article is to help you realize that you should be getting links from people who are holding positions in territory you want to hold, then keep moving back through the rankings trying to get links. Don’t worry if they are ranked on the 10th page, if the term is competitive they will still be a valuable linkback.

As always comments and emails are welcome, and of course we love to have you link directly to our articles. If you enjoyed this article please add my blog to your feed reader… if you do not have a feed reader, please join the 21st century. Goto Google.com/reader and start by adding www.1stsearchenginerankings.com to the list. That way you have instant access to new articles as soon as they are published. Thanks again for reading!

Copyright © 2005-2009, 1stRankings Co in partnership with 1st Search Engine Rankings
This article may NOT be redistributed in any way, shape or form. If you would like to link to the article we would appreciate it but republication in part or in whole is strictly forbidden and 1st Search Engine Rankings will file legal suit due to any illegal reproduction of its content. Use of a small snippet as reference is allowed and recommended when referring to articles from 1st SER SEO blog. All articles are unique to 1stSearchEngineRankings.com, please inform us if you see one of our articles published on another blog.

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Because essentially the same strategy works for both games… in fact the main reason why webmasters never attain success is because they don’t have a strategy… and the ones that do often have a faulty concept of it. Most webmasters do not even calculate their own steps let alone anticipate those of their competitors. So how do they expect to win? They jump into the game much the same as a amateur Chess-player does, playing moves on a whim without realizing or contemplating the final outcome of that decision or calculating the risks and benefits to such a move. And THAT is the reason why in both games we have so many losers, its not because they don’t know the game, the rules of the game or the general ideas. Its because they don’t have a strategy and they aren’t planning ahead, there focus is on NOW and they don’t see the big picture.

So how does this analogy and realization help us become better seo? Well first once we realize an error we must take steps, careful steps to fix that error. If we lack a strategy and have been running our seo campaigns half-hazardously without thinking about the consequences, if that is the case then the logical solution is to create a fool-proof strategy. But how does one start a strategy? Using the following guide…

Strategic Planning in Seo

Identify your market…
The first step is to identify your market and target. Walking into a seo campaign without identifying your targets is like walking onto a ball field and not knowing which team you are competing against. The idea that you are targeting “everything” doesn’t work, it creates an ineffective strategy and a perfect environment for failure. Just like in competitive sports you take on one goal at a time, you don’t compete against multiple teams at once. You identify your goal and that is what you fight for… that is not to say you can’t have multiple secondary goals but they should indeed be secondary.

I can hear somebody saying

“wait a second Randy, I have been targeting multiple goals for years and have been very successful”

You missed the point, the point is not that you CANNOT target multiple goals, the point is that the more goals you have the broader your playing field and the less effective you will be across the board. And by goals I am not necessarily referring only to specific keywords, I am talking about specific market strategies here. You should have a number of goals, many of which should be dependent on completion of other goals. For instance a small music site dedicated to selling hand-crafted guitars should not immediately set a goal to take on the banjo business. They should first develop strategies to take out the guitar business, one-step at a time.

So how does one identify their market? Well I suggest you do some Keyword Research to get some ideas to start from…

#1. Keyword Research, create large lists of keywords which can be narrowed down to specific keywords to target immediately, secondary keywords for later on and maybe a third list of “maybes” which you can save for later on. You should create lists of non-competitive and low competition keywords which get some traffic, you should use these to write articles and create resources, that way you are slowly building some traffic and rankings while you work on larger and larger keywords. To do this keyword research I use Keyword Elite because I find it is the best tool on the market, the most effective and the fastest. Unfortunately few tools are what they claim to be, that is why I whole-heartedly recommend Keyword Elite because it lives up to its wildest claims. If you would like a tutorial on how to do this I have written one entitled How to find low competition high traffic phrases – it details everything… however if you should have questions feel free to let me know.

If you want to just check individual keywords for traffic volume in Google than use Google Adwords Keyword Tool however I have found Keyword Elite far better in creating lists of keywords as it seems to find a larger volume of keywords to build from… so I suggest you get Keyword Elite just for this step… it has a money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose. After your first campaign you will realize how much time it has saved you and how many new prospects you have discovered that you would have likely never known about before.

#2. Develop content based on these keyword targets. Please note I did NOT say to create articles, I said content, something of value to your targeted audience. This is not to say that articles are not content… bear with me please. For instance if you are selling hand-crafted guitars then a good link bait might be to develop a tutorial/e-book detailing how to make a handmade guitar. If this resource is developed correctly and distributed correctly it alone could take you to the top for your main keywords. This is the fastest way to get to the top. People will link to valuable resources all day long… the keyword though is valuable
If you would like some consultation on creating a valuable linkbait send me a email at randy[at]1st-rankings.com and let me know about your site. I will see what I can come up with. However little research and brainstorming should turn up some good ideas… let me know what you come up with and where you feel it lacks and we will figure out something for you!

Uniqueness is everything. You need to start your site off immediately with a unique approach, a simple yet inviting atmosphere and the resources and content in demand by your niche. How do you determine this? See above under Keyword Research.

#3. Develop YOUR link building strategy
This part of your strategy is important to develop even before you start your site. I don’t think many people realize how important it really is. If you have developed your link building strategy prior to starting the site everything you do will be in harmony with that, so everything you do will compliment your link building plans… which tends to produce much higher inbound links both naturally and by request.

Methods of Link Building (by rating)

Link Baiting 10/10 – We have discussed this briefly above however I cannot over stress the importance of creating exceptional link baits. It is the wave of the future and definitely the best of today. Focus a lot of effort on link baiting and you will find it is far more effective than any time spent on other link building methods. Link baiting is not something that can be taught but is generally unique to each niche however some of the same principles apply to any form of link baiting. And those are uniqueness, demand, relevance and usability.

If you create a article based completely off a hot article from another site do you think that will do much good? Not at all, you will be considered a copycat and nobody will link to you. You need to create something unique, something in demand and relevant to your niche and which is usable by YOUR users. If you can do this you will gain links naturally, how many will depend greatly on how unique and how demanded your article information is.

Perhaps your niche is in need of a tool, software, service or product. If you can fulfill this demand it can also be a great link bait, especially if your able to offer it free and the service is in high demand. Maybe you don’t realize that your niche is even in need of such a tool or service. Do some research and brainstorming, read blogs, forums and authority sites in your niche and discover a common resounding need… fulfill that need and you have discovered a VERY effective link bait.

I use a piece of software called Seo Elite to spy on my competitors and what link baits they are developing. I then use this data to outdo them. I highly recommend this software for this process is only… some of the other tools it offers have become outdated but it is well worth the price alone for its spy on competitors feature. Sometimes I find brilliant link bait ideas using Seo Elite and sometimes I find them by just brainstorming and following the above suggestions.

Again 1st Search Engine Rankings would love to help you develop a link bait idea. Feel free to contact us for help…

Links by Request 7/10- Perhaps the easiest to perform and yet the most discouraging is requesting links. It seems like very few people actually answer and far fewer will link to your site. This is the nature of this particular method however there are reasons why you might be doing even poorer than average. Here are some tips when you do link requesting in the future…

Here is THE method for requesting links:

Tell the webmaster who you are, what you have that is relevant to their audience, where they can find that relevant content, and why it’s relevant to their visitors.

Michael Martinez a writer for SeoMoz noted this as the only way he would accept a link request. I would have to agree, I will not consider a link request unless it offers me or my visitors something of value. I have had webmasters send me requests that I review their tools for them, some are so poorly written I never check out the product cause I feel that if you cannot write a good letter to me than your tool cannot be that great. Write me a great email explaining why it is so wonderful to ME and you have won my interest and I will look at it. Many link requests never entice the webmaster to even click the link…

Lastly on this method I highly recommend you sign your full name in a signature with your email, phone number and address… it makes you more personal. It has been shown to increase response greatly.

So do link requests still work? YES they do if they are done correctly. Above I quoted Michael Martinez. He wrote an article for SeoMoz entitled How to request links from picky sites – read that article and follow his advice. It is very good information and if you do follow it you will find it does work, sometimes very well.

Social Bookmarking 7/10 – While I don’t recommend this as direct method of obtaining links I recommend it as a method of gaining a web presence. It is the fastest way I know of letting people know about your great articles and if they agree on the usefulness of said articles then there is a very good chance you will gain links from them. So Social Bookmarking definitely has its place. I know some webmasters get 100K uniques a month just from social bookmarking sites, if your site is of tremendous value imagine the link bait power… if you develop great link baits with this kind of social bookmarking traffic you can gain 1000s of links.

Forum Posting and Blog Commenting 3/10 – this method has little link value but it does carry with it the great possibility of gaining a valuable reputation and authority in your niche. If you spend your time giving valuable advice(without spamming your links) then eventually people will discover who you are whether it be in a valid sig, via a profile link or just asking you via pm. They will come to respect you for giving your knowledge freely and will link to your site and recommend you as a authority. I rated it has 3/10 for its indirect link building benefits. But its far greater value is in the reputation you will gain.

Directory Submissions 2/10 – The problem with directory submissions is that the directories that are worth submitting to generally have a very high submission contrasted with a very low moderation rate. Which means it could be 6 months before your site is even reviewed let alone added. And those directories that aren’t so careful and who accept most “manual submissions” are worthless. DON’T submit to general directories, you will see no benefits from it. If you must go the directory submission route than find related directories with quality standards and submit your site.

