As I discussed in the last post, gaining backlinks to your website is one of THE most important things you can do to improve your search engine rankings and if done correctly it can give you significant gains. Backlinking is no longer just about quantity, it's about the quality of the links you get. In a sense quantity of links still comes into it, of course you want to have as many links as possible BUT this should not be your intitial aim of the link building process.

The problem many people find with backlinks is that they often don't know where to get them from, certainly there are processes we can all follow like submitting articles, blog commenting, web 2.0 link building, cherry picking and the list goes on and on but if you don't target your link building efforts in the right places then you may be working a lot harder than you need to.

If I told you that I have a site which ranked number 35 in Google for my chosen two word phrase which I took to position number 2 within just over a week and a half would you belive me, well I hope you would but it sounds a little unlikely right? Before you get yourselves over excited I don't have some magic formula which I'm going to reveal to you, I don't have the answer to pummle the Google algorithm. What I do have though is good detective skills Read the rest of this entry »

Link building, coupled with on page SEO, is one of THE most important aspects of website search engine ranking and as much as we all hate doing it we have no choice if we want our sites to rank well for our chosen keywords. I think the reason people hate building links to their sites is simply because it's a very tedious and slow process which doesn't usually have an immediate, overnight effect on their search engine rankings. But ultimately if link building is done the right way then it doesn't have to be as tedious as it first appears.

Link Building The Wrong Way!

There are right and wrong ways to build links to your site, probably the most common mistakes people make are the following:

Building links very quickly to a brand new website

If you have a brand new website which has just appeared on the internet then the last thing you should be doing is building hundreds of links to that website to get it ranked. Personally, I only ever build around 5-10 backlinks to a brand new site once I know it has been indexed in the search engines. Over the next few weeks I then build Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post you'll remember that I spoke about using the FREE keyword tools available to you, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and the Google Keyword Tool to find article ideas for your niche website. In this post I just want to briefly touch on the main things to consider before pursuing one of these phrases.

Before you go after any keyword or phrase you are going to want to ask yourself a couple of questions before you spend the time trying to get your site to rank well for it:

1. What are the searchers intentions?
2. How will you 'monetize/convert' a visitor to a sale?
3. How well can you rank for your chosen phrase and is it worth it?

What are the searchers intentions?

This is probably the most important out of all factors to consider. If the person searching types a phrase which demonstrates no commerical intent whatsoever then there is going to be very little point in targeting it. By using our 'query' keywords and 'buying' keywords in the last post to search for a target phrase we should have been able to identify potential phrases which do offer some degree of commercial intent. Taking the phrase "how to buy a hybrid golf club" as an example, this phrase recieves around 20-30 daily searches, depending on which tool you use, which is a pretty decent volume Read the rest of this entry »

As we all know content is king, there is no denying that adding fresh, relevant content to your website will help with your rankings in the search engines providing it is done correctly. But one thing which people often struggle with is what content topics to use on their website, I know this is something I used to struggle with when I first started out online. But it doesn't have to be as hard as you think.

There are essentailly two things you need your content to have and they are:

1. Relevance to your reader and to the theme of your niche website
2. A demand for that content in the organic searches

This sort of content isn't at all hard to create and can be even easier to rank well for providing you know where to look for the right keyword phrases. Two excellent tools I love to use to find article ideas for my website are the FREE Wordtracker keyword tool and the FREE Keyword Discovery tool. Both of these tools generate some great long tail keyword phrases which can give you some great ideas for articles, better still because the phrases are longtail and very specific they are often very easy to rank for. Read the rest of this entry »

Ultimately if you want traffic from the search engines you MUST get your website listed within the first 20 listings for your chosen keyword phrase, to do this you simply cannot get away from the fact you are going to have to get backlinks to your website. There was a time when building as many backlinks to your websites as humanly possible was the thing to do. If you were trying to rank above competitors in the search engines for a given keyword or phrase one of the factors you looked at was the number of backlinks that site had.  Now, whilst we still look at the number of backlinks a site has when trying to rank above it, amongst many other factors, the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity. While this sounds obvious to many of you, you would be surprised the amount of people who are still concentrating on the quantity rather than quality. Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing a site on YouTube is a great way to earn yourself some extra traffic to your website and when you are marketing on YouTube, it is incredibly important to have as many viewers as possible. Increasing the audience is of the utmost importance to people trying to market on YouTube. There are a number of options available to increase your views, but one of the most effective and fun ways is to simply interact with other users.

