Tag: SERPS

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Back Links beginners Build My Rank Paid Tools The Keyword Academy

Build My Rank Alternatives

Bamboo builds strong buildings; links build strong websites; Khao Sak, Thailand

I originally published this post in November 2011 pointing out that people really didn’t understand how to use link networks. I’ve now updated it = UPDATED: March 2012 after Google de-indexed Build My Rank 

OK guys apparently the world changed and some of you didn’t notice. Ironic really, I’ve heard plenty of people whinging about not being able to get good backlinks. Or asking for alternatives to Build My Rank because the BMR blogs didn’t look “real” and weren’t niche specific.

There are two really obvious things that are apparently from Google’s swipe at backlink networks. First obviously backlinks from these networks were effective (otherwise Google would have just ignored them) and, in future you are going to have to play smarter. 

Bamboo builds strong buildings; Pandas like bamboo; links build strong websites; Khao Sak, Thailand

Build My Rank was not the only network to get deindexed and devalued, it was probably just the highest profile one amongst the make money crowd. SEO Nitro, SEO Linkvine. The sites that have not got hit are generally keeping a VERY low profile. 

This is quite specific – Google isn’t targeting spammy backlinks from forums, automated bookmarking or the other stuff you can buy for $5 at fiverr.  People who have spammed the hell out of their own sites are reporting no drop in rankings and no nasty messages in Google tools about “unnatural links being noted on their sites” 

This is all about networks which insisted on 150 -odd words of unique content. Google has found them and taken them down manually. 

So what do you do now to rank – what are the alternatives to BMR? 

Alternative 1: Forget Manufactured  Backlinks Make Your Site High Quality 

Yeah I know I probably just lost 90% of you. And no I’m not saying you don’t need backlinks – what I’m saying if you write really good content, engage with your readers, and be genuinely helpful. You will then, over time get natural backlinks, when people link to and promote your content. Its a sound approach, which will take a while, but at the end, you will be mainly Google-proof.  Not entirely – because you’d be an idiot to trust Google after this week – but a lot more than if you just have a mini-site of thrown together content that you don’t actually know much about. 

If you want to learn how to develop a long-term, high quality websites – CLICK to check out the Keyword Academy

Alternative 2: Find a Few High Quality links

I started a new site – 3 weeks later it was a PR3 – nine months later its still  PR3 and on page 1 for its desired keyword? What did I do? I gave it one single link from a PR3 site which I controlled which was relevant to the niche and didn’t have too many outbound links.

It not rocket science, it hasn’t changed any time recently. Some links are more useful than others. When you have access to strong links you will find it easier to rank your websites. 

Getting just one really, really good backlink can do more for your rankings than a 1000 crappy links. It will also look more natural to Google. 

What is a good backlink? A link from an authority site? So WTF is an authority site? A site which ranks well in the same niche as you, a site which has an engaged audience who find it useful, a page which has similar or the same keywords as you want to rank for, a site with PR (this is the least important factor). 

How do you get those links? Well as I said above the best way is to have such an awesome site that people in the same field WANT to link to you. But you can hurry up the process a bit. Its not rocket science. Its called guest posting. Try to find a blog who will accept a guest post from you. You’ll have to write really good content. You’ll have to make it possibly even more useful than the stuff you would publish on your own site. And in return they will give you a link. And you know what – you might even get visitors from that link – there’s a thought! 

Its pretty tough finding guest posting opportunities. You’ll have to contact a lot of webmasters, and expect a lot of rejections – or ignores. I hate doing it.  On the other hand after a while you get to know a few people in the same niche and then its a little easier.

It probably all sounds a bit overwhelming – and I can understand if you are pretty discouraged after the news of BMR. But if you give up now – Google wins – and I HATE letting the bullies win!

Check out the Keyword Academy – really – you’ll be pleased you did – its also free for the first month – so no risk to you. Really check out my new  Postrunner V2 Review – a great opportunity for quality backlinks. 

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Back Links

Entrecard Will Kill Your Search Traffic

OK I have been doing some Web2.0 stuff over the last few weeks and have looking for  sources of backlinks which will a) work for the search engines i.e. give me a do-follow backlink and b) might even get you some focused traffic. Getting my sites to the point their earn me passive income is all about increasing my backlinks

Entrecard Sucks!
Entrecard Sucks!