Link Exchange 1/10- Does link exchange still work in Google? Yes it does but it is IMO one of last methods you should use, I don’t attempt it at all. I spend all my time working on developing link baits, requesting links and developing content on my site and I find after that I have no time for link exchanging. The worst thing about link exchanging is that you have to link back to get a link, that means that if you want to acquire 1000 links using the link exchange method than you need to find 1000 places to link back to sites. Thereby greatly devaluing the quality of your site and the value of a link on your site… also most sites that respond to link exchanges aren’t worth getting a link from. In fact I find it easier to get links via link request than asking for a link exchange. Webmasters are more readily willing to link to you for a great resource than to exchange links.

FFA or Free for all Links 0/10 – Free for all links have the same problem as free for all directories, they get filled with spam and then nobodies link is worth anything. Obviously if your resorting to FFA links you either don’t know about the other methods or your site is not good enough for the other methods… in which case if you can get a link on a FFA site then you can be sure a thousand other webmasters with equally worthless sites can do the same. Don’t even bother trying to get links from FFA sites. Don’t chase after links on “links” pages, as I said before, if they are easily acquired by you then it won’t be long before there will be a hundred other useless links on that page. And each time a new link appears on that page your link becomes less and less valuable. I rated this method 0/10 because I do not recommend it at all. Yes some links pages still pass some value but, as time goes on and more and more links appear on that page your link becomes more and more valueless… multiply this by the number of links page links you have and you can see how easily rankings can be lost.

#4. Make a splash… without scaring the fish
This is actually two parts… you want to be seen and recognized as an authority by THE authorities in your niche. This will help you build credence and loyalty. However you can get all the traffic in the world who love your content but they may not link to your site based on other factors… such as your stinking-blinking pop-up ads. This is the age of modern marvels, don’t use 90’s advertising on your site, stick to clean ads or none at all. It is better to build a large repeat visitor base then to make a few bucks now on ads. Ads can also be very counterproductive if your site is in the sales business as you may lose a sale due to an ad on your own site. Many times affiliate links will perform a thousand times better than your regular contextual ads. For instance for each dollar I make on adsense I make $100 in affiliate commissions. So where do you think most of my advertising is focused? Around affiliates… find affiliates who offer a tool, service or product you can recommend honestly and which you have tried and tested. You will sell more effectively because your readers will be able to tell you have a very well rounded understanding of what you are reviewing.

#5. Seo budgeting
It is a very good idea that you create a budget, it will help you keep a systematic approach to your campaign and keep things running smoothly. Budget link buying, whether it be direct paid links or payment for the acquisition of links. Decide whether or not you need to hire a seo/link buyer/consultant and factor this into your spending. Don’t overspend assuming you will soon have the money to pay it off, stay within your budget and you will make progress.

#6. Take advantage of a killer resource
I have seen some wicked link baits in my time and what surprised me about many of them was the lack of strategy around them. They were written/produced effectively as far as gaining popularity but the owner never received any real benefit from them. Make sure you are taking every step to monetize good content and resources on your site. I am not saying you should charge for it as that is generally less than effective. Instead try some affiliates, if you gain trust for integrity in your niche then you will be able to sell more easily. Put your link baits to good use so that the links they gain can acquire you more rankings. What good is a killer link bait which produces 20K links if they all have irrelevant anchor text… sure you’ll have a ton of link juice but a lot of wasted link value.

#7. User behavior and Analytics
While we are now aware that Google tracks user behavior on our websites(when they are able to do so) that is not what I am going to be talking about. Many webmasters fail to watch their own traffic, to analyze it and check user behavior. If you have an article which is gaining huge amounts of traffic but a great portion of that number is bouncing regularly, what is the problem? If you can determine the problem you may have solved the mystery to keeping these visitors and perhaps making some extra sales. That is however easier said than done…

If you want to use what I consider to be one of the best Analytics tool in the industry that would be Google Analytics however I don’t use their service anymore due to their factoring my user behavior statistics into ranking my site – instead I have found what I find to be a very competitive analytics tool which offers what Google Analytics does including some extra features which many of us webmasters demand, they offer all of this at a very reasonable price. Here is my review of Clicky Web 2.0 Analytics. You can use it effectively to track user behavior and find those trouble pages where you are getting large percentages of bounces. Don’t tell me you can’t afford analytics, you can’t afford NOT to have analytics.

Some webmasters can increase their conversions from 20-50% and sometimes as much as 80% just by checking their user behavior issues. It may be something as simple as a dead link or it could be much harder to diagnose but whatever it is due your best to check that problem. Clicky Web 2.0 Analytics also makes it very easy for me to check specific visitors from specific sources and determine how long they stayed at my article page before bouncing… this helps me determine whether the user/s theoretically read the article before exiting or if they exited very soon after entering the page. Why does this matter? Well if the majority of users read your article but still bounce then your article obviously either has done one of three things…

1. It has answered there question so they no longer need your site
2. It has not answered there question hence they are leaving
3. They found what they were looking for but you gave them no reason to stay on the site.

Many times you can keep users on your site you just need to figure out what will entice them to stay and continue through your site, whether your ultimate goal is to have a newsletter subscription or whether you are looking to make a sale… you need to do some research to fix these problems.

Analytics is also very effective in determining what campaigns are performing and which are not. Perhaps a certain link/ad you have purchased is sending a great deal of traffic but is performing very low in conversions. If you can’t find an on-site problem perhaps you should consider removing that link/ad from your campaign next month.

Keyword tracking is also very convenient with tools such as Clicky Web 2.0 Analytics as you can determine which keywords are converting best for you. Which are doing poorly and which are easiest to monetize, this information can be invaluable in future campaigns.

Action tracking can be very effective in determining not only what type of visitors but how many of them perform certain tasks on your site such as begin/finish an order, sign up for a newsletter, click an affiliate link, click ads, visit certain key pages etc. If you have a high percentage beginning an order but a low fulfillment than you should check for errors in your shopping cart system and annoying, useless and time consuming forms that would lose your buyers mid stream. If you have not implemented action tracking I highly suggest you do. It will help you keep your traffic and convert it into money.
One thing Clicky makes easy which Google Analytics did not is the ability to track off-site action tracking. This can be affiliate links, off-site order processing(paypal), off-site newsletter subscription etc… I think you get the picture.

I could go on and explain the benefits of Analytics but I have written several articles previously on this topic, please goto our archives and read these for reference.

This article is already getting pretty long. I struggle with the 10 step approaches, they are easy to create but I feel a lot of the meat is lost in those simple articles. So I tend to elaborate and do extensive descriptions of what I am talking about. I hope you appreciate the time I put into this article cause I can do a simple 10 step approach next time if you don’t

I didn’t list every last thing that doesn’t work, instead I tried to accurately present those steps that DO work. You can find previous articles discussing some of that or you can email us and ask us regarding specific seo questions and we will do our best to get back to you with the answers.

You can email me at randy[at]1st-rankings[dot]com and I will do my best to answer your questions.

Copyright © 2008, 1st-rankings Co in partnership with 1st Search Engine Rankings
This article may NOT be redistributed in any way, shape or form. If you would like to link to the article we would appreciate it but republication in part or in whole is strictly forbidden and 1st Search Engine Rankings will file legal suit due to any illegal reproduction of its content.

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I am getting a search volume of about 18K queries. Keep in mind this is data gained over the past 12 months. Now take a look at the new Google released search volume data. Goto https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter the keyword seo… here is the results I got.

Notice the difference? Google gets 1.2 million search queries for a keyword Yahoo is only getting 20K for… that is absolutely amazing. I have seen this over and over in my rankings on Google and Yahoo… I can get 500 hits for one keyword on Google and Yahoo will send only a couple hits in a whole month.

Now that I have shown you the difference in the search volume between Google and Yahoo let me show you what this tool can really do. Okay lets start off by doing some keyword research for a laptop bag supplier which specializes in leather bags. So that appears to be our main keyword.
So lets enter that into the tool and get some suggestions.

Right away I find two additional keywords worth targeting…

leather computer bags and
leather laptop cases

In june the first keyword received 9,900 queries in Google and it averages 14,800. If you click the “Choose columns to display” dropdown menu and click “show search volume trends” it will show a graph depicting the trends… unfortunately and this is something I hope Google will rectify soon, but currently it only gives a graph bar for the trends when IMO mouseover should give a numeric value for each month depicted in the trends graph… but I can live without that for now.

What I do like about the current situation of the tool is it gives you the previous months search volume and the trend data and also the average data… this helps you to eliminate keywords which might have had a temporary spike in search volume in one month which you will likely not see again for some time. This is very important to me… another thing that I really like about this tool which really should be in ANY keyword tool is the ability to sort results by search volume or keyword in alphabetical order. But using this tool to find high traffic keywords and then comparing trend data will be highly useful to me in the coming months. I know I will be using this tool all the time!

