Make Money on the Internet

10 Internet Marketers you Must Pay Attention To!

admin — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 11:01:43 +0000

If you’re not currently using an RSS reader to read about everything that’s happening in your industry then you’re missing a great mechanism of getting exposure to the very information that you’re interested in and need to know about. (If you want to know what an RSS reader is, how it works etc. then click here to see a video explanation.)

This post isn’t about RSS readers, though – it’s merely a follow on from Pat’s “Reader’s Choice” post (that I came across through my reader!) – All about who you follow in blogosphere.

Your Attention is Valuable – Don’t Waste It!

There are so many distractions online and differentiating between valuable content and just noise can be a bloody hard task!

So, I’ve created a list of people who are absolutely worth listening to – add them to your RSS reader and digest the excellent content that they produce:

Internet Marketers Who Deserve Attention:

As an internet marketer, If you spend an hour each week going through the posts of these 10 people listed above then that’s time well spent!

Thanks to Pat for the inspiration with this!

Let me know in the comments box below who your favourite bloggers and internet marketers are!

What’s an RSS Reader? / How does it Work?

How to Make your First $1000 Online

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:45:53 +0000

There seems to be a barrier that prevents the majority of internet marketers from getting to their first $1000 online. A while ago I did a survey to my list and collected around 200 data points of information to find out where people were at with their business.

The results were really quite astounding.

Over 50% hadn’t made anything.

Over 75% hadn’t made their first $1,000.

Less than 7% were making more than $500 per month.

What Makes for Such Poor Statistics?

I see a common path for internet marketing beginners when they stumble into this whole “make money online” industry:-

They’re sold the notion that making money online is a get rich quick process
They get scammed having bought a “push button” product
They realise they got scammed and go hunting for answers
They build a few sites, build a few backlinks wait a week and don’t make any money
They spend their whole time on forums looking for the “answer”
And then it seems to click….

There is a common misconception that those who are successful online are cleverer, or have some kind of inside information that is the missing part of the jigsaw. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

When I look around at the people who are making the most amount of money online – the bright ones aren’t listed there. It’s the ones who have the ability to stick it out – who take a system and follow it relentlessly – who overcome barriers and keep on going.

So here’s the Simple Process to Make your First $1000 Online

This is the fool proof strategy that anybody can use to generate an income.

Firstly – find a market in which people are already spending money. Don’t try and create a niche that doesn’t already exist – that’s a high risk strategy and may lead to spending a serious amount of time and effort for no return.

Secondly – position yourself in that market. Look at what your competitors are doing / selling to make money – use this information to help figure out what people are looking for.

Thirdly – don’t stop building and promoting that site until it is making money. The most important aspect of the whole process – you only get paid at 100%. Building a site for a few weeks and then giving up is NOT the answer. Develop that site until it gains traction – whether that be from free or paid traffic.

Finally – optimise your conversions. Figure out how you can make more per visitor. This could involve testing, adding upsells, creating an email marketing funnel to improve the sales funnel – whatever!

The whole process may take a few months. It may take up to a year. This system works beautifully to the point that every niche you enter, you will make a decent amount of money from. You’re not doing anything clever, under the radar etc. You just work the system and you see it through!

I’m pretty passionate about this whole internet marketing, make money online thing – so I’ll be posting about ways in which you can build out this whole process over the coming weeks, right the way from how to make sure that the market pays, to muscling your way into the most competitive of niches.

This week is the first of my free webinar series on how anyone can generate an income online with this simple process – It’s going to take place this Sunday, July 31st – and will offer a heckuva lot of free, valuable content. Click here to sign up now

Is Having a Top Google Ranking Even Worth it Any More? Interesting Case Study Within!

admin — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:48:23 +0000

Here’s the write up for an interesting little experiment comparing the click through rates of a #1 organic search listing and a PPC ad for the same keyword. I wanted to see which would get more traffic, the results are below!

If you looked at a typical Google results screen 5 years ago and compared it to a typical results screen now then you’d probably notice some rather large changes:

5 Years ago:

Now:

These screenshots aren’t actual representations of what the search results look like because unfortunately I don’t have any snapshots of Google five years ago, but they’re a fairly accurate representation.

The areas in Red are either Google Ads, Google products listings or other stuff that Google has chucked in that will worsen the click through rate of an organic listing.

The areas in Green are our sites – the sites that we’ve spent ages SEO’ing…

Notice how the “Now” screenshot contains a heck of a lot more red than it does green

That’s right – it seems every day there are new “Google properties” added to filter clicks away from natural search listings to other areas of the Google network.

So, How much has this affected our Click Through Rate?

A while ago I spent a long time researching, testing and writing about how it was reasonable to expect a 56% click through rate from being in the #1 position in Google. I don’t think those figures are accurate any more though…

Firstly, I’d like to draw your attention to a great recent study carried out by a company called Slingshot who claim that the top result today only gets a click through rate of 18.2%! That’s a far cry from the 52% that was reported a number of years ago from the SEOResearcher web site.