I don’t know if you count Entrecard as 2.0 as really its just a fancy banner exchange which as been around forever (ie like 10 years – a LONG time on the Internet).

I never took much notice of Entrecard but people over at the Today forums were singing its praises so I signed up (free) and installed it on my Travel Over 30s blog.   And I dropped my entrecards – almost always on relevant blogs in the travel and expat sector. You can drop a maximum of 300 cards a day – with a little distraction – ie. actually reading some of the blogs this can take several hours – most of the blogs have every widge under the sun and take FOREVER to load.

And sure enough the traffic came – maybe 50% of people I dropped on dropped back within the next day or so – to be honest this was better than I had thought. I got a bit of traffic from them.

Then I stopped  dropping – and my after a day or so my Entrecard traffic went down to a handful a day. Which again was to be expected. This was not passive income – if I didn’t drop no one was going to drop back or even visit.

So Entrecard wasn’t building me an ongoing audience – it was just getting me a reciprocal “drop and run” response. So if I didn’t drop I didn’t get traffic.

Which in its self is not so bad – but it got worse, a lot worse. My Google search engine traffic disappeared. I was getting a steady flow of queries from Google to a number of different posts – I had had this traffic for around a month.

After a week or so of serious Entrecard activity -my search engine traffic had gone. Why?

Well I don’t know for sure- as you never do with search engines, but I am almost certain it is because my Entrecard traffic was low quality – it was hit and run – they came found the Entrecard widget – dropped and left.

Google rates pages for a number of reasons – but a lot of very short term visitors who click in and out – seems to get you marked down. And I think this is what has happened to my blog.

Meanwhile my other Today blog, which I never had Entrecard on has gone from strength to strength on search traffic.

So not only will your Entrecard traffic not convert to sales, Adsense clicks or even readers – it will also have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.

Entrecard is off my blog as soon as my current backlog of adveritsers are through.

Categories
Blogging Making Money Online

Today Works Well for Trends Blogging

IMPORTANT: Read this update on blogging at today dot com – it still works well for trends though.

Well I am enjoying blogging at today.com more and more. Mainly because I am finding it pretty easy to get my posts indexed and then get search traffic to them. What I am doing is something that is called “trends blogging”. Google has an appetite and the appetite is for whatever people are searching for at the moment. To check out the top 100 queries at Google trends – trust me it usually makes for pretty depressing reading!

I’ve tried using Google trends to blog directly – but to be honest lacking real-time access to US TV is a huge disadvantage – and not caring even less about US popular “culture” is a show-stopper!

So instead I am doing my own version: which is currently around a film which is about to be released. I suspect it might be popular because the sexy photos of Nicole Kidman in Australia hub does pretty well. And the movie isn’t out yet – which is the point – the premier is tonight so I wrote about the Australia Movie premier and the post was indexed with 40 minutes – probably less I wasn’t looking. I was already getting some traffic to an earlier post on the same topic so I checked my stats and made sure I answered the questions to searches I’d had traffic from – some of which weren’t answered in the original post which kinda gave me the hint that I might be onto something. I am now sitting in position 2 and 3 for my keywords in Australia anyway – and of course its not yet today in most of the US – I LOVE the time difference game sometimes (its almost as good as the curency game at the moment for those of us whose currencies have dropped against the US$ ). Now the nice thing about today is that I get paid on traffic not directly on clicks -that’s lucky because entertainment is notoriously BAD for Adsense payouts! But I am definitly getting traffic!

Categories
Marketing Search Engines

Google Reveals SEO Secrets

Google has just released their Search Engine Optimization Guide. Yes the big G itself is finally prepared to answer the most FAQ out there ” How do I get my site to rank in Google?”

Its a pretty scary document: well scary if you are in the business of scamming people out of good money by pretending that SEO is hard to do – its anything but. In fact I suspect none of what is in this guide is new. Its just been finally collected all together in one place so that people can actually find it – now that’s an idea!

The report is fairly simple to understand for anyone who has the rudiments of how a website is setup. The bottom line is excellent for anyone who wants to make money as an online writer because as usual the bottom line is that a website which is attractive and useful for readers will also attract the search engines. Get your headings right and make sure you correctly anchor your backlinks and Google will notice.

