From free for free

If you’re reading my blog, I’m sure you’re interested in know what makes a site rank well in Google. This is the coveted knowledge all internet marketers seek. Aren’t we all looking for a page 1 ranking? Wouldn’t you kill to know how to achieve a #1 ranking?

As I mentioned in my last post, Rand Fishkin outed the #1 ranked site for “SEO Company”. The post did not claim that the site used black hat practices, but it does use fairly obvious link building methods. Their links screamed link anchor text optimization, which is a solid sign that they are manipulating their anchor text. This is something we all do, but Google does not like. Our job as SEOs is to make our links as natural as possible so that competitors cannot publicly out you. So let’s dig in deep here and look at what factors are allowing this site to rank #1 for “SEO Company”. Not only has it achieved a #1 ranking for this term, but it has also received site links. Site links are read as a type of “authority” by searchers because it makes the listing look more important. So how did this site rank number one in Google?

What we’re about to do is a twofold explanation; you will learn how to do two things. First, this will help you understand how to research a niche and determine how competitive it is and how long it may take to dominate the niche. I will show “how” the site is ranking. The second thing this allows you to do is look under the hood of your competition and figure out what they’re up to. If you go head to head with another internet marketer, here is how you’ll discover what they’re doing.

On Site Optimization

First, let’s dispel some bullshit ideas about SEO. First, the content is king thing. Second, that keyword density matters.

So check out the site: nationalpositions.com

A few things about the on site content. It isn’t that “great”. Of course, it isn’t “spammy”, it isn’t scrapped, it isn’t auto generated, and it is original. That is the point where “quality” no longer matters, unless you’re doing link bait of course. Overall though, there isn’t too much about this site’s home page that is really impressive. Also I  want you to use your browsers find command. The phrase “SEO Company” does not appear once! The word SEO appears 4 times and the word company appears 3 times, but neither of them together. According to SEO Quake the keyword density of SEO is 0.37 and the density of company is 0.19. So this 3% or 5% or whatever people bullshit on about is NOT true. This information is not public, nobody knows it, and it is not that big of a factor in your ranking. Yes, using a keyword a few times does help, but continuous use of a keyword does not make a document more authoritative for the keyword. A page does not even require the use of the keyword to rank for it. You’re welcome to believe what you like, but here is an example of the #1 ranked site for “SEO Company”, but has a 0% keyword density for that phrase!

So what is the MOST important on site optimization factor in SEO? Well my buddy Griz talked about it the other day on his How to Make Money Online blog. It is the content enclosed in the title tag. The title tag is the most important on site factor that needs to be optimized. So let’s look at this site’s title tag.

Search Engine Optimization Los Angeles, SEO Los Angeles Company

As you’ll see, the site uses SEO and Company in their title tag. This gives their page strong on site authority for the words SEO and Company. This, plus the slight on site usage, is combined with one more factor (which I’ll discuss in a second) and allows them to rank for the term. One thing you’ll notice is that this site does not do what most would suggest, which is to put “SEO Company” first in the title. Generally, this would be a weakness for a site. You could be more competitive by putting SEO Company up front in the title, but this site has enough authority for “SEO Company” that they can place the keywords toward the end. (Again, we’ll get to that authority in a moment)

And lastly, let’s talk about semantics. So this site doesn’t use “SEO Company” exactly on their home page, but how did they manage to not trip the Google bomb flag and how did they rank for a term they do not use? Cough cough… its called semantics … cough cough. Go read my post about SEO and Semantics here.  Google understands word relationships. They have indexed the entire web, which allows them to learn some impressive things about the English language, how words relate, what niches words belong to, and what niches are related. SEO relates to all SEO terms, SEO niche relates to Internet Marketing niche, and the Internet Marketing niche relates to the Make Money Online niche.  There is a relationship, although separated, between the key phrases “SEO” and “How to Make Money Online”. So when I passed Griz a link earlier, it is going to help more than if I had a blog about dogs. Google knows SEO is related to making money online. (I hope that helps a little with Forbes Griz =P) I carry a good bit of authority so far for the term SEO and Google can evaluate the relation of this blog’s niche to Griz’s. And on the site we’re reviewing, Google can make a relation between “SEO Company”,  “SEO”, and “Search Engine Optimization”.

The lesson to learn from this is to focus more on using long tails and semantically related keywords than just using the exact phrase over and over. First, keyword density is not all it is made out to be. Why waste your content on excessive use of your keyword when you could simple reinforces it with semantically related keywords and long tails. This still supports your primary phrase and allows you to rank for more terms.

So HOW is it Ranking?

Ok, so if you were patient enough to read this far, you are still wondering “well how DID it rank”. It doesn’t use the exact phrase in the title. It doesn’t have a high density of the words. And it doesn’t even use the phrase once! They’re breaking all the content rules, but Google still considers them the top SEO Company.

It’s nothing new. It’s the thing that’s been said over and over. LINKS. And more importantly, KEYWORD anchored links.

Again, I won’t say content isn’t important. It plays a variety of roles. It is what your visitors read. It communicates keywords. And, it can be used to generate links. So there are times when content is important, but it is not what gets you ranked.