While YouTube is not usually thought of as a networking site, it is in its own way. You can easily connect with other users, and interact with them. Leaving comments on the content of other users is a great way to get more users looking at your content. Search for content that is related to your content, so the viewers of one will be interested in the other. After looking at content posted by another user, a viewer may see your comment and look at your content. Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous post 'Use the Power of On Page SEO to Generate Traffic: Basic SEO Strategies 2' I talked about the importance of completing some basic on page SEO techniques when you are putting together your affiliate site and today I will be talking abut off page SEO.

When people try doing a little SEO to their sites they will often complete some on page SEO using some good SEO techniques but then not benefit themselves because they neglect to complete good off page SEO. Overall, it is just as important to complete good off page SEO as it is to complete good on page SEO, you need to find a good balance.

Again, the techniques for good off page SEO are not that hard but they will be more time consuming than on page SEO. Off page SEO will happen over a period of time and the key is that you cannot complete it all at once, you have to take your time to complete it steadily and in stages. Some of the basic off page SEO techniques are:

• Use a mix of link directories and related sites to get links back to your site. Submitting your site to 1000 link directories is NOT the way to go, never submit too quickly. The key is to complete a few directory submissions each day to slowly build up backlinks to your site. The real benefit in link building is seen where you get one way links back to your site which are from related, and if possible, authority sites. Some of these links should contain the keywords you are trying to rank for but again you shouldn't overdo it.

• Try to use one way links and not reciprocal links, whilst reciprocal linking is sometimes the only way to get people to link back to your site it does reduce the power of the links built to your site.

• Build an external site yourself which is relevant to and links back to the site you wish to promote. Squidoo, Hubpages and Wikidot are all great sources of traffic and will allow you to build a mini site/lens completely free, they are often underestimated greatly.

• Use article marketing to write relevant content about a particular topic of your site or products on your site, slowly submit these articles over time to article directories. You should include your site link in the resource box linking directly back to your site or to a page on your site using one of your keywords in the anchor text if the directory allows.

• If your site has an RSS feed then add your site to the RSS directories, you may think only the SE's will see your link but you would be surprised the amount of 'real' visitors who may reach your site through an RSS directory. Melissa Eaton has created a good, comprehensive RSS directory list right here :

• If you are using WordPress then your site is automatically pinged each time you add new content, the Max Blog Press Ping Optimizer plugin is a must to ensure you are not banned by the pingbots because of excessive pinging. If you don't use WordPress then ping your site manually using http://pingomatic.com every time you add new content, again don't ping too often as it will be detrimental to your site.

• Add social bookmarking buttons to your site such as those available at addthis.com , there are also many WordPress plugins which will allow you do this automatically such as sociable.

• Add decent, unique and keyword rich content to your site which IS readable by humans and not just written for the SE's.

All of the above strategies are essentially getting backlinks to your site but the really important thing is that you don't do this part too quickly. If you do undertake this process slowly, thoroughly and in the right way then it can make your site, do it too quickly and irresponsibly and it WILL break your site. The off page aspect of SEO is something you are not going to achieve overnight, it will take months and it should continue throughout the life of the site. Always continue to build links and think of new ways to keep your visitors coming back for more.

Remember don't just think of the search engines, people have to use your site as well.

Today, following on from my previous post I want to talk to you about some basic SEO strategies which you should be using with all of your sites.

Your SEO strategies will be broken down into two main areas, one page SEO and off page SEO. In todays post I am going to be primarily talking about some quite simple on page SEO techniques which you should be implementing within your sites during and after the site build process.

On Page Search Engine Optimization

When looking at One Page SEO there are several things which you need to consider and ensure that you do. It's important for me to mention that the following list is not exhaustive and there may be other techniques and considerations to be taken into account but essentially if you get the following things right then you are on your way to building a well optimized site.

Your overall keyword placement

• Always remember to include the main keywords which you are trying to rank for within the main title of your page. Don't put huge chunks of text though which is meant just for the SE's, remember that your site should still be readable by humans.

• Ensure that you fill in description and keyword fields in your site's meta data, don't be lazy and leave them blank, if you do then you are only cheating yourself. Your description should contain your main keywords but remember that this description is the one which will be seen in the SE's by your potential visitors so again remember to write it so it's appealing to humans and not just SE bots.

• Where possible try to make use of your H1, H2, H3 & H4 tags. The H1 tag is where you should be inserting the main keyword on that particular page that you want to optimize for. You can then add additional keywords into your H2, H3 & H4 tags which are maybe less important than your main keyword(s) but will still bring you traffic.