Okay back to our results… I have compiled a list of part of the keyword suggestions google has provided, I did not bother to try and sort them or anything, I pretty much left them raw. And here it is…

Click this link for a larger image:

One thing that is interesting to me is the vast difference in the singular and plural searches for certain keywords. I have heard some seo claim that they are the same but this can be easily disproved by the fact that searches for the different versions produce totally different results(not in all cases obviously but in the case of the leather briefcase/s keyword it is)

I have taken a small list out of what google has presented in suggestions… I am using this only as a representation and not as a keyword research project for laptop bags. Again if you notice the singular and plural forms listed separately note that this is not a mistake and you as an seo should always make sure you rank for both versions.

Of course being a adwords tool it the tool gives some invaluable info on advertiser competition… if your a totally organic man(or woman) than you may feel this does not pertain to you but this can be a good indicator of the organic competition as well… keywords with low ppc competition are likely to have little organic competition as well. So keep this in mind when using this tool.

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE GOOGLE SEARCH VOLUME TOOL!!!
Okay my suggestions would be…
1.) Ability to select keywords and export only those selected keywords to csv or text file instead of having to export the whole list.
2.) The ability to delete keywords from the list which you feel are not related to your target. This could prove invaluable when creating a list of kewords to target as manually deleting later could prove a time waster.
3.) Actual search volume data in the trend graph… this can be guessed at but I always like specific and accurate data.
4.) The ability to form groups of keywords and export them together would also be nice.

These suggestions are not necessarily for Google, they are for anyone who will make a tool which queries the Google Adwords Search Volume tool.

So my overall opinion of this tool is, this is a great step in understanding the search volume of Google and the differences between that data and other engines. This can prove very valuable to you in your keyword researching. Like I said previously, this tool has now become my #2 keyword research tool. Keyword Elite is still my #1 as it is the fastest way for me to build a list of targeted keywords… however I will probably use the two tools side-by-side as they will save me countless hours and tons of money.

If you have any comments on this tool please comment. Feel free to email questions or comments regarding Keyword Elite as well.

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I am writing this article for I see very few people giving detailed articles on this subject, usually we discuss seo or affiliate management but hardly ever do we include both as an item… affiliate marketing is by far my favorite form of marketing, I prefer it over any other form of advertising or marketing however, sadly many do it all wrong. Many affiliate marketers do one of two things, they advertise using PPC or else they tend to use grey hat spam techniques because their site isn’t rich enough in itselft to achieve “success” any other way. In this article I am going to present the third and in my mind most successful method of affiliate marketing and one which very few affiliate marketers ever truly reach.

The first thing you need to learn when beginning affiliate seo in any area or niche is: always create your site and content with the user in mind, forget the affiliate programs and forget the search engines… design and cater to the user, think like the user… then and only then will you be able to truly become successful and conquer the search engines for your niche…

That may sound like an oxi-moron… – “forget about the affiliate programs” – but believe me it isn’t. Many new affiliate marketers go through affiliate promotional sites such as ClickBank or CJ looking for the highest payout programs. They select the ones with the highest commissions even if they know very little to nothing about the tool/service or product they are promoting… this is one of the downfalls of many affiliate marketers. Why? Because while you will be able to sell nearly anything to some people you will lose a large portion of people who will see right through your gimpy marketing ploys, many people can tell when a site is promoting a product/service based on their knowledge and experience or when they are promoting a product or service they know nothing about. This detracts greatly from your conversions… “but don’t black hat guys do this and make a killing?” Yes many black hat guys do, they setup sites and promote products they probably never even heard of or at best know very little about, and many of them make tons of money… however nothing near what they could make if they took this white hate approach, believe me its true.

Don’t promote affiliate links, promote the subject – When I am looking for a specific type of product or service I will at times find an affiliate site and whether I stay or whether I go through their system and buy that product or service depends greatly on how well they present themselves, what claims they make and if and how they attempt to back up those claims, the profossionalism of the site and what the actual webmaster knows about the product/service and the topic in general. For instance I was looking for some software a while back, I ended up going through someones affiliate url because the guy wasn’t promoting an affiliate link he was promoting a product from experience and promoting it based on his knowledge of the subject. He was no amatuer and I could tell right off that he knew not only the product but he also knew the subject and was an expert of his niche and that is why I bought the product, the only reason I bought it and the only reason why he got the commission. So the difference between promoting a product and promoting a affiliate link is whether or not you know your stuff. This probably seems elementary to you but it is a step in a process which will bring you success… fail this area and you will lose a huge portion of conversions you could have easily made.

Perhaps the most successful ploy in this area is not just convincing the user of their need for a specific service or product but getting them excited and interested in the subject and niche as a whole… you may get visitors who are semi-interested or who think they may be interested in buying a product but they may need some nudging and some encouragement. This kind of coincides with step #4 which we will discuss later in this article but more importantly here is the aspect of creating an interest in the area you are promoting and then it will be easier to create such an interest in the actual product your promoting. Do you want to convert a few sales or do you want success? I am sorry that was a dumb question wasn’t it

I will tell you the secret to the success of a good affiliate marketer and how they can convert so well… it is very simple, they place themselves in the position of the user, they tend to promote services and products which they can honestly recommend and which they are familiar with and then they convince the user of their need of that product or service, whatever it may be. This last part of the equation is very important, you can provide information but unless you convince the user that they need what you are promoting you will not have as high conversions as you could have.

So lets take a look at the steps to affiliate success… these are the steps I use and I can guarantee they will make you successful if you follow them faithfuly.

1.) Find your niche… – many webmasters have their hands in so many cookie jars they are not truly successful in any of them. Sometimes and I would venture to say nearly all the time those who focus on one niche will become the most successful. There are many advantages to such a deployment of your resources and time. Find what your good at and what you know and begin there.

2.) Place yourself in the position of the user… if you were the user would you be sold? Many times even affiliaters(sounds like a good work to me ) who make alot of money, once they take this step find their conversions rising 10-75% – that is amazing!

3.) Promote tools, services and products which you are familiar with, which you use or would use(if you needed what you were trying to sell) and which you can honestly recommend based on your knowledge and experience with the site and service and the subject matter.

4.) Convince the user he or she needs what you are promoting, convince them that the product or service you are promoting is much better than any other service on the web… show them why they need it.
Before you can convince them of their need of the product or service it is recommended that you excite their interest in the overall subject matter… once you get them excited in the topic at large you can easily sell them on an actual product.

5.) Make it easy to buy on impulse… – many people now days buy on impulse, they see something they think they want and they buy it. Make it easy for this group of people to buy on their impulse. Make things simple, concise and easy to navigate. Get straight to the point in your articles and reviews, don’t waste 20 hours going nowheres.

6.) Stay away from alternative forms of advertising – One thing I find so counter productive is using multiple forms of advertising on top of affiliate marketing… many times webmasters will promote a product and then add adsense or other advertisements on the page which not only cluttersthe page,  but can present a less-than-professional atmosphere and will also deter the visitor from completing your goal: converting into a sale. I would rather lose 50 potential clicks by removing the adsense and have one of those 50 convert into a affiliate sale then to possibly lose an affiliate sale cause the advertisment was more appealing than the content of my site.

7.) Create a professional atmosphere… – not only should your site be clean, neat, tidy and easy to navigate but it should also appear authoritative, resourceful and less like a traditional affiliate site. There are some affiliate marketers who believe that webmasters should not do anything to make the affiliate link look any less than well… an affiliate link. I disagree, while I am honest and straight-forward I believe webmasters should do their best to hide the fact that they are promoting a service or product for which they will get a commission. I will explain more later.

8.) Learn your trade, become an authority in your niche… – I cannot possibly overstress the importance of knowing your niche, knowing your product and gaining a reputation for it. It can take time but isn’t rocket science… one of the easiest forms is by frequenting forums, blogs and networking sites related to your interest. Answer questions, become known for good quality information and people will not only begin to visit your site via your sig but they will also tell others…

9. Analytical research and implementation – Analytical data is so important and can tell you why a user is bouncing, what pages/affiliates are performing best and where your weak points are. Below I will go into a little more detail and make some recomendations on this area.

You may have noticed these steps are not strictly in order… however you should get the general idea. Many of these steps will need to be done many times over and will take time to master.

Okay I did this  a bit backwards, I gave the overall steps first and then go into the detailed analysis of each… please bear with me.

#1 Finding your niche
This is a step that will vary greatly depending on the webmaster and situation… of course your the only one who really knows what your good at, what you love to do and where your knowledge lies. Perhaps you are not very experienced in a certain niche but you are very interested in it. Spend some time acquainting yourself with the different aspects of the niche, frequent forums and blogs related to it and learn as much as you can. Don’t try and become an “expert” overnight, take time and learn. You will eventually build your experience to a point where you can give back in the same way you have learned… this is where the reputation begins.

You might want to do some number punching on a specific niche which is perhaps less competitive and yet is well trafficked. I find a tool called Keyword Elite very very helpful in such research, you would be surprised how many true gold mines I have found using this tool. Its high point is that it eliminates all that manual work and can compile large lists of keywords in minutes. If your like me you don’t have alot of time to spend in manual digging so a tool like this is essential.