So I set out to do some research. I wanted to know whether a top listing in the search results would attract more clicks than a top listing in the PPC results for the same keyword.

What Gets more Clicks – A Top Listing PPC ad or #1 in Google Natural Search?

This experiment was pretty basic. A chose a two work keyword that attracted 6600 searches per month according to the Google keyword tool.

Then I SEO’d one of my sites until it reached top spot in the UK version of the Google results.

I then ran a PPC with a very high bid price (to achieve position #1 consistently) set on exact match for the same keyword.

The PPC ad consistently appeared in the Google ad position that’s above the natural search results, rather than to the right. I’ve noticed that you can get massively higher CTR by getting your ads listed in that position, especially with sitelinks enabled.

The Results of My Little Case Study

Sreenshot of Analytics for SEO Traffic:

Sreenshot of Analytics for PPC Traffic:

Honestly, these results shocked me big time.

This means that despite having #1 in the organic SERPs, I was able to get 184% of the clicks from my PPC listing than I could from my free listing.

That’s pretty crazy.

Now there could be a number of reasons for this:

Firstly, my PPC ad had quite an epicly high click through rate for this particular keyword:-

Part of this high CTR was undoubtedly because my PPC ad had a nice bunch of sitelinks underneath it.

Also, the title for my organic listing may not have been optimal for a high click through rate – it wasn’t a bad snippet, I just haven’t tested it to see if it could be improved.

Finally, this experiment was performed in a competitive niche with a full spectrum of 3 PPC ads above the natural listings which will undoubtedly dilute the CTR for the organic listing. However, there weren’t any Google places or product placements to dilute natural traffic. I expect the experiment would have yielded different results if all ads were in the ad position located to the right side of the natural listings where they generally attract a lower CTR.

In Conclusion

I’m finding it hard to argue that a PPC ad with aggressive bidding, when done correctly, can easily outperform the #1 listing in Google natural search.

It’s certainly making me consider introducing new PPC channels to a number of my sites because I can see that I must be missing out on a lot of volume in my competitive niches.

OF course SEO isn’t dying – I just write that to attract your attention But, you have to admit, it’s pretty interesting to just how much volume PPC ads can take from the natural results!

Have you noticed this yourselves / have any data to report? I’d love to hear from you in the comments box below!

Keyword Research – Knowing Your Data (Surprising Case Study)

admin — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:52:14 +0000

Bold Statement:- The accuracy of data from keyword research tools is not great! Especially with regards to estimating search traffic volumes.

It’s been reported that the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is up to 100% out on the search volumes that it reports.

This is massive – this can be the difference between a niche worth hitting and a niche that’s just a waste of time. And, especially when it can take a couple of months to rank a new site, is it worth taking stabs in the dark?

My Keyword Research Case Study

So here’s what I did to prove that the numbers weren’t stacking up:-

i) I chose a variety of keywords and grabbed their exact match search volumes from the Google Adwords keyword tool.

ii) I ran an Adwords campaign at 100% impression share with the same keywords on exact match for 6 months.

Here are my results with two of the highest volume keywords. For obvious reasons I’ve removed the actual keyword from the graphics:-

Keyword 1

Google Adwords Search Volume Prediction:

Actual 6 month results:

So, The keyword tool estimated 22,200 x 6 searches in 6 months = 133200

Actual exact searches = 221,345

That’s a massive 60% extra actual searches than estimated.

Keyword 2

Google Adwords Search Volume Prediction:

Actual 6 Month Results:

So, the keyword tool estimated 5,400 x 6 search in 6 months = 32,400

Actual exact searches = 14,053

In this instance the keyword tool is over estimating actual search volume by 230%!

Impression Share

The ads weren’t running at 100% impression share, but they were pretty damn close:

In Conclusion

Take the results you get from keyword research tools with a pinch of salt. All the keyword tools I know of read search data from the Google API – but I’ve just shown you that these numbers can be wildly inaccurate.

If you’re embarking on a full scale project and want to get some actual keyword and market research done then drop $500-$1000 on creating a few Adwords campaigns and get some real and exact data to make solid decisions from.

That’s not to say keyword research tools are worthless – but, as I mentioned before, you need to understand your data!

Embedding YouTube “Clean Style” – YouTube iFrame Code

admin — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 10:35:40 +0000

I wanted somewhere to quickly access the iFrame code to embed YouTube videos without the border, player controls, related videos and all the other jazz that comes as standard….Similar to this:-

So I thought I’d just add it to my blog!

