Savvy Affiliate

Day 22 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

You have your website going, and you are starting to get traffic.  Maybe some of the traffic is coming from direct referrals, maybe some of it is coming from comments, maybe some people are just typing in your address.  But how much of it is coming from Search Engines?

Not Enough

How do I know that You aren’t getting enough traffic from search engines?  Simple.  No one is.  You would be hard pressed to name a single website that wouldn’t benefit from more search engine traffic.  Search engine traffic is the cream of the crop.  It is the most valuable traffic by far.  On average, your search engine reader is worth more than your direct referral, he is worth tons more than a social network user.

Mature sites get about 80% of their traffic from search engines.  Even this site, which is only 6 weeks old, gets about 40% of its daily traffic from search engines. (Except for days I get stumbled, then StumbleUpon accounts for 90% of the traffic.  So how bout a stumble?)  The bottom line is you need to build up your search engine rankings.

Luckily, there is one easy step to improving your search engine rankings that many bloggers don’t think about.  Simply doing this one step can greatly increase your rankings for your targeted keywords. 

Use Smart Post Titles

Your post tiles are incredibly important.  They affect everything about how you rank in the search engines.  Google looks at your <H1><H2><H3>and<H4> tags for keywords to see what your site is about.  Your post title will display as your search engine result unless you are using something like All in one SEO Pack (which you should) and you change it.

Most importantly, people link to you using your post titles - At least half the backlinks you get to a post will be some variation of your title.  So your post titles have a huge affect on your anchor text, and consequently the keywords that you rank well for.

So What Are Smart Post Titles

Smart post titles attract Google, attract Backlinks, and attract Searchers in the results page.  This may seem hard, but all three are looking for similar things

• Be Specific - Your readers should usually be able to tell what your post is about from your post title.  If they can’t figure it out, why will they come to your site?  And how will Google tell?
• Keyword Density - Use at least 1 or 2 keywords that you want to rank for in your title.  That will tend to set the theme for your page as well
• Numerals - Using Numbers in your title attracts backlinks, attracts Diggs, and attracts searches.  Do it whenever you can

Give those a try and see if you don’t start seeing an improvement in your search engine rankings.

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Many People Are Enabling Do Follow, How Can You Use That Without Comment Spamming?

More and more people are enabling the Do Follow plugin, which allows you to get a SEO enabled link back from the blog when you comment on it.  Before, many blogs had the tag rel=”nofollow” in their comments, which told Google that that link wasn’t a “vote” for the site.  This plugin turns it off.

There are literally hundreds of blogs using this plugin.  Here is the most comprehensive list of blogs using Do follow that I have found.

Clearly these blogs enabled do follow to get more comments, and you would like backlinks, how can you combine the two without spamming?  When Do follow first came out people were going around more or less spamming every site with it enabled.  That is the wrong thing to do.  There is a right way to get some Google juice out of your comments, and here it is.

Comment on older posts!  That’s right, everyone comments on newer posts.  A popular site can be flooded with comments when it puts up posts.  But if you go look in the blogs archives you will find a lot of posts from when the blog was first starting with little or no comments.  Many of these will still have a decent Page Rank.  If you are using Google toolbar, where you can see PR, you can cherry pick several archived posts to comment on.  This is not quite a blackhat SEO technique.  But it could definitely be considered a grey hat technique.

You shouldn’t spam - I am by no means saying you should spam the site.  You shouldn’t do that with newer posts or with older posts.  You should take your time and actually write a comment that is worthwhile.  It will be good for the blog, get some quality content, and good for you, as you will get some links.  A win-win if I ever saw one.

That’s all the secret there is.  Try this and you will find your Technorati ranking going up as well as your search engine rankings.

You can thank me later.

Actually, if you want to thank me now, how bout voting for Savvy Affiliate in the 2007 blogging fame contest?  It’s free, and if I do get famous I will be sure to spread the link love around.  If that isn’t your thing, I have Do follow enabled on my trackbacks, so if you link to this post you’ll get an SEO enabled link in return.  Not too shabby.

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Looking to get a backlink to your site?  You Can get a free link to Savvy Affiliate.  And it couldn’t be easier.

I have installed the “Do Follow Trackback Plugin” - if you ping me you’ll get a Google enabled link

That’s right, every single person who links to me will get a backlink from this site, automatically.   So looking for an easy way to get a couple of backlinks?   Find an article you like on Savvy Affiliate, and put it in a blog post.

In fact, you can even do it for this blog post.  What could be simpler?

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Organic Backlinks are free, and work best, but how to get them?

If you have done any work at all in order to optimize your site for search engines, then you know that the biggest thing you can do is to get lots of organic backlinks.  All three of the major search engines use links as a way of counting “Votes” to your site, with some votes countint more than others.

Organic backlinks are simply links which are embedded in content of an article.    They aren’t links that you buy, they aren’t links that you submit your site to, and they usually aren’t links that you trade.   So how do you get organic backlinks?

Create Value

The simplest thing that a blogger can do in order to get a lot of links to his post is to write something which creates value.  Other blogs won’t link to a post which is junk.  There needs to be something unique about your post if you want it to draw any links to your site.   Write a great review of a product.   Write a great summary of how to solve a problem that your readers have.