• Write good quality, relevant and unique content for your site. The content should include your main keywords without affecting the way that the overall page reads. Try and get your main keyword(s) for that page both at the beginning of the content and at the end of the content. Without going over the top you can also bold or use the <strong></strong> tags around some of your important keywords, don't bold too many though, you don't want your page to look ridiculous.

• Utilize your alt tags. For those of you who don't know what they are, alt tags are tags which are attached to your images within your site. A typical alt tag would look something like this in a html view:  <img src="nice_image.jpg" height="200" width="200" alt="This could be your keyword">

You may or may not be surprised by the amount of webmasters who don't bother with alt tags and simply leave them blank. In certain circumstances you can use this to your advantage when you are trying to rank higher in the SE's for specific keywords, some well completed alt tags can make a difference between ranking above or below one of your main competitors. With this said you also have to be careful not to abuse them, when you are placing your alt tags in don't stick your keywords in every single one, simply use a few of them. With the remaining alt tags try to keep the description relevant, afterall alt tags were not initially built to gain SE ranking

Structure your site well & link between pages

• Make sure you structure your site well, this is more for your visitors than the SE's but you'd be amazed the amount of people who forget that visitors may actually need to navigate around their site and they simply build their site for bots. You can try to over optimize a site and make things ten times worse.

• Make sure you use basic html to link to other pages/content within your site. Don't start using flash or java this is not particuarly SE friendly.

• Use your keywords within anchor text to link to other pages. For example if you have a page in your site which lists gold rotary watches then make sure you link to that page using the keyword which you would want to rank for in the SE's using the following code as an example: <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/gold-rotary-watches>Gold Rotary Watches</a>

• Make sure you don't overdo it with over lengthy links, in addition don't try and cloak/hide them in any way, this will only get your site penalized by the SE's.

• Use the 'nofollow' attribute if you are linking to pages in your site which have very little to contribute, these include pages such as your contact page etc.

The above are some basic strategies for your on page SEO of your website, used properly they can benefit your site massively.

In the next post I will be talking about off page SEO.

Something which is still really important and often forgotten when building an affiliate site is the SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) aspect of the site build. Building a site in itself is not a particuarly difficult task but getting visitors to it is usually the part which people find hard and often boring, I have to say that I am one of those people. One thing in particular I hate doing is building links to my site but I realise how important it is in the success or failure of that particular site and no matter how pretty my site looks if it has no visitors to look at it then what's the point.

For me one of the biggest things which made me avoid doing any SEO to my sites initially when I first started out online was that I didn't really understand it, there didn't seem to be a clear guide out there which made things clear and simple, in fact in most cases the resources which were available to me only made things ten times worse. This said I avoided it completely, I would slap up a site full of eBay listings using BANS, add little content and then wonder why it made me no money. One of the key factors missing in my site build was SEO and unique site content, although site content can bring us into a whole other ball park so it's not something I am going to discuss in great detail for the remainder of this post.

What I want to say to you initially is don't be affraid of SEO, the basic prinicples of good SEO are not that hard at all, it's often the basic things which get missed and it's those things which can (if done correctly) make your site a success or a failure. Of course there are many other factors to be taken into consideration but overall good SEO is key from the beginning.

The benefit of building affiliate websites with scripts such as WordPress is that the grunt work on the SEO can actually be done for you with plugins like All In One SEO, however there will still be some work left for you to do.

In the following two posts I will be talking about the basic strategies of on page SEO and off page SEO, along with some tips of what you should and shouldn't do.

I don't know if you have seen this system yet or not but I have been giving it a go over the last few weeks with some good results already. The system is known as the Free Traffic system and you can read more over at FreeTrafficSystem.com .

The Free Traffic System is a new and FREE way to build quality one way links to your affiliate site quickly and easily. We all know the importance of getting quality back links to your websites in order to build your traffic and your search engine rankings, in essence if you don't bother building back links to your sites then you may as well give up and walk away now.

Building back links to your site isn't particularly difficult but it can be quite time consuming if you're going to do it right. Of course you can pay someone else to do it for you, and while this is okay, you have to be sure you know where the person is getting the links from and whether they're trustworthy. Therefore Id rather not outsource unless I have to.

The main thing to remember is that building one quality back link to your website is more effective than building 20 poor quality ones. If done right then a mix of decent on page SEO along with a well built up set of quality back links can get you onto page one of Google.

One well known and effective way of getting back links to your website is by using article traffic and this is what the Free Traffic System does. It allows you to submit your quality content to related blogs in a steady and controlled fashion. Within the articles you will also have two links back to your website which use the anchor key phrase which you specify, and that's the term you are trying to rank for. All articles are submitted and then have to be approved by admin over a period of 48-72 hours, the articles tend to be 'drip fed' through into the system and the back links will come over a few days, which is great because they appear much more naturally to the search engines.