Lastly stick with your niche… don’t give up if it takes a while to build up traffic and start making decent conversions, given time and adhering to the above steps you will get there if you only stick with it.
It can also be good to partner with a friend or fellow-enthusiast, you will be able to get twice as much done and you will be able to come up with more innovative strategies. But make sure you get the revenue agreement figured out first or it can lead to issues later on.
#2 – Place yourself in the shoes of your users
There is a saying that goes something like “don’t judge a man till you have walked a mile in his shoes” – you need to turn this into action, you need to mentally place yourself in the position of the user. Would you as the shopper be sold on the product or service or would you be disgusted with the setup, the annoying ads/pop-ups and the inconsistency of the content? Once you can relate to the users you have broken down one of the most challenging walls because once you know why or what makes a user leave out of dis-interest there is a very good chance you can fix or atleast improve the situation greatly.

Many webmasters have a hard time understanding how to take this step and turn it into action… its almost illusive to them. That is why it is really helpful if you are a native to your niche, it is really helpful if you are well-versed and very experienced in your niche. If so, you can use your personal experiences and can also take a look at competing sites and find out what annoys or dis-interests you and use this to better improve your site.

A less effective, but a method none the less is to have a site feedback link prominently placed on each page of the site which gives the user an opportunity to voice their opinion about your site and why they are leaving. Some sites implement a pop-up which appears when the user attempts to leave the site, while most dis-interested users will immediately click out there are a select few who may give their opinion and it could be their voices which echo the reasoning behind the mass departure of those who never responded. How you word your pop-up or site feedback page and the layout of each will determine greatly whether or not they will bring in feedback and be successful. Stick to short, straight-to-the-point forms which first and fore-most apologize for not being perfect and then ask politely for the valuable input of the user so as to improve the site. Simplicity wins everytime…

I believe webmasters should use any avenues at their disposal. I think the reason why some webmasters fail is that they are too narrow minded and insist on strictly adhering to one or two avenues when they could see far greater success if they only broadened their scope. Since the user is already leaving your site I don’t see how a pop-up is really going to effect anything however I would set it up so that returning users do not see the pop-up again… this is VERY annoying.

Lastly there is a tool I really love which will be so very beneficial in attempting to place yourself in the shoes of your users… that tool is called CrazyEgg – this kind of fits in with my Analytical step but it can be useful in determining what users are doing on your site which can give you an idea of why your visitors may be leaving.

If your still wondering “how can you place yourself in the position of the user?” Then maybe an illustration will help… This can be a hard thing to learn if you aren’t personally interested in the niche you are competing for. For instance if I were to start a affiliate site promoting cosmetics I would be lost, I wouldn’t know what to promote and I wouldn’t know how to sell them cause I don’t use them… however if I started an affiliate site for guitars or guitar accessories I would be at home… I play guitar and I love guitar. I have a good understanding of what styles are popular now days, what types of guitars would sell well in certain situations and what the better brands are. I can use this information to start a successful guitar site for my users will begin to see that I am not just a webmaster looking for a affiliate payout but I am actually infatuated with the subject I am promoting. Does that make sense?

Being an avid guitarist I find myself browsing the web often for music… if I were starting a site how could I use this potential demand and twist it into a means of converting more sales and actually gaining traffic to convert into sales? Because I may someday start a guitar site I won’t publicly share all my linkbait ideas and thoughts on this, but I am just trying to give you some ideas from which you can spin your own.
#3 Become familiar with what you are promoting
Know the pros and cons to the product you are promoting, understand what it can and cannot do and understand how it can benefit the group of people you are targeting. Use all of this information to promote the product. It may surprise you but a few negative comments can actually increase conversions. There is a saying which goes “if it appears too good to be true it probably is” – well many have that mind set and if you present an unbiased picture of why a user should buy the product as well as some of its minor faults it gives the user the idea you are being honest with them.

For instance you might list all the positives – you always list the positives and pros first – and then list a minor fault which is not likely to be that important to the user, a fault which all or most competitors share. You need to be very careful here as you can hinder your sale by saying the wrong thing but honesty truly is the best policy and you can use it to turn over more conversions if you do it right.

#4 Sell the user on your product, convince them why they need it
Of course as you probably already know this is a very very important step, if the user isn’t convinced they need the product your conversions will be low. Again there are no magic words to say that will convince the user of their absolute need for what you are offering. If however, you have followed step #3 you will be so acquainted with what you are trying to sell that you will know the points that will sell your product, what will make it stand out and what to say to convince the user to buy it. That is why it is so important to follow all these steps, many are dependant on each other for true success.

#5 – Ease of purchase, don’t let them think
I am just kidding but it is advantageous for you as a webmaster to give the user the easiest trip through your site and through the purchase, get them there easily and don’t throw rocks in the road. While most affiliate programs do not give you access to the actual checkout, you can control most of what goes on uptill this point. Take advantage of that, don’t make them wade through your 50 wonderful offers, sign-up for 25 newsletters and 10 recommendations on other software to buy. Cut out the nonesense and let them get to what they really want, you can always bug them after the purchase

#6 – Cut the extensive supply of advertising
In this day and age we are bombarded with advertising from tv, radio, internet, billboards and everywhere else imaginable. The last thing most of us want to see is more advertising, it has gotten so bad that certain forms of ads have declined greatly in conversion because the mass majority of people are becoming blinded to them. But not only is it a turn-off but it can also detract from your affiliate conversions and many times you will be losing sales from $10-200 each time a user picks a advertisement over converting into a affiliate sale.

So if at all possible keep strictly to affiliate and I also recommend you use links and informative reviews over banners and small snippets of text. The former tends to convert better from my experience. An article recommending a product or service converts quite well while banners for the same product and service can perform very poorly on the same site. Bombarding your users from all sides will lessen the effectiveness of ALL your revenue streams.

#7 – Create a professional, simple and inviting environment
I find myself more likely to buy from a site with a professional yet simple atmosphere over a site which looks like it was started by a 10 year old on a weekend. This step builds upon the last step in that we are presenting the user with convenience, an inviting and professional atmosphere conduisive to converting sales.

Keep things simple, learn from the Google example. People love simplicity and are attracted to it, don’t throw the user through hoops or present a situation where the information the user is looking for is always a “step a way” – you know what I mean, you have been in a situation like that before and you know how irritating it can be.

Provide the user with unique articles and content, don’t copy other peoples work, re-wording it so the search engines supposedly will rank it. Write your own stuff, bring innovation to your niche, build a tool or two. Whatever will enhance the user experience should be done… many times implementation of free tools will result in linkbaits which will help you achieve search engine success faster.

Back to that point I made on hiding the fact that you are affiliated… many people have given affiliate sites a bad name, there are also FireFox plugins and other software embedded on computers which converts affiliate links such as ClickBank urls from your aff id to theirs so you never get the commission. Not only for those reasons, but you also want to get the user to the affiliate page which will be much harder to do if you present yourself openly as an affiliate.  I use 301 redirects, I create a page and then use a 301 redirect to redirect it to the affiliate url. That way nobody can steal my commission, I won’t lose a conversion because a biased user doesn’t like affiliate urls and I get the user to my destination goal.

#8 – Become an authority in your niche
Webmasters are always quoting and linking to authority sites, so it is obviously something any webmaster would want to attain to. It is not however as hard as one might think to actually become an authority. It will take time to build trust and reputation and become that authority but it will indeed come if you are patient.

You should spend time at forums, answering questions, getting acquinted with prominent members and authorities in your niche. Don’t spam your url, if you are allowed add it to your signature but don’t try and promote yourself on these forums.

Spend time at the authority blogs and sites in your niche, comment on their posts, try and add new insight and think out of the box when commenting and replieing. Remember your comments will either build your reputation or disgrace it.

Social bookmarking sites are popular now days, they can be a useful means of quickly getting the word out about your site or a new feature/tool you have implemented. Don’t overuse or abuse them however.

The major thing is that you are authority material… I know a guy who doesn’t know the first thing about seo, affiliate marketing or building links. I would rank him as a newbie in those areas yet he runs a successful poker blog, he is competing in a very very competitive field without any experience in seo or marketing… how can he be successful? He has learned this step, he is an authority and people have come to respect him for it. BTW it is a hobby for him, he doesn’t have any ads or affiliates… he is only successful because it is a hobby, had he instead started as many webmasters do, with the intention of making big bucks with affiliate commissions, I doubt he would have been successful.

If you believe you have the experience and knowledge it takes to become an authority perhaps all you need is the spotlight turned on you for a short while to expose that to the world. To do this you could implement a linkbait, do or say something which is out of the norm(it is best if you can back it up) or in other words be contrary to popular opinion – this of course can go both ways – or you might discover some new earth-shaking revelation. Basically anything which gets you under the spotlight, you can use to benefit your acclaim to become an authority. You can do many things to get your name out there but once your under the spotlight, many times you need to make the best of it right away or you will lose that chance.  Also agreeing with everyone is not always the best way to become an authority, most people like independent thinkers and ideas. You should agree on proven facts but where there is doubt, try and find the truth and present it, don’t be afraid to do that.

#9 Analytical research and its effects
This is a step which you will be repeating over and over as your site grows. You will not only want to build more traffic but you will want to ensure that your current traffic is at high conversion rates and if not you of course need to answer the question, why not. Using analytical data you can determine where your weak points are, what your doing right and where you can improve. You can figure out what affiliates are performing the best and which get the highest traffic but lowest conversions… maybe your copy needs tweaking. All of this data is important and a affiliate marketer who fails to use it will never truly fulfill his or her true potential.