Here’s the normal embed code for the above video:-

And here’s the modified code (with modified elements in bold)

?rel=0&controls=0&border=0&egm=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0"&frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

And if you want to autoplay it:-

?rel=0&controls=0&border=0&egm=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0&autoplay=1"&frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

Here’s a full list of YouTube Embed Parameters (opens new window).

This, of course, only works until they ban your account for no discernable reason!

Understanding the Accuracy and Limitations of Google Analytics

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 18:47:48 +0000

Google analytics is free, it gives us a great deal of information that we, as webmasters, can use to assess site performance, keywords and on-site metrics that indicate user engagement.

However, any data is only truly useful if you understand exactly where it’s come from, how it’s been compiled and what elements of it could be inaccurate. Here are some important things to know when use GA to measure your site performance:-

Javascript Reliant – Analytics uses “page tagging”. Webmasters have to add javascript snippets to every page they want tracked. Javascript code is executed on the visitor’s machine and can easily be blocked. Around 5% of internet browsers blocked javascript in 2008 – these visitors go unaccounted for with GA.

On top of this an unknown percentage of users have extensions such as “Adblock” that also blocks the GA tracking code. Furthermore only a small percentage of mobile users have phones that can execute javascript properly.
Cookie Reliant – Analytics usually drops 4 cookies (cookies are simply small files of information about the visitor’s activities) to help determine unique visitors, referral paths and other useful information.
Cookies are dropped and stored on the client machine until the cookie either expires or is removed. I haven’t been able to find any reliable information about the %age of users that block cookies, but I’d say around 10% do. If cookies aren’t accepted, or are refreshed, GA will either not report the visitor or provide false information (ie. count the visitor as a unique when in actual fact they are a return visitor).
No Spider Information – It is really important for a webmaster to understand how search engines are crawling their site. Information about the regularity and depth of site crawls can help understand effectiveness of site structure and what content is deemed “important” by the search engines. Unfortunately Google doesn’t provide any of this information or allow webmasters to upload log files containing the info.
Analytics Under Reports – Webmasters often report that Google Analytics under reports traffic statistics. The client side javascript/cookie based model is inherently less accurate than a server side tracking option such as using a log file analyser.
Reliance on Google – One of the biggest issues that companies face with SaaS (Software as a Service) based tools is that of reliance and data security. By using Google’s tracking software your data is stored on somebody else’s servers and can be removed/deleted at any point in time. It would be a real kick in the nadgers to lose years and years worth of web analytics data – and this has to be considered a risk.
Stats aren’t compiled at Real Time – Analytics used to update once a day…nowadays it usually updates multiple times a day – but the data isn’t real time. If you operate a site with lots of traffic I’d recommend using a real time tracking solution to understand exactly what’s happening on your site at any given point in time.

Don’t Get Me Wrong – Analytics is Great…

It’s very powerful, free, has incredible extended functionality, conversion tracking, integrates with Adwords and Adsense, allows report creation, segments, filtering etc etc. It’s just important that we, as webmasters, understand just how accurate the data in Google Analytics is and what may be missed out!

100% – The point at which you get Paid

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:11:58 +0000

Each time you start a new project, you’re back on the start line. And unlike the Olympics, it’s not even a fair race – everyone else is already 50 meters down the track.

Most of the time, this means you’ve got some serious catching up to do before you can succeed from your endeavours. Not only that, but you have to get through the dip – the thing that separates the med school students from the doctors and, of course, the failing internet marketers from the successful ones.

Stories Hurt

We’re constantly being sold this notion that making a living online is a quick and easy endeavour. Our immediate reaction to quick and easy is one of jubilation: “Yes! Anyone can do it and I don’t have to risk much because it won’t take long!” – Marketers tell us what we want to hear, and we lap it up like a kitten does a bowl of milk.

Ironically, though, quick and easy is the worst type of business to have: One with a low barrier to entry, high competition and often ever diminishing potential for return.

How about Another Approach?

A far better approach is to create something that’s hard to replicate. Instead of creating a plain affiliate site, build a community. Instead of throwing a few junk articles on to a WordPress blog, consider testing conversions, click throughs and other metrics to the point where you can drive paid traffic and make an ROI.

These approaches take longer and will inevitably involve failing a few times – expect failure – embrace it and continue moving forward. These sites can’t be built in a weekend. Often six months is pushing it.

There is really no money in building half-assed projects in the long term. In an era of addon domains, it’s all too easy to start again if things are going too slowly, or you get bored. Pay GoDaddy their $12 and wack up another blog – that’ll do it!

Just remember – each time you get back on that start line, you are the furthest point you can possibly be from succeeding.

This isn’t Sexy at All. But It’ll Probably Make you More Money!

admin — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:06:36 +0000

I was in two minds about whether to write about this… I’ve been spending some time figuring out what type of blog posts people react to, share, and seem to enjoy the most. And, this post is pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum of what seems to make a “popular” blog post.