The content you submit must be unique, don't go submitting caffeinated content into the system. At present it seems to work quite well, but if people begin to submit rubbish into the system then potentially the value of the links for your sites will decrease. I would either recommend writing the content yourself or paying someone to do it for you, you can get a good 500 word article written for around $1.50 per 100 words from people in the forums and a few other places. What people will be asking now is what about duplicate content? There will inevitably be a risk of having duplicate content however the system does come with a built in article spinner which if used properly will allow you to create 5 or more articles from one original piece of copy. And you can use copyscape.com to check the uniqueness of the articles you are going to be submitting.

The system itself is quite easy to use and it will take to around 30 minutes or so to properly spin one of your articles and get it submitted into the system but if you do this once a week for a month you will build up 120 decent quality back links to your site. If you also add one of your own blogs into the system then they will also give you an additional 7% of back links on top of the 30 you can do at any one time which is quite good.

What I would say is that if you are at all unsure of using this system then try it out on one of your lesser visited sites first and see what sort of effect you get, watch your stats and your visitors closely and see what happens. My feeling is that it's just another way of building good back links to your site, traffic and search engine rankings. If you do need me to explain any of the process in any further detail or provide any further tutorials on the blog then simply let me know and I will see what I can do. Give it a go and let me know how you get on.

www.FreeTrafficSystem.com

If I say blog commenting to you it can bring up all sorts of ideas into your head, for most people they think that blog commenting is about visiting a bunch of blogs and simply leaving a comment like 'great post' or 'thanks for the post'. This is what I would call the wrong way to go about blog commenting. Blog commenting overall can be a very powerful way of getting traffic back to your blog providing that it is approached in the correct way and not with the attitude of a spammer.

There are what I consider as two main types of blog commenting. The first kind is the kind which helps build backlinks for the search engines, these are links from the 'dofollow' blogs. These links affect how your site is ranked by the search engines, page rank etc.

The second type is blog commenting for physical readers, this is where you actively contribute to a blog by providing relevant and helpful comments. However, in most cases the link back to your site will be attributed with the 'nofollow' tag, meaning your site may get little benefit from a search engine point of view. Just because of this many people assume its a waste of time but you'd be surprised how much traffic you can get from it.

In this post I will be discussing the second of the two mentioned above.  I am going to try and cover some of the most common mistakes which people make when it comes to blog commenting and hopefully you will understand the better ways there are to go about it and how powerful it can be when done correctly.

Mistake Number 1: Posting irrelevant and random comments on someones blog with only one thing in mind, your traffic!

From my point of view when I am commenting on someone's blog I am doing it because I am interested in the site, what the person is writing about or because I have an opinion on what they are saying. Of course the aim is trying to build traffic to my blog/site but this is the last thing you should be thinking of. Always comment honestly and with the right intentions, just think before you comment and ask yourself 'Would I approve this comment?' and 'Would I appreciate this comment?'. If the answer to both of those questions is no then don't post it on someone elses blog, it is neither helpful or useful and it won't do you any favours in the long run.

Mistake Number 2: Don't comment blindly on every blog in your niche area.

If you want to find releveant blogs to comment on then there is a great and easy way to do it by using Google blog search. If you visit google.com and from the 'more' option select 'blogs' you can type in your niche or topic and search for blogs which are related to your site and these may be sites you wish to comment on. Here is where people start to make the mistake, they go ahead and start commenting on every blog in the list. What you need to remember is that google is looking for natural linking to your site, natural linking is not going from 0 to 500 links in one day and you will be penalized for this, essentially you are trying to 'win' google's trust and comment spamming is not the way to go about it.

With the list of blogs you have come up with, do some further investigation and find out a few things about the sites you are going to be commenting on, find out:

1) What the traffic to that blog is like; a good way of finding this out is by looking at the alexa ranking at alexa.com, you may find installing the alexa firefox extension quite useful for this purpose.

2) What the Google page rank of the site is; I find that the SEO Toolbar from SEOBook.com is a really useful way of keeping an eye on your competition's page rank & number of backlinks along with a few other important things. Page rank is not going to be hugely important and if the other 4 points here are good then I personally may choose to discount it.

3) How often the blog is updated; you are aiming to comment on blogs which are updated at the very least of once a week but preferably more than that.

4) How many people are commenting; the amount of people commenting on a blog gives you an idea of how popular the site is and how interactive the visitors are.