Again to recap. The content  isn’t that great. No keyword density or any usage for the exact keyword. The separate keywords are used, but very little. All the traditional factors are almost absent. So let’s get our hands dirty and throw this site into SEO Elite. If you don’t have this program, get it. If you don’t have the money, I understand, but this is my MOST powerful tool and you’re about to see why. This program does link searches in all major search engines. It combines the results from them all. Then it goes to each of the sites that link to the site you entered and it checks the link, nofollow/dofollow, anchor text, page PR, site title, site IP, and more. It then puts it all together and performs use useful calculations. You can quickly sort this information and understand exactly WHY a site ranks.

Here is a preview of the keywords present in the anchored links. Before I show it, I’d like to better explain how this works, let’s show an example. If a page links to this site using “LA SEO Company”, then another with “Awesome SEO Company”, and then another with “Internet Marketing Company”, you would get something like this.

1. Company – 3
2. SEO - 2
3. Internet -1
4. Marketing -1
5. LA – 1
6. Awesome – 1

(and so you know, the link that says “Internet Marketing Company” would help enforce the authority for the word Company, which would help the ranking for SEO Company, but not as much as the exact link “SEO Company”  would)

So here is the results from SEO Elite.

As you can see, the words SEO and Company dominate by a large margin. The vast majority of the links coming in use those keywords. This next image gives an even stronger view of the anchor text. This option allows you to input keywords and phrases to see how many anchors use that key phrase and calculations
the percentage.

As you can see, this site has a TON of links coming in with the words SEO and Company. Over HALF of all their links include the exact phrase “SEO Company”, while 56% feature the word Company and ALMOST 70% of their links include the anchor text SEO!

This is why they rank for SEO Company. One last time: Google ranks sites primarily based off the authority passed to them via links! And they use the words used as the anchors to determine rankings for keywords! The more anchored links you have for a key phrase, the higher you will rank for that key phrase (generally). Of course, there is more to SEO than that. But if you want a “dummies guide to SEO” in a quick nutshell, it’s in those two images. So if you’re not ranking for your keywords, I want you to ask yourself “how many keyword anchor links have I gotten for this site?”. When you get links, what words do you use? Do you use article marketing to grab anchored links? Do you use directory submissions? Link exchanges? Do you make effort to get the RIGHT anchor text? Do you even make the effort to GET the links? Do you spend more time getting links, reading, or writing content? (cough.. it should be getting links)

What about low quality links?

Ah… a topic I’ve talked about a few times and I was damn excited when this example came up. Generally, I feel bad outing a site’s links publicly and will usually never do it, but Rand went ahead it did it for me, so there is no more harm in me using the example.

So you think directories are worthless? LOL

Look at this:

Look how many of their links are from directories, resource pages, link pages, and link exchanges. I even see an article site in there. Next, look at the titles. It’s all a bunch of unrelated pages. And want to see one of their strongest “SEO Company” links? This page is a PR 3 and links to it with the desired anchor text. The page is basically a list of exchanges. These are probably all exchanged and paid links. These are the links are the “gurus” tell you to NOT get. People go on about how exchanges are useless. They talk about how submissions are dead.

Well this site ranks for the phrase SEO Company. A phrase with 33,100 average monthly searches and an average CPC of $6.55. Yummy. Not the volume of stuff like “make money online”, but you could make a pretty penny with an Adsense blog in a niche with those stats. And this site got the rank using a ton of directories, link exchanges, submissions, resource pages, and probably paid links. It pays to know how to rank well in Google.

Can Low Quality Links Hurt?

Ah.. Well, maybe. Honestly, they are not the best long term strategy. If you’re making a flagship in an ultra competitive niche, I would not suggest these practices. Google doesn’t like link manipulation like this. Now that Rand has made this site’s link profile public and thrown it in the face of the SEO community, it is likely that this site will get slapped. This is why some of my fellow bloggers have stopped doing case studies. We show our stuff, it gets reported, and we get slapped. This is because; Google does not want you to build links. When I do SEO on bigger sites, like this one, I do not go all out on these types of links. Also, I would not use this as a professional SEO tactic. But, this is a SEO and Make Money blog. I’m not interested in talking about “ethical” SEO only. I’m interested in what gets a site ranked, what gets it traffic, and what gets me paid.

So here is something to consider. Google obviously relies heavily on hand edits and human inspections. Their algo is not great at detecting all SEO practices (they are pretty good though). This means you can get away with a lot as long as nobody notices or cares enough to report you. There are several things you can do to create enough doubt to prevent a reporting. The site we used as an example has been around for three years before someone finally outted them and it took Rand, who is one of the net’s most popular SEO’s who is notorious for exposing sites in a way people don’t like. There isn’t nearly as much risk for your scrapbooking blog.

(btw, I’m not knocking Rand, his blog is awesome. I don’t think I’ll get his attention on page 2 or 3, but I’ll be a little worried when I make it to page one for SEO)

So That’s How It’s Done

I talk about SEO and will continue to talk about it, because I love the topic, but for the most part I just showed you how SEO works. There are fine details and particulars that we can discuss, but it really comes down to building authority with links. SEO Elite is a big purchase, but I hope this showed you some of the potential of the tool. It can do a lot more, but for this feature alone it is more than worth the money. The value of knowing exactly what your competition is doing is almost priceless. And honestly, the use of SEO Elite will teach you more about SEO than most SEO blogs on the internet. I read blogs for months before I purchased the program. Upon buying it I spent days just running reports on sites, it changed the way I saw SEO. No longer do you look as simplistic measures like link volume, but you get to see the nitty details.