Nevertheless, I’ll blog about it anyway. Why? Because it’ll make you more money if you implement it. And that’s what this game is all about!

So, Here’s the Problem…

One of the best things about having an internet marketing business is that you can see what works and scale it up. Especially when it comes to traffic – the lifeblood of an online business – how good would it be to know how an article performed, or which email in your follow-up series is converting your offer?

Therein lies the problem – most of us use Google Analytics – a fantastic free tool! But not without its limitations…

Ever noticed that you’re getting a lot of “direct traffic” before?

Well, if so, here’s something you may want to consider…

The large majority of email traffic will be reported as “direct” traffic in your analytics account:-

And, let’s say you create a free e-book and use that as a giveaway to build your list. And then you give people the rights to giveaway your free e-book. Any links within the PDF file that points back to your site will be counted as direct traffic!…

Twitter – the majority is reported as “direct traffic”. Any articles you’ve distributed that are picked up in ezines – “direct traffic”. Email signatures – “direct traffic”. Visits from the “http” protocol to “https” and vice versa – “direct traffic”. Visits that pass through some302 redirects – “direct traffic”.

Arggh – you get the message! Direct Traffic Sucks!

I don’t know about you, but if I syndicate an article through The Phantom Writers and it gets picked up in an ezine – I’d like to know exactly why I’m getting a spike in traffic and not have it reported incorrectly as “direct traffic”.

And, wouldn’t it be good if you could submit a press release through PRWeb.com and be able to report the exact sum total of visitors that each and every syndicated instance of that press release generates?

That’s the kind of reporting helps you see what is really working, so you know what to do more of and what is just wasting your time.

Well, here’s the good news….

Analytics Can Do this for You, It’s Called URL Tagging

In instances where Google doesn’t have any header information to report with, you can use what’s called a tagged URL…

This basically tells google how you want your traffic reported.

So, here’s how you create a tagged URL:

1) Take your landing page URL – I’ll use my blog as an example:

http://www.paulmccarthy.co.uk

2) Apend some Google variables like this:

http://www.paulmccarthy.co.uk/?utm_source=newsletter10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=blogging&utm_campaign=Email%2BFollowups

Et, voila – no more direct traffic rubbish!

Now, whenever somebody clicks that link, it will report the following information in my Analytics account:-

If you use the Google Analytics tag builder, you can enter your destination URL at the top there – then you enter all the variables (Campaign source, medium, term, content and name) into their respective fields and the horrible looking, elongated URL that you need to use is spit out at the bottom!

Now you can track email signatures, press releases, PDF books, email follow up series – anything that you wish to distribute on the web – and have that reported accurately in your Google Analytics account.

I hope you find that as useful as I do!

Taking a New Site from 0 to 100 Visitors a Day from Google

admin — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 10:14:27 +0000

If every time you entered a new niche you knew with a sense of certainty that you get 100 visitors of free traffic per day within the first 6 months then that’d be pretty good right?

That’s what this post is all about – it’s a brain dump of what I’ve done to get new sites to that first milestone.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know that actually I pretty much hate SEO – I’m too impatient and it’s too volatile – but I can’t deny that getting 100 visitors to your niche site every day is valuable!

Case Study: Cloudhosting.co.uk

This is actually a site I built when I was a partner in the web hosting company Krystal (these guys are thoroughly recommended by the way).

The site has ranked top for the term “cloud hosting” and numerous other phrases like “cloud hosting providers” for the UK version of Google’s search results above multi million dollar companies like Rackspace.

Obviously, web hosting is a lucrative sector, so even though the site isn’t being monetised currently (I’ll be working on that over the next few weeks) it is at the 100 hundred highly targeted visitors per day mark and has been since it was about 4 months old. It also currently holds a PageRank 5 which means it’s “important” in Google’s eyes.

Having taken about 6 months off from building niche sites, I recently created another one for the “Watch Me Make Money” series on Leoandpaul.com that’s around 3 months old and is in the top 10 for its main keyword of 6,600 searches and numerous other key phrases. I don’t want to mention the domain on here because it’ll warp the analytics traffic stats, but I’ll reveal it in the future.

So I’ll use my experiences from these two sites (and a couple of others that I won’t mention because they’re my little secret!) to describe how I go about buying a new domain and developing it to the point where it gets 100 visitors per day…

Part 1 – How to be Certain your Ranking is Valuable

Who likes wasting time? Yeah, me neither. SEO can be a HUGE waste of time if you mess up. Imagine optimising your site for a keyword that gets loads of search volume but is 100% non commercial…

I’ve done this before – see my film site spittinflicks.com. I must have built this site about five years ago before I really knew what I was doing – I optimised the site for the keyword “film forum” and it ranks #1 or #2 in Google for that key phrase. Unfortunately, the value of this keyword is next to nothing – it was a complete waste of my time – lesson well and truly learned! Still, I now have a popular film community at least (if you like films then make me an offer! ).