I have used many tools through the years. I really liked Google Analytics, it had tons of useful information but after we completed the Bounce Facter Research I quit using it. I wasn’t sure the pros out-weighed the cons so I stopped using it. I now use AwStats, Clicky Analytics, CrazyEgg, and have tried various other tools. I find that these three along with the raw logs provide me with most of my data I need. If you are willing to brave Google Analytics user behavior factoring I would recommend it, it is a very good tool and 100% free.
But how do I get traffic? How do I start ranking in Google for an Affiliate site?
A good seo will not stick to only one method but will implement multiple methods to gain wider exposure. Having said that there are methods which you will find work best for you or for certain types of sites. You should always focus most of your attention on those as they will bring the highest return on investment. My favorite are linkbaits… they tend to be the highest return on investment of any seo methods I have ever tried, they also tend to continue to attract links long after the initial launch which means it is a one-time fee with long-term benefits which pay for themselves ten times over.Many people however come to me because they can’t brainstorm any linkbait ideas for their sites and/or are unsure of implementation of those linkbaits once they are done. [plug: if you send an email to randy[at]1st-rankings[dot]com and ask for pricing and details on link bait development I will see what we can’t brainstorm for you.]
This is a very very very important aspect of linkbaiting. A poorly planned out linkbait may only work to half or sometimes less than 10% of its potential… that means if you do it wrong you could potentially be losing 90% of the effectiveness of your tool/service. Thats a huge loss! Make sure you think out each feature, each aspect of the tool, get feedback from the community, get beta-testers to test your tool and make suggestions. Do all in your power to implement their suggestions(unless they are outrageous). You will find by consulting the people you will be selling to that you can create a tool tailored to their exact needs, it will be truly effective and will be a linkbait which will continue to grow for years to come.

I am not going to mention the site or the keyword in this article but you can use the same principle to create your own linkbaits… there was a guy who created a site, from all outward appearances it was not very much different from most of his competitors… but in fact it was different. While his competitors were paying per month for links and seo(some were paying from 100-500K for seo) this guy was putting his money into a linkbait, a linkbait which just over a year later landed him at the top of a multi-million dollar industry term. If this sounds like a fairy-tale it isn’t, this is a true story and believe it or not it happens more than you may think and a year may be all a well planned affiliate marketer will need to conquer the industrys most competitive terms.

What made his site stand out, how did he acquire such a heavily targeted and heavily competed industry? It is quite simple really, everyone was competing in the same way… few were using inovative seo, most of them were just paying for links. This guy however was building a linkbait, it was a free service, a service which literally hundreds of his competitors had already tried… “Hold it… I thought you said it was an innovative idea” – I did indeed. Remember this, an idea can either be inovative in and of itself or it can be implemented in an inovative way. There are many people who have used the idea of webmasters before them and yet they alone were successful… it is not only the idea but how its implemented and how it is promoted that will truly create success. History bears record to this.
I truly hope I did not overwhelm you with information but did indeed provide you with some steps to take to better your affiliate seo and have helped place you on the road to success.I am more than willing to help you if you have questions… while I am very busy and my fees are generally not cheap I will do my best to setup a consultation, help you build a linkbait or whatever you may need.

Because of time constraints I could not write this all in one sitting so it is logical to assume I forgot something… if that is the case feel free to drop me a comment and let me know when I was sleeping and i’ll do my best to update it
I also wrote this article with the hope to rekindle a lost interest in webmasters, help them get back to affiliate marketing and give them steps to achieve success. My goal was not to map out a complete system but to give them the steps by which they can create goals, goals which they will over time complete all of.  I have no doubt theses steps will work for anyone in any niche… I hope they have been helpful to you.

Again drop a line or comment and let me know what you thought of the article… also drop me a line requesting a certain topic if you’d like.

Copyright © 2008, 1st-rankings Co.
This article may NOT be redistributed in any way, shape or form. If you would like to link to the article we would appreciate it.

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Okay first of all lets step back and take a look a the Google pagerank(toolbar that is). What google thought would be a fun little toy for webmasters has turned into a nightmare for them and their algo. What is the problem? Link buying and selling has become very popular, forums like SitePoint and DigitalPoint help flame the fire and promote the buying and selling of links. Many times these links are too hard for Google to distinguish. In other words Google sees them as natural and cannot therefore penalize them. Of course Google wants to keep their search engine as natural as possible and paid links tend to go against that process.

Google has made posts on their blog regarding this, they have had Matt Cutts write articles about paid links and get the neighborhood watch started – a system where webmasters tattle on other webmasters – and attempt to convince webmasters that Google will catch you if you buy/sell links. Matt has written quite convincing articles on this but as always I question it. Google has for the past year and a half(specifically) been working at undermining the sale of links unless nofollow tags are used. But they have not been very successful… it is like gun laws, in the end the bad guys have their guns or in this case their paid links.

Sorry for going through all this as I know you want me to spit it out, you want the scoop on the pagerank flux. I had to lay the groundwork to explain why Google would go to these lengths, then I can explain what is going on. Please bear with me….

Google has been for a while now attempted to knock the wind out of the paid links kick. So far their success is really not something worthy of writing home about. So they have have finally done what I have been predicting was coming for a long time now. Google has discounted the PR to a greater extent then ever before in the hopes that it will knock a blow to paid links.

During this PageRank(toolbar) update we have seen reputed sites such as ProBlogger and CopyBlogger go from a PR 6/7 to a PR4. This is a big drop and it has gotten a buzz to say the least. We have seen many high PR sites drop to lower PRs yet none of these report seeing traffic loss or loss in rankings which proves this has been no mass penalization against paid link buyers/sellers only. This PR update is hitting all sites in the hopes that webmasters will get sca

Some people are correlating this PR update with recent changes in rankings. This cannot be… if they were related then ProBlogger would have lost TONS of traffic and rankings which he didn’t and so far nobody has… this PR update was an attempt at discrediting the PR so as to flush paid link madness out of the system. There have been serps updates recently as always seems to be the case around this time of the year. 1st SER lost a PR point – is now 3 even though it was predicted to be 6 and with all the new links it has gotten it should be – even though I have gained a good deal of positions. This update has been very good for me so obviously can not be correlated with the PR update.

For those of you chasing PR knock it off. You will waste valuable time you could be spending on gaining rankings. As always this update proves the utter worthlessness and and uselessness of chasing pr and its involvement in the serps.
Well these are my views on the recent PR update and they seem to add up for me. If you got comments feel free to drop them.

Before I published this article I noticed Matt Cutts post… he appears to be insinuating this was a penalization against those selling/buying links and that you should be careful lest you are hit too… this is baloney. Many of the sites which were hit don’t participate in buying or selling of links and there is no way they would be associated with such. Matt Cutts/Google is attempting to intimidate webmasters into quitting buying and selling of links.
Some seo are suggesting that this update was against blog-link farms as one blogger called it. I have one problem with this… if this is indeed the case then wouldn’t it be logical to see some sites lose more PR than others based on how many of their links are actually of this genre? It would seem so however of all the sites I analyzed it appears that it is a consistent drop as though it has nothing to do with the backlinks and I wholly believe just that. This PR update has nothing to do with backlinks… I am sure some of you will disagree and some of you will call me a nut and a liar and that is fine. I say what I believe and I say what I see. This is what I see. If someone can prove me wrong I am ready to hear it.

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Most of us who have been on the internet any length of time are aware of the main types of link building. I will list them and then go into each one and explain why or why not you should use each.

• Reciprocal links – You get a link and I get a link and… unfortunately its not as good as it sounds.
• One-way links – Definitely the best link ever, Google sees one-way links as very valuable and there is no way they will ever have negative effects on your serps as reciprocal links can.
• Link Baiting – The idea or implementation of a tool, service or content in such a way that it attracts links without the asking. By far the very best link building idea, it sure beats buying links and it is all natural… Hey even Matt Cutts is for it so it must be good
• Three way link exchanging – IMO a risky link building idea and many times implemented in such a way that it is not all that hard for Google to figure out. It does work though and is better than link exchanging if done right…
• Paid links – This is for webmasters who have fat wallets, they can just dish out money and get high PR, high authority links without doing any actual work or can they?
• Spamming – This is probably the most common and frustrating link building method… the use of forms, forums, blogs and other public community sites to spam a link hoping that the site either automatically accepts all submissions or has a poor moderating team who will fail to catch and moderate the spam.
• Link requesting – This method has gotten alot of flak and even though it has a very small success rate it is still IMO a very good method to use which I shall explain later on in this article.

Reciprocal linking is a very common method of link building even though Google has greatly devalued it. Is there a place for reciprocal linking? Most certainly is, when you link to a site because you love what it offers and want to share it with your visitors and the other site does the same for you without either of you knowing… I can hear webmasters laugh and question “Haha and you really think Google knows whether or not it was a planned reciprocation or not” – I most certainly do… when was the last time you found a site you liked and decided to link to them… okay you found your deepest links page and stuck their link on the very bottom correct? Somehow I am doubting that. lol – I take it you got the point

When webmasters like a site they tend to write articles about the site and link from prominent places on their site.. So yes I think google can tell when a link exchange is worth something by determining the location and prominence of a link on a site, relevance and how many link exchanges are taking place. The days of link exchanging with anybody are over… that will do little for you now days and can even harm you.