So go out and get links. And don’t depend on the advice of others unless they show you actual proof. Test stuff and try. Do some directory submissions and see if they help or not. Do article marketing and test that. Your confidence will increase when you actually get out there and build some links and prove to yourself what does and doesn’t work.

I’ve written about directories before here at SEO Zombie and promoted them as method of link building you SHOULD use to promote your niche blogs. Well many uninformed SEO’s, Internet Marketers and “Make Money” bloggers go on about how these links are dicounted. They talk about linkbait, good content, etc.

Well Rand over at SEO Moz caused a shit storm this week when he outed a company for ranking #1 for “SEO Company”. You can check out the conversation here at Sphinn. Its a long thread of shit and people attacking Rand. I’m not going to get into that debate here, because it has been well covered. While everyone else is all worried about the ethics of this outing, I am only concerned about one thing.

The site ranks #1 for “SEO Company” using DIRECTORIES!

Now, having low quality links in a highly competive niche like SEO can get people like Rand all up in your shit and reporting you. But who do you think is crawling all over your links for your super long tail niche sites? Most likely, nobody. And likely nobody as informed as SEO’s like Rand.

So there are two things I want to take away from this. I’ve talked about them both before.

First, can low quality links hurt you? Hell yes. I’m not in the school that believes that incoming links cannot hurt you. You know Google is going to give the site Rand outted a nice little manual review. This will likely result in a penality or a discounting of their links.

Second, should you get low quality links? Yes. Of course, using them on high profile sites creates risk. But if you use them on long tail niche sites, you run a lot less risk.

So go submit to directories =P

So like everyone else, I have been having problems with BANS and Google. They seem to be targeting the footprints of that script and yanking them from serps. No too long again, I launched a BANS, filled it with great content, did “safe” link building. It got indexed in a day and I was excited, two days later it was deindexed and has stayed deindexed. Nothing I can do, but fill reinclusion and pray they let me back.

Well I’ve been sitting around and thinking. First, the Markov engine of constantly refreshing content from eBay feeds is really nice. So are the updating keywords associated with the content feed. I am not satisfied with the Javascript widget thing eBay gives you. Secondly, I’m frustrated with Google dictating my income on these sites. The BANS model was easy money, why does this have to stop?

The solution? Make my own. I am a firm believer internet marketers should have basic skills in the languages of the internet. This includes programming languages like HTML/CSS/PHP. Luckily enough, I was into web design before I got into SEO =P So its time for me to get my hands dirty and do some PHP coding.

I’m going to keep very vague and non-informative about this, but I wanted to share “some” of this. For now, I’m not going to share any scripts I make. I’m doing this because it defeats the purpose of making it. I want to reduce the footprints of my sites, so a custom made script will do this for me. Nobody else out there will be using the same method as me. As hundreds of internet marketers scramble to keep up with BANS and other popular scripts, I plan to sneak in under the radar.

I cannot teach you guys how to program PHP, because it is too much to cover here and way off topic for this site. A few weeks of solid study and scripting and you can have some good knowledge on the topic. Be warned, it is for advanced people only. If you have trouble installing Wordpress, working with Cpanel, databases, permissions, or FTP…. this is not for you. If you’re going to tackle this, I suggest you start searching Google for some good tutorials.

I am working with a script to parse the RSS feed of items from eBay, which is basically an xml file. I’m taking the contents and using PHP to generate HTML ouyput. Unlike the Javascript widget, this method will actually generate textual content, titles, and images that will be readable by search engines. I will include this php script in a page with some original content to fix any duplicate content issues. I will either use a Wordpress blog or another script as a CMS. It’s basically a makeshift BANS replacement.
(I’m excited about the Markov that can be created with the script, related posts plugin and nested comments)

It will take a little more effort than setting up BANS, but I think it is well worth the time. All the traffic that was being captured by 1000’s of BANS sites is now up for grabs because they all got slapped out of Google.

I know this post isn’t “teaching” anything, but I thought I’d share the idea. I know some of my readers won’t be able to do anything with this post, but if you’re a programmer I hope I got some wheels turning. I’m working on a script right now and should be finished tonight. I’m going to launch two sites this week to see how it does. I’m going to launch both a .info and a .com and see how the domains are treated.

I think the important thing to take away is that making money online is about learning how to adjust. SEO is never constant as things fall in and out of favor at Google. As an internet marketer, you need to adjust. And instead of accepting defeat with the niche store model, I want to see how I do without the BANS footprint.

Good luck guys! Sorry I’m not sharing more but I’d be shooting myself in the foot.

If you’re looking for a way to get into SEO or to start making money online, than you should consider niche marketing. There are several ways to do internet marketing, but starting a niche website is an easy way to learn the business and quickly see success. Flagship blogs, like this one, have great long term potential, but can be a challenge for a newbie. To do well in a hard niche requires a serious amount of marketing and SEO knowledge. Because of this, it may take months or years to grab a significant enough market share. Months will go by without results and many give up. This is why niche marketing is great for beginners.