The bottom line is this: Before you undertake any kind of project where your main source of traffic is the search engines you should roughly know the value of ranking for your target keywords. In a game where it can take months to get ranked – are you willing to risk not knowing how valuable a ranking actually is?

Here’s how I go about measuring the worth of a natural listing:-

1. Estimate total traffic for that Keyword

If I’m lazy, I’ll use the Adwords keyword tool (set to “exact match” and to the location that I’m targeting – ie. for Cloud hosting that was the “UK”) and grab the estimated traffic amounts from there.

If I’m taking on an extensive project and want reliable data then I’ll invest a bit of cash in an Adwords campaign and run an ad at 100% impression share. Impression share is an Adwords metric that shows you the percentage of how often your ad is displayed against the total possible displays for any given period.

You can only ever lose impression share due to “bid price” or “budget” so I make sure to bid high and have a nice high budget. Of course, I don’t want anyone to click my ads because that costs me money – so I make my ad copy unattractive and run the campaign for a few days.

As a side note: On adwords It is not a straight forward auction process whereby the highest bidder gets the highest ad positions. Your bid “score” is determined by a combination of your “quality score” multiplied by your bid price. And it is the bid “score” that is used to determine where your ads are ranked in relation to the competition.

To keep a low bid price, you need a high quality score. There are many things that go into getting a high quality score – relevance, ad click through rate, account history etc. Now, as I mentioned before – I don’t want a high click through rate because clicks cost me money. Therefore my low click through rate may lower my quality score, which means my bid price has to be higher to remain on the front page for the 100% impression share that I’m after.

At the end of this little test I have some reliable data that will tell me exactly how many searches are occuring for any keyword.

2. Consider the Click Through Percentage on Natural Listings

So, now we have an idea of the true search volume for any given keyword we can estimate how many clicks a top 3 position will generate for us.

Thanks to SEO Researcher we have a study showing the likelihood that someone will click your link in relation to organic positioning in the search engines:-

This data trends very closely with AOL’s leakage of click through data so it would appear to be a pretty accurate representation of what actually happens.

Notice how the #1 position gets over 4 times more clicks than #2 and over 5 times more clicks than #3. It just goes to show that it is worth going after that number one position!

When I enter a niche, I’m confident that I will get top spot – so I take the 56.34% as a guideline. If you aim for a top 3 position then take 14.72% and so on…

Total traffic to your site = searches * estimated click through rate

The final part of this analysis stage is to place a dollar value on a visitor.

How much is a Visitor Worth?

100 visitors for the keyword “why is the sky blue?” is worth nothing. 100 visitors for the keyword “extended stay hotels” is worth considerably more:-

Yeah, that’s right – advertisers are paying on average $157 per click to get someone to their web site for that keyword.

So, the first thing I always do is try and place a figure on how much 100 visitors for any given keyword is worth…

For cloudhosting.co.uk this wasn’t possible. Here’s why: Cloud hosting was something new that not many people knew about when I created the site and, even today, the cost per click data for the term “cloud hosting” is way off base:-

This is why you sometimes need to take the estimated average cost per click in the Google Adwords Keyword tool with a pinch of salt. If I take the same keyword “cloud hosting” and put it into Google, just look how many ads there are:-

As I mentioned earlier, Google’s advertising platform (Adwords) is a bidding platform. Essentially, you bid for position. So with so many advertisers bidding on the keyword “cloud hosting” you can be sure of two things:-

The average cost per click is a lot more than £0.05
There’s money to be made from this keyword

Having worked in the hosting industry, I can tell you that people tend to choose a host and stick with them for a long period of time. A lot of these advertisers will be willing to sacrafice any year 1 margins because they know that they’ll make the money on the rebills. In other words, they’re likely bidding a couple of dollars per click at least.

Of course, if you’ve run the Adwords campaign back in step 1 then you’ll have a rough idea of what people are paying for the traffic.

Total keyword value = incoming clicks from Google x estimated visitor value

That’s it – that’s how you make sure that you’ll be able to monetise traffic when you get your #1 Google listing!

A Final thing to Consider when Estimating Search Traffic Volume

Long tail keywords will usually make the majority of your traffic. In other words, if you ranked for “make money online”, you’d get search traffic from people typing in “make money online writing articles”. And it’s extremely difficult to accurately predict how much traffic a #1 ranking will truly get you because of this long tail trend.

To give you an idea, an article on Search Engine Journal reported that 78% of visitors came from long tail keywords as opposed to head keywords in their small analysis.

Part 2 – Buy an Exact Match Domain if Possible

Let’s say your ranking your site around one major keyword and a bunch of sub keywords – having an exact match domain for your main keyword helps you to get ranked, without doubt.

This is especially true on Bing – their weighting towards having keywords in the domain name is much higher than that of Google. It’s surprisingly easy to get an a site ranked if you have an EMD.