I am not saying that link exchanging via links pages is totally valueless, I am saying it is getting very close to that and too risky for me. Sites which create literally 100s of pages of links for the sole purpose of increasing their rankings are going to find it to be worthless. A links page which is linked to from your home page and does not appear to be orphaned and which links to only a few and quality and related sites will still be valuable to you however very few such sites exist who are willing to reciprocate. Most sites worth reciprocating with are not interested…

IMO the days of reciprocal link building are dead and gone and unless you are playing Google as a game and are not interested in becoming a success I highly suggest you move on to greener pastures.

One-way links – Now that is a broad topic. It would include many of the aforementioned methods of link building such as link requesting, paid links, link baiting and others. I just want you to realize the importance that one-way links have on a sites success… without them you will get nowhere. If you do not have atleast a few good quality, related, authority one-way links I highly doubt we will see you too much at the top of Google. Google values such links very highly, unlike MSN and Yahoo which seem to like large quantities of links whether quality or not.

Link Baiting – Ahh my favorite link building method and in my mind the far easiest(takes mental power ). I figure it this way, you need to be offering something worthwhile to convert the traffic you currently have into sales correct? Well if you need worthwhile content/tools/services to convert traffic then why not put extra time and effort into them to turn them into linkbaits? Kill two birds with one stone scenario.

If you do not have content/tools/services which are in high demand than you will likely lose alot of your traffic so gaining traffic should not be your objective. Your objective should be to convert the traffic you already got and bring in targeted traffic. The best way I know to do this is link baits… I have never seen it fail. A good linkbait converts extremely well.

Most people agree with me on this and they want to create a link bait but fail to do so because of one or two obstacles. Some webmasters are afraid it will not work, others are afraid it will cost too much money and the cost will outweigh the benefit. And then there are those who can’t seem to think up a link bait for the life of them. My suggestion is to first of all analyze the top competitors in your industry, figure out what they have, what they offer, what they want to offer, what their customers/users are saying and last but not least find out what they do NOT offer and how you could improve on their neglect.

Use this information against them… do they offer tools which are popular? Hire some people to go through the tool and find problems, find ways to improve on their idea and create your own tool with marked improvements. Be sure to go through forums, blogs and authority sites looking for professionals who will give you tips and ideas to use as linkbaits. Many will and reward them later with a free beta of the tool. Ask your users what they would like to see on your site, what does your site lack to make it the best site in the industry? Get feedback and then implement the suggestions if and when possible.

The same principles can be used for articles and content. Go through your competitors content and look at their articles, find flaws, find issues that they do not fully explain, find questions they don’t answer, find problems which are not answered but for which an answer is in high demand. Make use of their faults and write better articles…
On this note I should mention copy law and tell you to start articles and tools from scratch… don’t copy competitors word-for-word or you will likely get in a law suit and be in a bit of trouble

Be unique, appeal to the masses and you got yourself a wicked lot of magnetic power. If you need suggestions on a linkbait try our open Seo Experts Forum

Three-way link exchanges – This method does work and if done right Google will not be able to figure out very easily however many slip up on this and many three-way link exchanges go foul because they are careless. I think Google is beginning to look for patterns, patterns which will allow them to discount the value of three way links and perhaps penalize webmasters for even using such a method… if you do try it I recommend you watch each link in the exchange… alot of three-way link exchange services are offered by webmaster who use their own domains which in my mind is risky. Once Google finds out that a certain domain is a hot spot for un-natural link building don’t you think that any outbound links will be suspect as well? Don’t you think that domain will be watched closely?

I myself have not gotten into this aspect of things. I have seen sites get penalized badly from using this method and although I think it is quite possible to do it well and not get caught I don’t think it is worth the time involved… I think linkbaiting is much more beneficial and there is no risk involved with link baiting while three-way link exchanging is indeed risky.

One last thing on three-ways. Like most link exchanges three-ways tend to get back-burner link positions, hardly ever do you see three-ways between high authority pages. When such an exchange does occur I would venture to say Google would not have reason to look into it. Think about it, how valuable is a link if it is stuck on a links page among 100s of other links pages? Whether reciprocal linking or three-way linking I think the position your link and your partner’s link is placed will have a great deal of weight in determining whether that link has value or not. For one-way links this does not matter as much, Google still discounts the value of one-ways on such pages but for link exchanges Google can tell that there was nothing natural about it. Atleast that is my theory and so far it seems to play out in how Google works.

Paid links – Paid links are perhaps the easiest and fastest way for a webmaster – with money – to achieve higher positions in the serps. It does however carry risks and is costly… you may pay $5k/month for a number of links that a 10K linkbait would have gotten 100 times over… again we need to bring the cost / benefit ratio in to the equation. Is it really worth it? To the pros outweigh the cons? I honestly don’t think so. Paid links can be discovered by Google and are discounted to nothing…. also sites found to be selling paid links can and have been penalized and/or banned by Google. I also have reason to believe that sites whose primary source of link value is found in paid links have and are being penalized.

Having said that Google “can” find paid links I must admit they cannot find everything and alot of paid links have not and cannot be discovered by Google. Think about it… how would Google know a link was paid for? Lets see, perhaps if words such as “paid”, “sponsored”, “advertise here”, “buy a link” etc appear next to a given set of links, perhaps Google can use this info against them. But lets say that such indicators do not appear, lets say to all apparent purposes the link in question appears to be natural. How would Google know?

There is only one other way I have come up with that Google can and does find paid links… that is to go through sites that offer link brokerage services. Many of these sites can be viewed by anybody and anybody can see what links are being sold. I would think this would entail alot of manual work but there has been evidence to support this theory… not enough to prove it but enough to make it worth looking into.

There is of course those who report sites for selling/buying links and Google does follow up on these reports and does penalize sites submitted via such reports so the neighborhood watch has been enacted and it may be your neighbor who causes your paid links to be found out by Google… that is the only way I can see Google getting really good at detecting paid links but again what appears to be a natural link will likely be treated as such.

Spamming for links – It used to be quite easy to spam for links… it seems a few years back forums did have link value and until an seo contest destroyed any value forums did have, they were a great source of back links for many. Many people either manually spammed or had a automated program which did it for them. Unfortunately people still do it and even though there is much more spam protection for blogs and forums it does still get through and many links get posted un-moderated for what little good it does the spammer.

Most blogs now use nofollow on all blog comments so there is no value coming from them… many forums also implement this but even those which don’t will pass very little value as Google has pretty much banished them from passing value. So what good does link spamming do? Haha none actually… there are unsecured forms where links can be spammed and they will be posted without moderation and they will get some value… however because of the ease at which the form can be spammed it is likely that thousands of links will pile up pretty fast and that first link will be valueless.

This is why many sites notice a rise in rankings from spamming but over time they drop to nothing. This of course goes for link exchanging and three-ways as well… as more links pile up the value of your link goes down and down.

Link requesting – Still a method but many go about this so wrong… they write a letter and send it to 500 webmasters… some of them are smart enough to use the webmasters name on each letter but this has gotten a little old since there is software which is really good at finding that info and sending automated emails to 100s of webmasters within seconds.

Link requesting has indeed gotten a bad name, now most link request emails end up in the dump before they are even read. The only people who respond to these, are webmasters of the same caliber who also have a site which does not seem to be able to get links from any other method. Such people will respond.
But there is a method of link requesting that works and it works really well… I know I am pressing linkbait heavily in this article but I have to, it is the ULTIMATE LINK BUILDING METHOD and if my article is to be accurate I must push it. The best form of link requesting is when you have something to offer the requestee, when you have something worth looking at and when the email is personalized to each webmaster it is sent to. NO I do NOT mean changing a few words to make it sound “personalized”. I mean actually personalizing the email… also flattery works well. Flatter the webmaster, mention specific articles that have taught you so much. Then appeal to his pride by asking him/her to review a tool, service, product or content you have recently created and explain that you want a professionals opinion and that is why you came to him/her.
I would post what I use but I don’t use a template, I find the webmasters email and I start out writing by what I know of that webmaster. So each email I send out takes time and is personalized and believe it or not when the webmaster gets it the email actually looks real, like it wasn’t typed out by a robot and it actually makes the webmaster feel like he is worth something. That is the only way I have found to get through and actually get something out of a link request.

Now that we got an understanding about the major types of link building maybe I should give some tips on actually doing the link building part.

Act natural – What value do you think a link has if it looks un-natural? Very little in my mind… when link building keep this in mind, if the link looks un-natural maybe it is not worth paying for or reciprocating for. But keep in mind, when able to get one-way links you should not be afraid of penalization from having an un-natural link. As long as the page is indexed in google and there are not hundreds of links on that page you will get some value from that link.

Article publication – I did not go into article publication above so let me briefly give some pros – that may be hard – and cons of this method. The biggest downfall to article link building is probably the fact that the page your article is on will likely only have one or two links and those will be from the site it is placed on which means until or should I say if that page becomes more important and gets a few good backlinks the value you get from that link will be very small.

Also posting multiple articles to one site is not a good idea, it is a waste of good material(I am of course assuming its good material ) which could either be published on your site or even on other sites which would be much more beneficial in the long run.