However the value doesn’t have to be in the content itself.  Many bloggers compile lists of other articles.  When done correctly these link posts can generate a lot of backlinks.   Many of the people who you link to will follow the link back to your site.   If your site impresses them, they are likely to keep coming back, and to give you links from their site.

Let People Know Of Your Post

Of course no one can link to your post if they don’t know about it.   If you are an established site with established visitors then you don’t have to go out of your way to get people to read your posts.  They are likely to come to your site or read your feed on their own.   However if you are a new page, you need to get the word out.   Some of the best ways to get the word out about your post are to go to other sites with similar content and leave comments in their pages.    Make sure that the comments are meaningful and not just spam, but don’t feel too shy about including your link if it is similar.   An additional way for new sites to get initial visitors is to post on forums.   Write posts on highly visited forums and include your links in your signature.  If this is done right it isn’t spam, it is just letting people know of additional valuable content.

Ask for Links

If you want people to link to your post try asking for links at the bottom of your post.  Include button which displays the HTML to put a link to the page.    Write a sentence like “If you liked this post drop me a comment or a link”   Although this may seem a little cheesy, asking for links is one of the best ways to get them.

More Resources

Self made minds has a great post on a similar topic about generating organic backlinks

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Day 12 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

Eventually, one thing that every webmaster must focus on is increasing his rankings in the search engines.  A new site will likely get most of its traffic from direct referrals from other sites.  A mature site however will get the vast majority of its traffic, over 75%, directly from search engines.  As far as search engines go, the one that you really care about is Google.  Google has over 55% market share of worldwide searches.  Its two closest competitors, Yahoo and MSN, take 22% and 9% respectively.

So for a webmaster just starting out, what do they most need to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?  Well below are some SEO basics, later on we’ll go into more detail, but extra detail is mainly just tips and tricks on to how to do these better.

1) Search Engines Rank Sites by incoming links - Its no secret that the main way Google ranks web pages is by who is linking to a specific site, and what keywords they use to link to it.  A link to a site is considered a vote for that site in Google’s eyes.   Get more incoming links and you will get more votes.  Google takes the anchor text of the link and uses that and the surrounding text to determine what they site being linked to is about, and what keywords it should rank for.  This inspired the Google bomb, an attempt to rank highly for a specific keyword by getting tons of backlinks for that phrase.

2) Some votes count more than others - Although no one knows exactly how Google weights each links, it is well known that links from highly ranked sites count a lot more than links from other low ranked sites.  This is why links on high ranked sites are in demand, and can sell for 100’s of dollars a month, whereas links on low ranked sites are worth very little.

3) You can rank for a specific phrase by using a Keyword frequently, and getting people to link to you with that phrase - When you are doing search engine optimization, you want to pick specific keyword targets, and you want to be #1 for those targets.  You can rise in the rankings for a specific keyword by using it frequently in your post, in your post titles, and in your meta information.  More importantly is getting people to link to you with that keyword.  Perhaps no one is taking this to a greater extreme than John Chow, who is on a binge trying to get links with the Anchor text “Make money online”

4) Ranking is only half the battle, the next step is getting users to click on your site -  Even when you appear highly in the search engine rankings, you still have to convince the searchers to come to your site.  You can do this with targeted page titles and targeted site post descriptions.  Some people don’t take the time to write excerpts for their posts.  That is a mistake.  Writing a concise excerpt for your post is one of the easiest ways to get more search engine hits.  Posts I write excerpts for generally get 50% more Google hits than posts I skip doing this.  Additionally there are loads of wordpress plugins which are designed to help you optimize your search engine rankings.  The one I prefer is All in one seo pack.

5) Be prepared to get hits for things you never though of - Although targeted keywords are great, and will be your top referrals, by far the majority of your Google traffic will come from long tail keywords.  These long tail keywords are phrases you might never have thought of, or even tried to rank for.  In fact they could very well be unique phrases that no one has searched for before, or is likely to again.  The trick to having a strong long tail keyword ranking is to mix up your content.  If you use many different keywords, and write lots of different content, then there is a lot of combinations which will hit your site.  Some of those combinations will inevitably drive users to your page, where you can turn them to dollars.

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One Thing which seems to spawn across the internet from time to time is Link Chains.  I first saw this with Dofollow link train.  Basically what a link train is is that one blogger posts a list of some sort or another with their link in it.  The next blogger picks up the list and inserts their own link.  On it goes with the list growing larger and larger and the bloggers at the front of the line getting a lot of backlinks.  (Kind of like a pyramid scheme where no one loses money)

There are various thoughts on link trains, some people like them, others hate them.   I’ve never tried one so I thought I’d give it a shot and report back the results on how well it worked.

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions below this line———

Below is a matrix of 120 stars, I have already added a link to my blog onto one of the stars, all you need to do is copy and paste the grid into your blog and add your own link to one of the other spare stars, and tell others to do the same!

Viralink

********************
********************
********************
********************
********************
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When you ping me with this Viralink, I will add you to my matrix. 