Obviously, if an exact match domain isn’t available or you want to brand your site with something more memorable than howtotrainyourpetalsatian.com then just go for it. With over 300 ranking factors in Google an exact match domain is just a drop in the ocean.

Part 3 – Nurture your Immature Site!

A new site takes time to rank highly for half competitive keywords. Some people say it’s a sandbox, some people say it’s a filter; quite frankly I don’t know what it is – but it’s there.

And when you develop a new site, you have to be pretty careful about what you’re doing and the kind of signals you’re sending to Google. I have had too many sites “nuked” from ranking because I rushed things in the first 4 – 8 weeks.

On one particular occasion, I built a hotel portal for my local town and aggressively developed the site in its first 8 weeks….

I over optimised the landing pages with my main keyword in the title, h1, h2, meta, content and internal links
I built backlinks like a nutter through mass article submissions
I created backlinks from other sites in my portfolio with PR of 4 or above (bad idea!)
The anchor text of my backlinks were my main key phrase (no anchor text diversity)

The result of this extremely ambitious site development campaign wasn’t pretty. Google applied an algorithmic filter to my site – all pages across the domain had poor rankings. If you typed in my main keyword “swindon hotels” into the search engine a deep content page showed up before my homepage – if this ever happens to your site then you’re probably being subject to a filter. Either that or your SEO plain sucks!

This blog you’re reading now, however, had a PageRank of 4 around 1 month after the domain was registered and seemed to get half decent rankings pretty quickly (note that it has since dropped to a PageRank 2!). So, to my mind, this means there are ways of sending the “right” signals to Google so that you can rank quickly…

The Google TrustRank Thing…

You’ve probably heard of PageRank but you may not have necessarily heard ot TrustRank. It’s something I’ve been looking at extensively over the past 6 months to try and figure out how important it is in rankings…

Verdict: It’s very important.

Google wants to rank “trustworthy” sites. But how the heck do you do that without human intervention? Well, there are patents filed that suggest Google is using “trust by association” factors to determine whether a site is likely to be spammy or not…

It works like this. The big G manually pick a sample of say 200 sites that they know are highly trustworthy. Sites like BBC news, CNN, Harvard university et al. On these sites there is literally 0% chance of spam. I have no idea of the list, but it’s not too hard to imagine what type of sites would be.

Once this sample set has been selected, the theory goes like this: if you’re linked to from one of these sites then that’s a major trust boost for your site. The more hops your site is from a “trusted” domain, the less trustworthy your site is, and vice versa.

There’s obviously a heck of a lot more to it than this, the basic principle remains true. And this is why SEO’s are trying to get their links on .edu, .gov and other “trustworthy” domains.

So, anyway, my point is this:-

If you can get contextual, editorial links from trustworthy domains then it’s seemingly easy to overcome this new site filter.

The question is, how do you get these links?

Old Style Article Marketing Doesn’t Cut The Mustard!

The average internet marketer does what I call “old style” article marketing. They’ll put their content on the big article directories and consider that a good way to build backlinks.

Unfortunately, most of these links are pretty weak in value. Sure they have some effect, but mass submission of articles to article directories is certainly not sending the right signals to the big G.

A better approach is to find a list of publishers in your niche and find ways of getting your content on their site. The higher the authority of the publisher, the better.

In the internet marketing niche, you’d put your content on places like http://www.sitepronews.com and http://www.quickonlinetips.com.

I’m currently doing a lot of work in the travel industry building links for a popular holiday destination and over the course of about an hour I came up with almost 50 publishers that were looking for content for their site. These links are high value, trustworthy, contextual, will last the test of time and can help bolster your rankings in a big way.

Another way of getting links from high trust domains is to write a press release. And I mean submit a proper press release rather than using junky sites like http://www.prlog.org.

These do cost, however – the one I like to use is prweb.com and it costs around $200 per submission. I submitted a press release in February and it received widespread publication and did wonders for the link popularity of the site I was working on.

Create Keyword Driven Incredible Content…

*Yawn* – I know – the whole “create amazing content” spiel again.

But now, more than ever, it’s important that you create unique content that’s valuable. The farmer update has made it so that just a small subset of poor content on your site can have repercussions for the whole domain.

I personally like to write quite lengthy articles and include some form of multimedia where possible, simply because in many instances this is a more valuable experience for the end user and that’s something Google may give credit for.

Obviously, if you’re trying to rank a piece of content in Google then you’re going to need to perform keyword research. Keyword research alone is a 10,000 word topic so I won’t go into too much detail in this post, but you’ll want to dig up a bunch of keywords that you think is valuable for rankings.