With niche marketing you are creating a site that is highly focuses on a particular niche or even a particular keyword. Court’s method of Keyword Sniping is basically a niche marketing method that is highly focused on dominating the rankings for a particular keyword. Although Court stopped supporting the method, it is an effective niche marketing strategy. It just was mixed with the idea of bad content and people might have used it for spam. Just because it was abused, does not mean it is not effective. If you use it in combination with solid keyword rich content and methods that appear clean, it can go a long way. (this site follows the keyword sniping model)

Niche marketing allows you to be a big fish in a small pond. It doesn’t take much content, usually a couple of solid posts is all a niche blog needs. The number of links you need are usually in the hundreds instead of thousands. And it allows you to easily be the “best” in the niche. You can dominate many niches in a few months from site launch, instead of a year.

When I started internet marketing, I launched a handful of niche sites. Instead of investing heavily into one site, I split it across a group of sites. In a matter of months I was making money from them. These sites now pay for all my bills and support me. I can now simply maintain them while I build this blog and other niche sites. In a few months my new sites will begin to produce income and my income will double. Also I can devote time to this site without stressing about the money it makes. This blog is around 6 months old now and has been a slow and steady project of mine. It made no money for the first 4 months. This would be enough to discourage most people. I didn’t stress it, because my niche sites provided me more than enough money. This site is now bringing in small amount of income, but is tiny compared to my niche sites. The time invested here is MUCH larger. I actually lose money on this site, but it has benefits outside of making money, but I can go into that later.

Finding a niche market is always a challenge for newbies and I don’t understand why. Honestly, I’ve never had a problem with it even when I was a newbie. I pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote down all my interests, all the stuff in my room that looked profitable, and wrote down all my girlfriends’ interests. These are all ideas for niche markets. I have ideas all the time. When I’m out and about I’m hit with ideas constantly. Sometimes I’m caught without a notepad and come home with ideas scribbled on my hand to look up when I get back to my computer. Before I start niche research I start to think about how I can make money with it. If it is a service, Adsense is possible. If it can be purchased, I consider eBay. I jump on various affiliate networks and look at possible products. If I feel like it can make money, I’ll put it down to do niche research. I come up with some keyword ideas off the top of my head, then throw them into Keyword Elite.

Historically, I am best at niche affiliate marketing. I’ve done well with eBay and ClickBank. I’ve also dabbled in Adult affiliates to test that market (I wanted to test my skills in one of the most competitive markets, and I did really well). Over the next few months I plan on playing with a few Adsense niche sites.
If you’re feeling discouraged with your SEO luck and just cannot dominate SERPS, I recommend giving niche marketing a try. I’m going to make some posts talking about how to do niche sites soon. It will go right along with my case study. (the case study is a niche site) Find a medium to long tail keyword that has low competition. Build a small highly focused site and link build hard for it. Due to its small size, you should see result quickly. This is a great way to boost your confidence and test various methods. Once you make it work on a small site, you can simply repeat your skills on a larger scale to dominate larger markets.

One of the most frustrating parts of launching a new site is filling it with content. Content production can be an annoying task, that is only beat by link building. And creating content in a niche you know very little about is even harder. Well there are several solutions for this, but you should consider looking into PLR content.

Private Label Rights content usually refers to ebooks, articles, written contextual content, scripts, and programs. Someone else makes them and you pay for the right to use them, rework them, or even sale them. It is an easy way to increase your productivity by reducing content production time.

Right now I am using Private Label Chest, which is a PLR site by Vic from BloggerUnleashed. It has several different PLR products, which are great for niche sites. There is a drip that periodically adds new content for you to use. Many of the products include mini sites, sales copy, and keywords. Vic also provide an abundant resource for mini sites, including templates, graphics, and fonts. You can use all this content in a variety of ways. Vic promotes the use of the $7 script, which allows you to sale your own digital product via a mini site. It pays directly into your paypal account, which is great.

Personally, I’ve been using the article packs for easy content and article submissions. I find it easier to rewrite an article than it is to come up with an article on my own. I simple open it up in Word and work through the article rewriting it. It is in “essence” the same as the PLR article, but is unique and no longer duplicate content. This is an easy way for me to produce content in areas I know nothing about, such as cars. I used a PLR article pack in my case study site Nashville Used Cars. I used rewritten articles to populate that blog, but also used Private Label articles to write articles for article submission via Article Marketer. I was able to quickly launch and promote a site with minimal effort and research into the car industry.

Private Label Rights are not a “must” to make money online, but they do help. I started making money simply by running niche sites where I produced my own content and articles. As my schedule fills, my time becomes more valuable and I look for ways to cut down my time. Aside from link building, content production is my most time intensive task. I can now quickly fill a site with minimal effort. If you’re at the point in your development where you’re making money and looking for ways to make sites faster, this is definitely an option. Vic is a cool guy too. He’s unique for sure, but has helped me learn this business and taught me how to make good money. So I feel comfortable suggesting this to you guys. I’m a member there myself.

Regardless of what type of site you’re running, you need a method of monetization. Most of the sites I run are monetized with affiliate marketing. Affiliates can work for almost any website model, including flagship blogs, niche blogs, niche stores, review sites, mini review sites, mini site, and one page mini sites.

One road bump of learning how to make money online is finding an affiliate to sale. I thought it’d be useful to make a list of some of the internet’s most popular affiliate programs. Of course, this doesn’t include every possible affiliate, but these are some of the bigger and better networks which will provide enough products to sale.