Rules
No Porn Sites
Only 1 link per person (i.e don’t hog the viralink!)
Please don’t tamper with other peoples url’s
Enjoy!

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions above this line———

If you’ve never done a link train, why don’t you give this one a whirl, see how it works for you, and post here if you got positive results.

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If You Write About Something Frequently, You Can Get In The Habit Of Only Thinking In Those Terms

One of the problems I have found while I was blogging is that I tend to use the same keywords over and over again in a single blog post.   For instance I often write about blogging more efficiently. And have found that because I am stuck thinking of the word efficient, I use the same word over and over again in the blog post. Although this makes it easier to write, to maximize my search engine listings I want to hit a wide range of keywords with every post.

It is very good to climb to the top of the Google rankings for a keyword that you are targeting.  However it is even better to climb to the top for that keyword, and also rank well for a dozen other keywords.  Recent studies have shown that almost half of all Google searches are unique! This makes it almost impossible to try and guess what people are looking for, or how they will find your site. Look up your hits from your top 10 key phrases.  Then count the hits from your next 100.  Chances are you are getting many more hits from keywords that you didn’t target, or even think of targeting, than the few that you are trying to rank for.

Although there is no reason to give up targeting specific phrases you also want to make sure you rank in a wide swath of potential searches.  Take the word efficient for example.   Although I may think that a person is most likely to find my post by using the phrase “Blog more efficiently,”  In fact there are dozens of synonyms that are also likely to be used.   A quick check on Dictionary.com shows that efficient has these synonyms

able, accomplished, active, adapted, adept, adequate, apt, businesslike, capable, clever, competent, conducive, decisive, deft, dynamic, economic, economical, effectual, efficacious, energetic, equal to, experienced, expert, familiar with, fitted, good at, good for, handy, masterly, organized, potent, powerful, practiced, productive, proficient, profitable, qualified, ready, saving, shrewd, skilled, skillful, systematic, talented, tough, useful, valuable, virtuous, well-organized, workmanlike

So while I may rank well for efficient blogging, what about being a clever blogger?  Or a proficient blogger?  These are all potential search phrases I missed.

If you find yourself using a single word or string of words too often, look it up in a thesaurus. The thesaurus can aid in helping you climb in the search engine rankings, and it can also give you new post ideas.   Although I’ve played out the efficient blogging theme for a while, perhaps I can write a post about being well-organized, and making sure you are acting in a businesslike manner?

 So do you use any kind of language tools when you are blogging?  Have you ever turned to a thesaurus for ideas?

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Want an Easy Link Back? Submit Your Best Internet Marketing Tip

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But not here.   I want to thank Jon over at Art of Money for his post on 4 Easy Ways To Get Quality Links For Free, he pointed out a site which I missed when I covered Group Writing Projects

The site is CanIMakeBigMoneyOnline.com, which is kind of a long name, but contains some good content.  The reason I bring this up is that he posts weekly “Internet Marketing Tips From The Web” every Friday, which he usually goes out and researches.  However for the next month or so he will be unable to do so, so is inviting reader submissions of their best marketing tips.  Although he won’t take just any thrown together post, if you have a decent quality content it is a good chance to get a new backlink.

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What is Dofollow Worth?

It is sometimes amazing to see what happens when a blogger takes on a persona.  As he writes more and more in that role it seems as though the persona develops until it is almost a real personality.  Although I don’t know John Chow personally, I’ve never met him, I think he might be case in point for this. 

John Chow has a persona of as the “Evil Blogger.”  I think that the persona is very important to his blog.  It drives some of his ideas, and how he implements them.  He recently had a post about buying Do follow links.  Basically, the idea is that he would turn on do follow tags for anyone would would subscribe at a rate of $10/month.

What is do follow?  Do follow is a new blogging movement to turn off the “rel-nofollow” tags in comments.  “Rel=nofollow” is a tag which stops Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines from using that link as a basis for their search engine rankings.

So Why Is John Evil?  Although the comments on John’s post were generally positive, it does take a bit of an evil personality to take a movement intended to benefit all blogger and try to make a profit off of it.  Not that there is any thing wrong with him doing it after all, his blog, his rules,  but it is an exploit many would not have thought of, or would have rejected if they had.

Would I charge for Do follow?  Although I have been considering implementing do follow on this site, (I’m not sure if my spam filtering is good enough or not), I would certainly never charge for it if I did.  I think that it might hurt his community, as it makes some of his readers, those who don’t subscribe, into somewhat second class citizens.  Blog-Op has a similar post to this, and the commenting consensus there is they would never charge for Do follow, and it may hurt John in the long run.

Would I pay for Do follow?  I wouldn’t pay for Do follow either.  I don’t think comments are worth $10/month, even on John’s site.  I don’t know how Google’s algorithm works for sure, no one does, but I suspect it may filter out comments anyway.   Furthermore, paying for those links might be too much temptation to be a bit of a comment spammer.  After all, if I was paying for it I would want my money’s worth.

So what do you think?  Is it worth it to pay for Do follow links?   What would you pay for a Do Follow link on a PR 6 blog?   Would you ever charge for the links?

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