5) How many readers are subscribed to the blog; you can usually find this out if there is a small blog reader icon which will have the number of subscribed readers for that blog in, this will give you a good idea of how many people actually read the blog posts.

In all you should be aiming to find a list of around 10-20 blogs which meet the majority of the things above. Once you have found these blogs you should spend time becoming part of the community of followers on that blog and get involed. Don't comment for selfish purposes, although you are ultimately trying to get traffic to your own blog that must not be your only motive.

Mistake Number 3: Post a comment which offers no quality or relevance to the blog.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, people visit a blog blindly and make a comment which has no relevance to the post and is of no use to anyone reading it. When you are commenting you should try to become part of the discussion in that post, try and contribute something if you can. If you found the post particularly interesting or you liked an area of it then say so, if you have something to add to what was said then add it. What your ultimately aiming for is to be visiting these blogs on a regular basis and getting involved in the blogging community around that individual site. The more you make an active contribution then the sooner you will see traffic coming through to your own blog from people who are interested in you and perhaps want to find out more about you.

The important thing here is that these people are actively visiting your site, they are taking the time out to come over to your blog and find out what you are selling or what you are talking about. These are not just empty backlinks you are getting, it is targeted traffic. The traffic will be coming through click thru's from your hyperlinked name, I personally never place a direct link into a comment unless it is 100% relevant to the discussion and unless you are completely comfortable in that community then you shouldn't either.

Give blog commenting a go, you may find you even learn a few new things from reading all those new blogs, both about the topic they are writing about and how to build a good blog.

The above guide is very brief and I have tried to cover as much as possible in a relatively short post (eventhough I realise this is quite long). When you are trying to build your search engine ranking it can get a whole lot more complicated but the basic ideas remain the same, which is always provide a useful contribution and treat the blogging community with respect.

Something which I hear more and more is people asking 'How do I generate traffic to my website?'. This is a very good question and perhaps one of the things people always struggle with. What I would say to you if you are struggling to think of ways to generate traffic to your website is your not the only one, there are lots of people out there in the same boat who are great at building websites and getting them looking nice but then that's about as far as it goes. After the website has been built people will commonly stop there and this is where they make their mistake, it is completely pointless having a fantastic looking website if no one is there to see it. You need traffic to your website to make it profitable.

Whilst there are many many ways to generate traffic to websites such as article marketing, PPC marketing, social bookmarking, forum marketing, mailing list marketing and many more, social networking sites can be a great way of getting traffic to your new website or products. You are probably familiar with the main social networking sites such as facebook.com, myspace.com and twitter.com, these sites are extremely propular amongst the world of internet marketers and I bet that many of you even have account there yourself for your personal use, especially on facebook or myspace. The great thing about social networking sites is the amount of traffic they recieve, they get literally millions of page views per day simply because of the amount of people who visit and use them. This is an opportunity not to be missed, you must must must get yourself into social networking, take advantage of the massive amount of traffic there is to be had and use it to your advantage.

So how do you use a social networking site to bring you traffic? It's not actually as difficult as you first may think. You need to get yourself over to some of the popular social networking sites like facebook, myspace & twitter etc and signup for a free account, there are also other ones you can signup for which I will list below. Then go ahead and get your profile setup, add in your likes/dislikes, interests and list all of your websites and generally make an effort getting the profile to look good. Just as a side note if you do already have accounts on any of the social networking sites, particuarly facebook and myspace, I would recommend not using your own personal account but set a separate one up instead for your business purposes. In addition make sure that you try and stick with one main niche in your profile, don't have a social networking account on twitter which talks about fishing, food, internet marketing etc, make sure you only stick to one area like internet marketing for example or your latest products. People will be using targeted searches and you need to target your profile content to match this.

Once you have created your profile and added the details into it, go ahead and search for people who you may want to be friends with, people who have similar interests to you, people who may be interested in your sites or products. You can do this by undertaking a search on the site for certain terms or groups which relate to your main interest, you can also use friends from your mailing list and build a group of followers. You then need to go ahead and make sure you keep your account updated, post updates to it, post news and information related to your websites and products, keep people interested in what you have to say. The more you keep your social networking accounts updated then the more people will visit your page and tell other people about your page, once these people tell 2 people they tell 2 people etc etc, before you know it you will have a  big group of followers and this is when it becomes viral.

Try it for yourself, post reguarly and build a list of followers and see how it goes.

A list of popular sites:

• Facebook.com
• MySpace.com
• Twitter.com
• Bebo
• Friendster
• Flickr
• Ryze
• Hi5
• Ning
• My Yahoo
• Ecademy
• Orkut