When you’re creating your content for these keywords you need to be careful of overoptimisation. 5 years ago standard SEO practice was to put the keyword in all “important” areas of the page – so the title, h1, meta description and on the page a number of times. One thing I’ve noticed recently is that it’s pretty easy to overdo your on-site optimisation (as I mentioned with my swindon-hotels.org site).

My advice is to definitely include your keyword in your title – but don’t make it your complete title (for example “Alsatian dog training – the 30 day Success Program” might be a good title for the keyword “Alsatain dog training”). I tend to follow a similar pattern for the h1 tag. Of course, mention the keyword a few times in the post body aswell.

Remember, Google ranks pages – you need to have a unique keyword for each page you’re focusing on ranking. I always have my main keyword (for the homepage) and then 5 additional keywords to target aswell. I’ll usually grow my keyword list over time, but this is a decent starting point.

Pay Attention to your Site Structure

This is what a site usually looks like:-

You have your homepage, a series of sitewide sub-pages and then posts.

Google indexes content by following links. The more links it has to follow to reach a piece of content on your domain, the lower the likelihood of:-

That piece of content getting indexed
That piece of content ranking highly

Please understand – those two points are massive generalisations – with enough link popularity you can get any page at any level to rank well…But site structure can facilitate rankings for your main pages.

Obviously your main keyword is your homepage. I recommend that the sub-pages (ie. those are linked to sitewide) target your secondary keywords.

This is a simple way of saying to the big G “these pages are important”.

Submit your Sitemap

Sitemaps are exciting bits of content:-

Can you detect the sarcasm?

Sitemaps aren’t meant for humans – they’re for search engines. It’s simply an easy way of letting the search engines know the structure of your site and what content should be indexed.

Most blogging platforms will allow you to install a plugin or a module so your sitemap is automatically generated. Here’s my beautiful sitemap!.

It’s always good practise to create a Google webmaster tools account and submit your sitemap through there:

Make your site Search Engine Friendly…

I won’t talk too long about this because this is farily basic stuff, but here’s a quick checklist for you:-

Enable Search engine friendly URLs
Include Meta tags on all pages
Make sure pages load fast (chat with your web host if there are concerns)
Monitor webmaster tools account for any crawl errors

I’ll elaborate slightly more on that last one. In Google webmaster tools any crawl errors that Google experiences is reported in the “Diagnostics” section:-

It’s always worth checking in from time to time to make sure that there aren’t any significant problems with your site…

You can also see Google’s view of page load times in the “Site Performance” section:-

Build Link Popularity to your Site

We’re now at the stage where we can start the main backlinking. You’ve already built a few high trust links back to your site (through guest posting and press release submission) so now we can start doing other forms of “lower quality” link building.

My approach to backlink building is to hit the home page first for my key term (and exact match domain) before focusing on other pages.

The other thing to realise is that you’re going to be creating a lot of content unless you outsource your article writing. It’s worth thinking about getting 50 unique articles put together to accelerate this process.

Alternatively, if you’re writing all these articles yourself because you’re on a tight budget then do youself a favour and grab a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking! (version 11 of DNS is out, but version 10 is very good and much cheaper to buy!).

Grab some Profile Links

Some people use profile links as a spammy backlinking weapon (sorry Shane, couldn’t resist mate!). And I have to admit, I’ve contributed to my fair share of the spam web testing things like xrumer and link packets.

But let’s be honest, we want longevity with our rankings. And spamming the crap out of forums across the web is not a long term approach to link building – eventually Google will algorithmically render these links redundant.

There are, however, a few juicy profile link opportunities that are just too good to ignore. Take YouTube, for example. The profile link in a YouTube channel is a “follow” link – in other words it counts as a “vote” in the search engine rankings:

It gets better. When you leave a comment on somebody else’s channel, you get a follow link back to your own channel. And, there are many PR7 YouTube channel profile pages that you can comment on…

In other words, you can get a follow link from a PR7 page to a page that links to your site within a few minutes. The only let down is that you can’t have optimised anchor text, but it’s still worth having I’d say…

So, instead of mass submitting profiles with xrumer, find some of the larger web sites and link back to your site.

Web 2.0 Sites

You’ve probably heard all about these before – you can create pages on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly, Tumblr and Livejournal and backlink to your main site. This is hugely boring work, but is still very worth doing.

I tend to add a couple of unique articles to each web 2.0 site before moving on to the next one.

You can also do some form of interlinking between the web 2.0 sites, but make sure it’s in a random “undetectable” fashion. Plain standard link wheels stopped working a long time ago!

Standard Article Marketing..

Don’t bother with these 2,000 article directory submitters. Submitting to most of those directories is a waste of time – You’re much better off finding the top directories and submitting to those. I’d recommend these to start with:-

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.amazines.com

http://www.articledashboard.com

http://www.articlesbase.com

http://www.articlealley.com

Guest Posting

I’ve mentioned this earlier on in this post, but I place extremely high value in guest posting. Contact publishers in your niche and get your content on their site with a backlink back to your site. These are links of the highest quality and cannot be overlooked in my opinion.