My suggestion is to publish content on sites not article directories, find a site which wants a writer(some pay and give a link) and write some good stuff for them. This method usually is worth a great deal more and alot of times the value only increases as more people link to your article and as the site gets bigger.

Awards and medals – Gain an award and you will likely pick up links from a number of sites right off and as you feature your award it will also attract links. These awards can be for nearly anything but should be from prominent and respected websites in your niche.

Bad neighborhood links – Try not to affiliate yourself with such sites. Stay away from adult, gambling and related sites unless of course your site is in fact one of them. Even though I doubt Google will penalize a site just because it has links from bad neighborhoods I do think that a large percentage of bad neighborhood links can result in loss of authority and may even have a negative effect on your sites ranking. I think sites which have a few authority links should not have this problem but don’t play with fire… stay away from them as they will not be of benefit to you.

Create your own directories for links – Some webmasters will create a directory and use this directory to build links to their other sites. They do this by requiring either a reciprocal link… the user must link to Site B for a link on Site A(being the directory)

For this method to work the directory owner should host the directory site and the site being linked to on different hosts so that google can not associate them as being affiliated. Also you will need to build the directory upto a PR3+ to really get anybody interested in submitting. This method does work and can help you but again you have the same issue we discussed earlier… most links gained by this method are stuck on large links pages so you get very little if any link value. My suggestion to combat this is to moderate all link submissions before accepting… make sure it is worth doing.

Different C-class IPs is a good idea – Try not to acquire tons of links from sites in the same C-class… such as buying bulk links from one webmaster who may own multiple sites under the same C-class. Try to get links from unique sites, different C-class ips.

Directory submissions – Submit your site to Dmoz and Yahoo directory – even though it is $300 – but except for that I would not pay for any other directory submissions. If you can get them for free than that is fine although again I must reiterate that links which can be obtained so easily will drop in value quite fast and there will be no long-term benefits there. If you find high PR directory pages in a niche-specific directory then it may be worthwhile to pay a few bucks for a link there but I would be mighty careful as most directories are not worth paying for or even submitting to for free. Google is killing directories now days so I would steer clear of them.

Before submitting I recommend you do a lookup for both the directory domain and the page your link will/would appear on and make sure it is indexed… you can do this by searching for site:directorydomain.com – Google is breaking down on directories now days and I think the day is here that directories will become as valueless as forums.

Edu/Gov juice – Get links from .Edu/.Gov pages, many say they are not special except that they tend to have larger amounts of backlink power however I think it also has to do with Google giving them more authority. Whatever it is they are very valuable and if you can get some links from edu/gov sites you should definitely go for it.

Find high PR link partners and pay them off – I love this one and it works quite well… I am sharing it because most people won’t use it because they are afraid of wasting their money. But honestly it is one of the easiest methods to get links.
You have two options.

1. Manually go through Google or Yahoo and do searches to find high PR links pages. You can do this by searching for terms such as “inurl:links.html keyword”(substitute html for php/asp as well and drop the ’s’), “keyword add link” etc.

2. Use a tool like Seo Elite which finds a ton of pages very fast, gives PR data, IP info, contact info and other useful tidbits. It allows you to look for pages with a set min PR or Alexa(if you want traffic) – I use this quite often and it sure beats manually looking up them. It finds the sites but I wouldn’t use it to send emails. I would do all that manually.

Once you find the sites – either method will work although the second is definitely worth buying – find the contact information and send them an email offering the webmaster from $2-30 for their link depending on PR and how many other links are on the page. Most sites who will accept link exchanges will accept $2-5 for a link instead and these links tend to be very valuable even though they are indeed on links pages. But make sure you do not do this on sites who accept free submissions without link exchange as they will be spammed and your link will be worthless.

You can also use this method for high authority sites by doing searches on Google using “site:authoritydomain.com keyword” to find pages related to your site. Once found contact the webmaster offering a sum of money to have a link on that specific page. For the first method a one-time price will do. For this method sometimes the webmasters want a monthly fee so you will have to determine if it is worth it. This is the best way to buy links though as Google can’t figure it out. Sorry Matt!

Getting away with paid links – Don’t pay for links on sites which use words such as “advertisement”, “paid links”, “sponsor”, “sponsor us for a link”. Such as words could be used to discount the value of links on the page and you may not get any search engine value out of the deal.

Interlinking your sites – I recommend you do so with caution. I also recommend you host each of your sites on a different C-class ip. Interlink related sites but try not to go overboard by interlinking all your sites, this can cause you problems you do not want to deal with.

Internal pages – Obtain links to internal pages over your home page… Google can determine patterns if the mass majority of your links are to your home page since most of the time the demanded material is not on the home page of the site but is on one of the internal pages. So vary your links going to internal pages as well as home page so that there are no patterns and the link love is spread across your whole site. I think this also helps establish value.

Language specific links – I find the most important factor in ranking in a language specific search engines is links from sites which are in that language. If you want to rank a page on a spanish engine you should get a few spanish links to that page. Keep in mind I do not recommend mixing sites… want to broadcast to the spanish population? Start a separate sub-domain(better yet another domain under their ext) and translate all your work for them.

Link life – This is a factor I speculate Google will use more and more to establish patterns in finding paid links. What is the average life-span of a link to your site? Do links to your site tend to last only a month or so? Do the majority of your links get recycled after a certain amount of time? Could this tell Google your either paying for links or your site is going downhill? Either way I can see only negative effects here. I would be careful about gaining short-term links, I think the long-term results may not be very good.

Natural selection – (Hey think I can rank for Darwin’s theory of evolution? Hmm lets see… ) – Obtain links in as natural a manner as possible. This is not to say that having an un-natural link or two will harm you but a number of authority natural links will establish your sites authority and I believe this is a major part of ranking for high competition keywords.

Pay for a review – Money talks and it is not that hard to find bloggers who will for a small sum blog about your blog/site and of course link to it. If you post on forums such as DigitalPoint and SitePoint you will find many. Again you will need to look at each offer and decide if it is worth accepting or not.

Reciprocal linking – Only reciprocate with related sites and do so with sites which will give you a link on a prominent page or atleast a links page with very few other links and ONLY related links. Google is getting better at this game and links pages containing links to anything are getting discounted more and more and you can indeed be penalized so be very cautious. Also check the site, make sure it is indexed and cached and make sure the page your link will appear on is indexed and cached… keep in mind pages which are dropped will sometimes still appear to have a PR.

Related links – Related links are worth much more than unrelated links and will be much more beneficial to your site authority. A PR3 related link can pass more value and help you more than a PR7 unrelated link. And please do not send me emails with graphs of how the Google PageRank works. I will ignore your rubbish, I have seen this and I know it for a fact. PR does not effect a sites positioning, relation does.

Quality means everything – Where is your link placed? Is it prominent on an authority page or is it stuck on some links page? Quality links placed prominently will be given more value than a link on a higher pr page which is not prominent and which is not an authority.

Vary anchor text – Don’t use the same link text for all link requests, link submissions or link exchanges. Vary them, believe it or not a variety of anchor text will improve your rankings better than if you use the same anchor text for all submissions. A varied link text gives an assumption of a natural state.

Seo myths or realities?

Gaining too many links at one time can cause penalties – This is not true. It can raise flags which can trigger filters such as the deceased(what I believe to be) sandbox filter however these are not penalizations and will not effect the long-term ranking in Google. The idea of this theory is that submitting to 100’s of directories can cause such a penalty… this is quite interesting since directories tend to moderate submissions over a period of 1-90 days so your 100 submissions could turn out to be only 1 every few days or at most a couple a day. I think we can safely say this theory is BUSTED!

Obtaining links from sites unrelated to my niche will harm me – Interesting theory but it ends there… there is no evidence to support this and it is illogical to assume google would penalize any site which had a link from an unrelated source. In fact most sites which are worth anything have many links from unrelated sources so this one is definitely BUSTED!

Reciprocal linking can get me penalized or banned by Google – This appears to be very true… I have seen sites drop like stones and for nothing can they regain their positions. They seem to get stuck around 950 or 31 in Google which appears to be a penalty IMO. Read a forbes article on how a successful jewelry site saw the wrath of Google.
If you start getting some authority links and then submit a reinclusion request they seem to reinstate most. Don’t hold your breath though.

While finishing this article I was looking at what others had wrote about it and I found an interesting article from SearchEngineLand which I found of interest for your guys so here it is: Quality Link Building : Social Links, Reciprocal Links and .edu & .gov Links

I hope you learned something from reading this “Ultimate guide to link building” and I hope that it is indeed just that. If you have questions or want an answer to a specific question not answered here please comment and I will add it to the list. Thanks for reading my blog!

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This article may help you funnel your SE value through to the pages that need the value and stop value from being leaked into hundreds of worthless pages you don’t want ranked.

Until fairly recently the nofollow tag was still being valued in Google(not like a regular link but still had some very little value) – we recently concluded an experiment which proves that Google no longer values the nofollow tag. To prove this we found an obscure keyword, we then took an established website and had bloggers and website owners link to this site using the keywords we specified as well as the nofollow tag attached to the link. We got about 50 links with the nofollow tag, we waited over a month(longer than necessary) and yet no where did this site appear for the selected keywords. The websites linking to the test site ranked but not even on Yahoo or MSN was seen a ranking for our obscure keywords for the test domain. There is no doubt that none of the three currently value any link with the nofollow tag.