• Commision Junction – This is one of the largest affiliate networks .
• Clickbank – A affiliate market place with lots of ebooks, software and info products.
• Linkshare – A large affiliate network similar to Commission Junction
• Performics – Another CJ like network with well known brands.
• Pepperjam – Another great network with products being added constants.
• Ebay and Amazon also have great affiliate networks. I’ve had great luck with the Ebay affiliate network.
• Regnow – Is an affiliate network with a focus on software
• CardOffers - Is a site that focuses on credit cards.
• And a few other smaller ones include Azoogle, CPA Empire, Hydra, and XY7

I haven’t used all of these programs yet, but they all come with good reputations and are promoted by many affiliates. I’ve worked Clickbank, Pepperjam, Ebay, and Regnow. In addition I work some small site specific programs, such as HostGator and Article Marketer.

There are several other affiliates that you can promote than the ones listed here. Some I won’t go into on this site. For example, there is an entire market of adult affiliates. Including porn sites, adult toys, condoms and dating sites. There are also gambling sites that focus on things like poker. And lastly, there is the “male enhancement” type stuff where you’ll promote Viagra. This type of is taboo, so I avoid discussing it here, but there is an opportunity to make money in these niches if you do not have a moral objection. I won’t debate it here or anything. I personally consider these types of affiliates as “just another affiliate”. They are markets where money is being spent, which makes them a market where money can be made.

Check these guys out and sign up with them. Clickbank and Ebay are great and allows you to promote many different products. Make money products are highly competative, so if you’re new you might want to start with niche products that are not in the internet marketing and make money niche.

If you’re reading my blog, you are likely interested in making money online. You’re most likely looking for that sure fire method of making money. Maybe you’ve tried several methods and purchased several ebooks in the hopes to make money with your website. The vast majority of people who try to make money online fail and give up. The internet is flooded with make money blogger who spill out bad information about making real money. It will likely cost you hundreds in programs and ebooks, and the result is that you will end up in debt rather than making money.

When I started I was lucky enough to read some bloggers who gave some solid advice. I took this and combined it with some past internet experience and took off. Within a few months I had a small army of blogs that made money. I now make my full income each month from the internet. It provides me the opportunity to go to school and earn money online in my spare time. I’ve spent a fair amount of my time on this blog talking about methods I use to bring traffic to my sites. I thought it would be useful to my readers if I expanded beyond the topic of “just SEO” and actually discussed the wider topics of making money and affiliate marketing. We will still be heavily focused on SEO, since it is the primary method I use to make money. We’ll expand our discussions into how beginners can make money with blogs. Then we’ll tie it all back to search engine optimization.

There are multiple methods to make money online and I don’t consider myself an expert on them all. I will talk about what I know and what makes me money. The majority of my sites are blogs that promote affiliate products. I’ve also made money with a small network of BANS sites, which have fallen out of Google’s graces in recent months. I am expanding now into using Adsense ads a monetization method.

So you know now, I do not fall into the same cookie cutter set as most A-listers. I’m not going to push StumbleUpon and other forms of social traffic. I won’t push “content is king”. I won’t avoid gray hat topics. I will talk about solid methods that will generate traffic by using search engine optimization.
There are a few things I can tell you now before we get into any details. There is no get rich scheme. I am not “rich”, nor do I care to be. I have a flexible income source that takes care of my needs, that makes me happy. I am not famous, nor do I want to be. There is no ebook or program that will do the work for you. Making money online is work; it’s not an easy job. I prefer it over other types of work, but it is still work. Early on you will be devoting hours to boring link building and will not see the effect of this work until months down the road. “Make Money Online” blogs “can” make money, but niche blogs make more money and are much easier to dominate. This blog is my “flagship”. It’s my official blog, but makes almost no money. My nameless niche blogs make 99% of my monthly income. You can start a make money blog, but the vast majority of people will spend more time talking about MMO than actually making the money. So my advice: don’t start a make money blog until you are actually MAKING MONEY ONLINE! Start with simple niche blogs. And the last thing you should know, only 5% to 10% of people who read this will do the work needed to make money. Most people who work at this give up because they think they cannot make money with blogs, but it’s simply a lack of work (in most cases).

So how does this make money thing work? Well it’s actually really simple. I’m a type of online salesman crossed with an advertiser and marketer. I locate people with a need that are actively searching for, I fill that need with a website, I provide an answer in the form of an ad or product, I promote my site so the needy find it, when people arrive I set the site up to channel them to the “solution”, when they click the solution or buy it, I make money. It’s that simple. People and businesses pay me for sending people to them. They make money and I get a cut for the referral. I do this over and over in massive quantities.

We’ll talk about how to find a need and a solution in future posts, but let’s stop and discuss how to get traffic to your site. Other bloggers will discuss social traffic, but here at SEO Zombie we’re all about getting search engine traffic. The reason I do SEO is because it is highly targeted, is free in the sense that I don’t have to pay per visitor, and it is recurring for a long time after I do the promotion. The top ranked site in Google gets 50% to 60% of the traffic that searches for a keyword. Ranking well in search engines makes the traffic available to you. This traffic comes to your site and can convert into money in your pocket.

If this is all getting too much, don’t worry. I’ve talked about SEO multiple times on this blog and I will continue to talk about it. I just wanted to introduce my readers to the expansion of topics here at SEO Zombie. And since I do SEO, I wanted to get some good Make Money Online keywords up on the home page.