I wrote an extended review of Googles SEO Guide an how it applies to HubPages here: SEO How to Do It by Google

One item the Google SEO Guide mentions in passing is that blogging about newsworthy or unique content will get you ranked. That certainly seems to be happening to me on my Australia News blog

Categories
Paid Tools Tools

AMA After 2 Weeks

Wow I am really impressed. I have been tracking the sites/pages I am promoting using Article Marketing Automation. Today I had a quick look – expecting the usual list of “not found” mean I’m not ranking in the first 1000 results and just about dropped the laptop – I am ranking wow!


Success
Originally uploaded by kevinthoule

I am promoting a hubpage I wrote a while back. The page is nearly a year old but wasn’t ranking at all well on the SERPS. I posted an article with a variety of 3 word keyword phrases on 21 September (which has now been published 53 times): almost immediately my Google traffic jumped – that could have been coincidence – I’ve seen this size jump before. But today I noticed that I was ranked for some of the 3-word KW phrases I had never promoted anywhere but via AMA – in fact sometime in the last couple of days I jumped from not in the top 1000 – to position #2 (for 2 phrases) and #6 for another!

Now hubpages may not be a fair test: I generally find I can get hubpages to rank easier than anything else I write. But I also have been pushing a niche blog of mine. Its been around about 3 months, is a .info and is bouncing around – it got to first page and then dropped out of sight to sit around the 100-300 rank mark for various long-tails, for the last 2 months. Now today its back, and boy is it back -the gain in the last couple of days is around 200-400 places so that I am now sitting position 10 and 20 for quite a number of my keyword phrases I. I submitted one article to AMA on the Sept 19 – and its been published 59 times.

People this seems to be working – I’ll let you know in another week whether the positions hold up. Those links again: AMA free version with a trial of the article submission
Or if you want to go straight for the money version – click the pretty banner on the right!

Categories
Back Links Marketing Search Engines

Backlinks are Everything.

I guess I am only just starting to learn the fine art of earning passive income online. One of the blind spots I had for a long time was that “content is king” – “write good stuff and they will come”. Well actually: they won’t, and in fact even when they do they may only make you 7c / day which is not going to see you retire in style any time soon.

There is only one  way for the bulk of your potential audience to find you: that is Google. Yes there are other search engines Yahoo probably sends me 5% of what Google does and MSN about 5 (no not % just 5 🙂 ). But Google is king of the search engines

You see Google don’t find your wonderful hub or article or website or blog by accident. It certainly doesn’t decide to put your site on the first page of results except for some very specific reasons.

  1. Google needs your content. Try this type “lis sowerbutts” – without the quotes into Google what comes back – this site normally ranks #1. At the moment in the Australian data centre of Google I rank #1 and #2 of 493,000 results: cool eh? Well no not really – lets face it “lis sowerbutts” isn’t exactly a high competition set of words – there aren’t that many sites around so I end up at the top because a) the name is in my url of this blog and b) and often comment and link to Lis Sowerbutts – an anchored link on the name of the blog
  2. Google thinks you have “authority”. Think about it if you have a problem with your car who do you call a: qualified mechanic or Uncle Ed who mucks around with motors –  OK, if they were both the same price you would call the “authority”. If you want the perfect smoked fish recipe do you check out Hub Pages or some site you never heard of: you go to Hub Pages because you know there is some great recipes there but even if I didn’t if I search via Google I will find hubpages often on the first page Why? Because Google “likes” Hub Pages. Which actually means that the Google algorithm basically gives Hub Pages the benefit of the doubt and indexes and ranks hubs quickly. Look carefully at what shows up most often on the first page of Google when you search for generic information: about.com, hubpages.com squidoo.com and almost always 1st or 2nd wikipedia.com. These sites have authority: just like you should listen to your Mum you should also probably listen to wikipedia or hubpages!

So how do you get that “authority” from Google? Well that is how

Backlinks are King

Try this: go to Google and type in

link:http://mywebsite.com

this will give you a list of all the sites which link back to your site.Well all the ones that google have got around to counting anyway, which can take anywhere from hours to months.

If you don’t have a profile or a website which has been around a few months try mine as an example link:http://hubpages.com/profile/Lissie
at the moment about 125 links. But look at those links: tags some of my hubs have, people I am a fan of, comments I have paid of hubs (my own or others), posts I have made in the forums. Being active on HubPages creates lots of backlinks to your profile and you can see the effect that my profile now has a Page Rank (PR) of 4. Basically the more links you have pointing at a page the more important Google considers it and the more likely you are to rank well in a search for that term.