Why/when/how should the nofollow tag be used?
The nofollow tag was introduced to a great extent to combat the large blog comment spam issue however its uses are many. Its main idea is to tell search engines “I am not affiliated with this site, I do not trust this page and/or do not want to pass any value to it”

This is very useful for keeping your value from being linked to a bad site or worse to be associated with that bad site which could possibly harm your rankings.

Many webmasters assume that by linking out you leak value/pagerank or whatever, that you will rank higher if you save your value by nofollowing all or most of your outbound links. This is a sad, what if all webmasters began thinking this way… how hard would link building become?Webmasters should not be afraid to link to good resource sites related to their niche.
Link to sites you believe will be beneficial to your visitors even if it is your competition. Sometimes offering your visitors an alternative can be a larger benefit than pretending your the sole provider in your niche and it will lower the chances of them actually leaving your site… yeah I know that sounds strange but it works sometimes.

I can’t prove 100% that this is so but I also believe Google gives more authority to sites which link to other authority sites in the industry, sites who aren’t afraid to link to the experts in their niche… I believe Google somehow attributes this to a good webmaster and somehow gives them authority for it. Again I can’t prove that but alot of evidence seems to support it… either way it is a good idea to share the love.

Leaking PR…
The biggest way in my opinion to lose link value or what some people mistakenly call PR is by reciprocal link exchanges. Probably the easiest and worst way to leak link value is by reciprocating with un-related, low quality sites. This can hurt your site and you are likely to lose positions randomly over time… the days of link exchanging for rankings are gone… Only reciprocate with sites who give you a link on a content page and which are relevant, others will greatly dis valued.

The second worst way is site-wide links. These draw value from all your pages and are not a good idea… I would nofollow all sitedwide links or give the webmaster only one link. Sitewide links are also disvalued, I believe how many pages the link is on may play a big role but just the fact that it is a site-wide link seems to be grounds for disvaluing.

Many people don’t realize you can even lose value through bad link management of in-side links, yes links on your site pointed at other pages on your site. Scripts such as forums, blogs, content management systems and others can cause link value to be carried to multiple versions of a page(duplicate content) and can cause you to rank lower than you normally would.

For forums I highly recommend using a sub-domain instead of a sub-folder… this acts as a separate domain and hence will not effect the rest of your site like it would if you installed the forums in a sub-folder. Make sure you remove session ids, 301 duplicate pages, mod re-write the urls to static and of course 301 those dynamic urls to the static versions. This will help your forums posts to rank for the topics being discussed, give more value to each page and make it easier for users to return to a specific topic.

Also with forums you should use the robots.txt file to tell the robots to stay out of the members profiles, members list, register and login pages. This saves value from being passed to pages which do not need it… also try and install a plugin which nofollows all urls in signatures and posts of users under a certain number of posts, say 50. That way you reward members for their support of your community yet don’t give link value to spammers.

Increase Google traffic by 1400%…
Many know Jeremy Shoemaker a.k.a ShoeMoney. He was advised this year by Aaron Wall of SeoBook to nofollow certain pages on his site, surprising to some his rankings increased greatly and of course so did his traffic. Jeremy claimed his traffic from Google increased 1400% which is quite hard to beat – If you want to see what he put in his robots here it is:

http://www.shoemoney.com/robots.txt

Based on simple robots exclusions I have used in the past I know it works and I know it can have absurd positive effects on your rankings… if your serious about taking out your competition you will want to check this out, implement nofollows and robots exclusions on your site where appropriate.

I have worked with exclusions and nofollows quite a bit lately so if you have questions or need help with your site to make sure you are not leaking value send me a comment and I will help you out.

That covers the basics of using nofollows, leaking PR and the like. If I failed to explain something just scream it out and I will try and update the article…

If you have further questions regarding this topic or would like a specific question addressed in our next article just make a comment to this article or send me an email.

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Thankfully we don’t need to guess on this, we have studies which prove in my mind without a doubt where the meta tags stand in this new world of seo.

Really I hate using the words “meta tags” anymore, I think many webmasters really do not understand what the meta tags were created for, they have this idea that the meta tags are a way for them to tell Google, MSN or Yahoo! to list them on the 1st page for whatever keywords they desire. Unfortunately they are very wrong. The meta keywords tag was originally established as a ranking method to yes tell the search engines your relation in the world of internet. The internet was new and nobody really knew how to effectively rank sites so techniques were introduced to help the search engines in this dilemma.

The meta keywords tag has since been spammed very heavily as well as the description and title tags. Anything to get that desired 1st page ranking. So my question is this, why would any search engine in their right mind continue to use a method which is so easily spammed, which anybody can use. Why should a little box saying “I think these keywords are what I am about” be used to rank a site? Afterall if I can do that so easily why not step a little farther out, maybe target semi-related keywords… what is stopping me?

Now I personally think that is very logical thinking… the question is are the search engines acting logical? To answer that question we and a few other people have done some testing.

First lets see what a Navy officer can tell us about the meta tags…. Meta Keywords test conclusions

According to his tests neither Google nor MSN responded to the keywords tag by ranking the page… btw the keyword used was obscure, not a real word. This correlates very well with my research of the three search engines. MSN may be a long ways behind Yahoo as far as traffic goes but they are leaps ahead in turns of algo and ranking. Don’t get me wrong, they have many problems and have a ways to go before even sighting Google ahead. However MSN is smart enough to know when to drop certain aspects of the algo. I will come back to that point…

What about the other tags? The title and description tags? Well Mr Navy didn’t test these apparently but I did a little of my own testing and here is what I came up with…

The title tag effects rankings in all three search engines, no doubts what-so-ever. Heavily spamming the title tag can have negative effects for Google rankings. Well I can’t say positively you would call them negative effects, actually I would be more inclined to call it positive effects to removing stuffing from the title tag. However upon stuffing the keyword tag we always saw a drop so I guess you can say both

The title tag seems to also play a role in ranking in MSN and Yahoo. We noted changes as good as 2-3 pages positive ranking increase. Upon changing the title back the original ranking returned and is now again at the new title.

I should also make it clear that you should always use the meta tags as they were designed. Want to use the keywords tag? Thats fine but don’t stuff it with keywords, list a few. Use the title to describe what that particular page is about, in doing this it may have a impact on your rankings to a small degree however the big factor is when the searchers are scanning the google page, if your title is stuffed with nonesense you can be sure you will lose a good number of visitors who might have clicked in. This also goes for the description tag, write your meta tags as if robots did not exist, create them with the searchers in mind. I can guarantee you will see an increase in CTR if you do this.

I know the meta tags are ancient history but that is not necessarily the case to many webmasters, many of them still fail to realize how important and yet how unimportant they are. Using the title/description tags incorrectly can cause you great harm and yet using them correctly can give you a great benefit just from the increase of CTR. So next time you see somebody say the meta tags don’t matter answer… “yes they do and here is why…”
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In this post I hope to show that just because Google can crawl a language does not mean they treat it the same. Thats right, using a certain programming language may have positive or negative effects. And not necessarily the programming language but how the language is used can also greatly effect your sites indexing and ranking.



There are many seo that still claim that the file extension doesn’t matter, now that Google can crawl even more languages than ever before webmasters are even less worried.

Most of us have heard of the phrase “search engine friendly” – It is used in a variety of ways and has many meanings from optimizing your meta tags(Google can crawl my meta tags now haha ) but generally when speaking of SEF(search engine friendly) we are thinking of making our pages easier for Google to crawl and index, correct?

Again many people have this idea that their pages must be SEF if they make it into the index. Afterall SEF means Google can crawl my pages… right? Not quite. Your pages may be indexed but not taking advantage of their full potential.

A little while back we decided to start an seo forums for our members to participate, learn more about seo, give their knowledge and help users out with their sites. Well anyways the forum was setup with dynamic php urls such as: /showthread.php?t=204881

We know from experience in helping other webmasters with their sites that these are not the best form of urls to use so we installed a mod which turned them into html urls something like this: google-discussion-f8.html – After installing the mod we bagan to see an increase in both indexed pages and searches which ended in a forum page result. This was no surprise to me as I have seen it many times before however I was thinking it would take alot longer to move over to the new urls in the index. It is still in the process but most of the urls are now indexed and are ranking for phrases they didn’t previously.

If you have a forum, content management system, blog or other forum of software that allows for modding it is a must that you change your linking structure to html links. You will see a great benefit from it. Google can and does index the php files but they are not treated the same as html for some reason.

I recommend mod rewriting all your dynamic files to html, if you need help with this try digitalpoint forums or post in our forums and we will see if we can help you.

We run and manage some e-commerce sites and some of these have been running for 8-9 years… we have since changed all the urls to static html instead of that long dynamic jibberish. We have seen a much higher increase in indexing and ranking of these pages since mod rewriting them.

If you do not want your e-commerce pages indexed the way to do that is NOT by using dynamic urls. Use the robots.txt file to tell Google to stay out.

It is very important you make your sites SEF by mod rewriting dynamic urls, creating sitemaps(html sitemaps linked to from every page on your site) and 301ing old pages to new. But make sure if you are changing your url structure that your old files are 301ed to your new files. For further help with this please see the forums.

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