Although I’ve discussed article submissions multiple times, people still seem to have a concern about the quality of these links. Someone asked in a comment about it, so I thought it was best to address article submission in a post.

It is important for me to say that I do not have any secret special access to Google. I cannot tell you exactly how the algorithm works. What I can do is simply share my experiences and my results. I do my best to share what I know, but nothing can be guaranteed by ANYONE. Unless you are a Google engineer, you never know “for sure”. I do well at SEO and have been successful at it, so I want to share that information here. I’ve reached page 3 for the highly competitive term “SEO” in just a few month. So I’ve done some SEO work =P

The truth about link building is that Google doesn’t like it. Regardless of how you’re doing it, Google doesn’t like people manipulating SERPS. The type of link building they like the most is link bait, which is links to good content that you achieve “naturally”. I agree that quality contextual links are best, but a lot of the sites many internet marketers run are very hard to link bait.

So can you be reported and receive a penalty for using low quality links as your base? Yes you can.
Can article marketing links be consider spam links? Maybe. Depends. And sometimes yes.

If you do a mass submission of 100’s of articles to 1000’s of sites and they all link to one page with the same anchor text, you are spamming. No judgment there, but that can get you in trouble. It all comes down to what degree you take the link building.

In addition, you should have other link sources for your site. If the majority of your link profile is obviously self generated spam, than you can get slapped. I hope that you take my advice and spread out your links. Try to get them from multiple locations, and actually make an attempt to receive legit links.

But do I think article marketing will get you in trouble? No

I think article marketing should be used as a part of your link building strategy. I have submitted several articles for this site to article sites. I use them to obtain anchor back links to my home page and subpages. It allows me to vary my anchor text. It also allows me to obtain links to deep pages with long tail keywords.

In comparison to all the other types of “free for all links”, I consider article marketing to be the “most legit” and “most organic”. Of course links from the directories are FFA links, but I consider any link I obtain from someone publishing my article to be a legit link. I am receiving a link because they liked my content. They wanted to use my content and willingly used it knowing I would obtain a link.

Keep in mind that many people do article marketing and Google has adjusted their algorithm to handle it. With article marketing, you will see your articles experience duplicate content penalties. The result is that many copies of your articles will not be indexed. Google will “notice” the link, but will not pass you a significant amount of juice. In addition, article marketing links will experience the effect of diminishing returns. Some of the links are very low quality. I’ve talked before if “low quality links are worth it“. And I say yes.

You can play in the margins where Google is not perfect. First, Google isn’t 100% at duplicate content detection. They are not 100% at discounting links. The result is that some links may pass more juice than Google intended them to. Lastly, weak links does not mean the same as “no links”. Of course, these links won’t push you to page one for any competitive niche, but I have seen sites hold ranks 1 through 5 on long tail keywords using nothing but article submission links. The reason is that nobody else is receiving any juice for that keyword. Even though it’s weak juice, it is the only site working it. Once you get to the point where you’re working hard niches, you’ll know enough methods for links you won’t be stressing article marketing so much.

I’ve done like 10 article submission for this site. That is like 100 to like 1,500 links pointing to this site from article marketing. I sit firmly on page 3 for SEO. I haven’t seen any negative effect from submitting articles to article directories. I have several other link sources though. I have several links that are totally legit from people who like my content. I have friends who link to me. I have theme links. I have many comment links. I have blog roll links. Article submissions are just a small percentage of my link base. I’ve done most of the work I’m going to do on the home page with article marketing. From this point on, I will use them on specific posts where I want to work a long tail. They don’t pass massive juice to those posts, but it does help me get indexed for the keywords I want to work on those posts.

So I do suggest using Article Marketer for getting links.

Alright, so I just launched a case study and next we need to talk about link building. I owe you all a post on my wordpress set up, but I’m going to post that as more of a general “how to” that isn’t just case study specific. So it will be coming in the next few posts.

Right now we need to talk about how we’re going to dominate for this keyword. Let me tell you now, its basically old tricks with hard work. The reason most people don’t rank is because they just don’t put in the time. So I hope this is a nice way to show the results of doing work.

My competition’s links are really weak. He is anchoring, which makes him competitive, but his links are very spammy. I “should” be able to out rank him without too much work. It should be stated that no SEO can guarantee results. I cannot control Google and they can be a bitch at times. Solid SEO practices produce results “most” of the time. So lets get to work.

Article Marketing

I’ve talked about article marketing with Article Marketer many times before and we’re going to be using the service in this case study. For this site I am writing two articles that are keyword focused for used cars. I will anchor TWO links in the resource box. The first article will link to the home page with my anchor text and the to a subpage (post) with a related keyword I’d like to work. The second article will link to the home page with a variation of my keyword as the anchor and then to a subpage (post) with another related keyword I’d like to rank for.

I have now built both index links and deep links. These a low quality, yes, but partly related and anchored. I also am able to get various different anchor text, which prevents Google Bombing.

This will create anywhere between 10 to 120 links or so. The number is not always the same. I cannot be sure if all directories will approve, nor can I know how long it will take the articles to get approved. Even if they’re approved, I am not certain how long Google will take to count them.

So simply submit the articles and move on. Don’t stress it or keep checking for them.