You can find these sites easily by doing a simple Google search…Something like this:-

dog training + “guest post”
dog training + “write for us”
dog training + “submit your article”

You get the idea. Within a few minutes you have a complete list of publishers at your disposal.

Blog Networks

If you’re John Wayne in the SEO saloon then you can turn to black hat blog networks such as BuildmyRank.com. They still work, that’s for sure, the question is – how long before these networks are discovered and devalued?

A lot of these networks have a very similar footpring; The articles are all very short, of no particular topic, always contain optimised backlinks and the content is pretty poor.

BuildmyRank is one of the few services that allow you to specify the subject of your post so that it will at least end up on a relevant site. Like I said – these services work today, not sure for how long though – you’d be crazy to just use buildMyRank as your backlinking strategy!

This is Important…

Backlinks to your site can hurt you in the same way that over optimising on site can hurt you.

I’ve heard the argument “if backlinks can hurt you then surely I can build backlinks to my competitors’ sites and get them all banned” so many times – it seems logical – but it just doesn’t hold up.

I know this, because I’ve seen it happen so many times to my sites, and friends of mine. A lot of the top SEOs have blogged about it, too.

Here’s the important thing to remember: If your profile is too highly optimised then you run the risk of breaching an optimisation threshold and you may be filtered.

Young sites seem to get susceptible to this more than old sites – although I have had this happen to one of my PR5 domains that was bought 8 years prior to the filter being applied – so older sites are certainly not immune. I have to admit, though, that the site was punished off the back of an extremely aggressive and highly targeted link building campaign.

The thing to do is diversify your anchor text when building backlinks to your pages. The anchor text is simply the clickable part of the link. Around 50% of the time I’ll have the anchor text as my main keyword. 25% of the time I’ll have a sub keyword for the same page, and the rest of the time I use anchors such as “click here”, “learn more” and the actual URL of the page.

Step 5 – Be Consistent

Top rankings simply don’t occur overnight for even slightly competitive key phrases and you should know that there will be a period of time during which you’re building links and nothing seems to be happening.

That’s just part and parcel of Search Engine Optimisation I’m afraid. There is a lag time between you putting a backlink out there and the link being indexed. Then there will likely also be a lag time before the backlink comes into effect for your ranking once it’s been indexed.

And the question is always how long? The answer is, it’s impossible for me to tell you. What I will say though is that if you’re doing this for the first time, then choose a group of keywords that is not too competitive. This will make the “dip” shorter and you’ll get results faster. This will give you the confidence to throw up a new site with a longer dip, but more financial reward.

Successful Internet Marketers v Failing Internet Marketers

I’ve been luck enough to talk to and meet a lot of highly successful internet marketers over the past few years and I really pay attention to exactly what it is that makes them successful rather than the next guy….

My incredible discovery is that it’s hardly ever because their internet marketing knowledge is any better than the rest of the IM crowd – rather that they are strategists and stick with one thing until it makes money.

They don’t jump from project to project – they don’t spread themselves too thinly – they simply decide on a strategy, acknowledge that there will be a dip before they earn financial reward and get through it.

This SEO plan is something that won’t give you instant gratification and will require consistent work for it to be achieved. Either commit to it, or don’t. Anything inbetween those two ends of the spectrum is a waste or your time.

I’m going to bring this ridiculously long blog post to a close – how do you rank your sites? What have you found to work best when getting top Google rankings? Tell me in the comments box below…

The experts series is coming as soon as I can find the time to finish it!! And, I’ve changed the comments box to Facebook style – apparently it’s what all the cool kids are doing – if you could leave me a comment so I know it works that would be fantastic

Important Question! Are You In London this Weekend (19th March 2011)?!

admin — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 20:55:18 +0000

First thing’s first.

Why trust a dude sitting in his vest, who hasn’t had a hair cut since his 15th birthday who drinks…well…I don’t know, some kind of vodka, or something?

OK, fair point. And to that argument, I raise:-

Because He was one of the guys behind one of the biggest launches of the year in 2010 (hyperFBTraffic)
Because he’s only been online for 14 months and now has multiple successful online businesses
Because I’m telling you that this guy is worth listening to!

Joking aside, Zed Shah and I had a quick rap over Skype yesterday, and I want to publish it here. If you’re in London over the weekend then this should appeal to you in a BIG way…

Grab a coffee, hit the play button and give it ten minutes to hear what’s on offer (thanks to some last minute unfortunate drop outs). Scarsity aside, there are 7 tickets remaining due to venue constraints so if you snooze you may well lose…!

Hope you Enjoy the Recording:

So, guys, if you’re around London this weekend and you want a “leg up” from the great Zed Shah then click here to learn more.

p.s The experts series is on its way!