You can submit more or less depending on your competition. I didn’t think this guy required much, so I didn’t submit much. Plus I like to link build over time, so I will be submitting a few more articles in the future.

Directories

I’ve talked about directories before. This is all about grabbing a few more links with anchors. I don’t mass submit with these, because I don’t like looking like spam. That is my method, but you can submit to these more if you want. Just check on the quality of them. I will submit to a nice batch of these because I’d like to grab 5 to 10 good links from these.

Dofollow Comment

Now its time to get out there and interact with other bloggers. Use any of the methods in this dofollow post or use a program to search for them. Find sites related to cars. Read these and leave a comment.

A few tips:

• Do not spam. Leave a legit comment. It is more likely to pass the test of time this way. You’re also more likely to get approved.
• Anchor the link with keywords if possible. If you cannot get the exact keyword, use parts of the keyword. Anchoring something like “Used Car Dude” isn’t as good as “Nashville Used Cars“, but better than “Justin”
• Look around to see if they allow anchored links. If not, just get your name. Don’t stress it. Its juice, get it. Get your anchors in other places.

Simply pull up your search tool or the list of posts you find. Comment on every single one you can. This could be 50 posts or 100 posts or even 500 posts. Just start commenting and keep working on it. You can break it up and do it over time, that’s fine. This could take hours if you need a lot of links. Luckily this niche shouldn’t take much. I’m just going to comment as much as I can. I’m not looking for a specific number. I will see how my SERPS do. If I need more, I’ll go back and grab them.

Squidoo

I’m going to create a USEFUL and content heavy Squidoo page. I will make it good enough that it can exist on its own. This way its less likely to be considered a farm link. I want the content to be HIGHLY related to my niche site. I will use this page to get a contextual anchored link. Which means I’ll link to myself in the middle of a paragraph with my exact keyword as the text.

Next I want to do some basic link building for this page. I will go grab some comments. I don’t care too much about the anchor and I don’t care too much about related. I want to get it a little juice and get it indexed.

Next I want to do a Bookmarking run on it (explained next). Here I will anchor it. I will throw it various anchor text related to my niche’s anchor text. This will assign the Squidoo page a little authority for that keyword, which then improves the link from this page.

Bookmarking Demon

Next I will do some Bookmarking runs. I suggest creating a piece of link bait at this point. This could be a helpful article, a how-to, or a toplist. These are “more likely” to receive social bookmarking links. Submitting these via BMD will look more legit. Anyone looking at your links will think that someone liked your linkbait. This creates doubt. Doubt is good! =P

I will do 1 to 3 submissions with BMD. If its a hard niche, I may do more over time slowly so it looks like my link profile is growing naturally.

BMD submissions are about 3 things

• Anchored Links. This is where you want to grab that text you want.
• Varied anchor text. Since you have full control, this is a great way to pick up varied anchor text, related anchor text, and long tails.
• Deep links. This is one of the few easy link building methods that allow you to anchor any text you want to deep pages! Take advantage of this.

Link Exchanges

Next I will try to find one or two RELATED sites that will do site wide exchanges. I’m not debating if these work or not. You keep trying without them and I’ll go get exchanges and get paid. Link exchanges work. Period. Now, not as well as one-way links, I’m not debating that. A small amount of RELATED exchanges do help. I’d rather grab some discounted exchange links than no links.

Remember these are discounted, so they’re not the best for long term success. These won’t rank you in a competitive niche. These will give you a little extra juice, which is great for low competition niche sites.

[If you have an auto / car buying / used car related niche site and want to exchange links, send me an email via my contact page. It should be working now]

Over Time

I’m a little different than some, but I like building over time. Google tracks your like links over time. I want a natural growth of links. Instead of slamming my sites with 500 links overnight and then nothing for 3 months, I like getting a few at a time. The progress is slower, but it keeps you under the radar. That is how I do it and you can do it differently.

I’ve already done article submissions and am waiting on those. Next I will work on commenting slowly. I will also create the Squidoo page. I won’t link it up right away though. I’ll then go grab some directories. Do some more commenting. Grab so exchanges when I can. Do some commenting. Link up the Squidoo page. Then do a BMD run. I’ll then wait a bit, do another article or two, some more comments, and another BMD run. I like doing BMD later in the game because it doesn’t look natural for a brand new site with little content to get social bookmarks its first week?? Like who the hell is going to find the page? And who would truly bookmark it? I want it to appear natural. (that’s just me)

I Will Follow This

I will do exactly what I’ve outlined here. I won’t do any secret special Voodoo. If I change my plan, I will let you know. This stuff isn’t hard or new, I just want to show you that it works. We will see the results over time and adjust.

It is possible someone might cause trouble for this site. If Google doesn’t like this case study, it could end up with a penality. So I cannot promise the site will be succesful. I’m on page 3 for SEO in 6 months with a brand new domain, that’s not bad. So I’m sure I can dominate the Nashville Used Cars niche =P

So let’s get down and dirty with some higher level SEO. This isn’t too complicated, but more theoretical than “go do this”. Let’s talk about link juice and exactly what is going on when you do linking.

Link juice is an easy way to visualize the concept of website authority and how links pass authority. Imagine a site as a container that holds a fixed amount of authority. This authority could be represented as a volume of liquid. This liquid is “Google Juice“. It is a “volume” of authority that your site and pages hold. Each site has a fixed amount of juice at any given time. Google juice is constantly changing, but we’re taking a “snapshot” to look at it at a particular instance. At this point the site has a set amount and it is distributed through the pages. You could consider pages as cups that hold this link juice. When a page links to another page it creates a connection between the two cups and juice flows out of one and into another. Visually this is the idea of page authority and how that authority is passed from page to page.

A New Site

Once you launch a site and are index you are assigned a minimumal amount of juice. It’s enough to get you indexed, but not really enough to rank for any competitive keyword. Once you get links, they start to pass juice to you. The pages on your site start to fill up and your site as a whole fills up with juice. The image below is a visual representation of this.

The top square represents a new site. The container is blue and the Google Juice is green. As you can see, the site has no links and very little juice. The second set shows linking. Once sites link to this new site, they pass juice to it via links (the arrows). The result is that the site fills up and now has more Google Juice.

Out Going Links

In this “snapshot” example, a page has a finite amount of juice to pass. If it is only linking (out) to one page, it can potentially pass full juice. If that same page links to more pages, it must split the juice that it passes! This is why people say not to look for links with many outgoing links. Here is a brief example.

As you can see in the first set, the site is able to pass a significant amount of juice to each of the pages it links to. In the next set, it is linking to three sites instead of two. Since it can only pass a finite amount of juice, the amount of juice each individual page gets is less! It’s like splitting a pie 12 ways instead of 6!

Link Exchanges

You hear constantly that one-way links are better than two-way link exchanges, but why? We’ll let’s look at the following example.

In the first set of sites, we’re look at a one-way link. The first site is linking directly to the second site. This is passing juice one-way and the second site benefits.
In the second set of sites, they have exchanged links. This time site A is passing juice to site B, but site B is now passing juice to site A. So site A lost juice and site B gained it, but then site B lost some juice and passed it to site A. The net result is that each site has a minor increase in juice. The increase is minor compared to the increase created by one-way links.

The Role of Link Location

I’m sure you’ve heard that a contextual related link is the best type of link and let’s look at why. Below is a diagram of a traditional blog page. On the right are examples of how much juice would be passed by a link in that location. In this case, the original Google Juice is shown in green and the increase is shown as the same color as the page location.

Google evaluates a link based off its location. If it is placed in a discounted location, it may only be able to receive a percentage of the juice. Links that appear in the “meat” of the site, which is the blog post, is going to receive the most link juice. Google likes solid, organic, contextual links that are related.

Links in the “comment section” and “side bar”, which are shown in blue and light gray respectively, are discounted zones. This links count, but much less than a contextual link. So although dofollow comment links and blogroll links help, they do not have the same effect as contextual links.

Footer links, which appear at the bottom, are generally highly discounted. These links are unnatural and not organic. If a link appears here, it is usually a “designed by” link, some form of credit, an SEO link, or a paid link.

Sculpting PageRank with Google Juice

If you’ve been in SEO for a while, you’ve heard of PR sculpting. If you’re new, it’s pretty simple. As you know, links act as channels through which Google Juice can flow. If you block this channel, you can horde the juice into that cup (webpage). This extra juice can now be redistributed through your site.

It is important to know that Google juice not only flows from site to site, but can flow from page to page within a site! You have a set volume of juice in your site and each page is a cup, but the cups can have different amounts. You can change these amounts by turning on and off the channels, which will block the flow of juice.

So how do we block it? Nofollow! =P

Nofollow is basically a dam for that link and blocks juice from flowing. Let’s look at an example.

This is a “normal” site with no PageRank sculpting activities. As you can see juice flows down from the index, which is the primary level, down to the secondary level, which is usually category type pages, down to the tertiary level, which are usually individual pages.

You can see examples of things we’ve mentioned previously. Looking at the tertiary level from left to right. The first is getting great juice because it is the only page getting a link from its secondary page. The second and third pages, from left to right, are getting less juice because their secondary page is passing out three links. So this juice is now split three ways. The forth page has more juice because it is getting links from two different secondary pages. The fifth page is getting good juice, but less than page one because it’s secondary page is passing out two links.
This is a very simplistic way to look at the distribution of Google Juice on a site. Next we’re going to look at what effect nofollows have on this distribution. Below is an example.

In this example we have nofollowed two of the links off the home page (in red). The result is that no juice is being passed via those links. Those pages, and the pages that receive juice from those pages, have significantly less juice! The result is that two secondary pages and two tertiary pages have little to no juice.

It is important to understand: THE VOLUME OF JUICE DID NOT CHANGE!

The site still has the same amount of juice. The juice that was in the now empty pages must now be passed to other pages. More juice collects in the index, which allows the one secondary page to receive a significant increase in Google Juice. This allows the three middle tertiary pages to receive more juice! Pages one and five, from left and right, will now have a harder time ranking, but pages two, three, and four will now have more juice to obtain their desired rankings!

So That’s What’s Happening!

I hope that I explained that well. That’s kind of what is happening when you get links. It’s a little too high level for some, but don’t worry. All this results in is “go get links”. I think it’s good to understand the why behind what I’m doing because I can better evaluate links. What is actually happening at Google is a massive probability calculation, but this is a much easier way to “visualize” what is happening. I hope that helps. I haven’t done a post like this in a while, that was fun =P
Thanks for reading.