Continue reading »]]> I have just written an article over on my other blog, MattHouldsworth.com about how I promote each blog post after I publish it. Much of what you read on the net about promoting your blog takes a holistic view point, however, in my opinion you also need to look after the finer detail, if your manage the promotion of each blog post well then you will not go far wrong.

I have uploaded the check sheet I use to prompt myself on the post so if you are an affiliate blogger you may find that useful, either way if you have any more ideas on this please do leave a comment.

Continue reading »]]> Great search engine optimization is a very important goal for any website that lives on the traffic it generates. There are many factors when it comes to search engine optimization, one of them being correct usage of url links.

An optimized link will help direct search engines to their correct destination while providing you with greater search engine placement based on your chosen keywords.

It’s not difficult to develop an optimized link habit but many people still neglect this simple trick that is costing them thousands of visitors each month.

Here are 3 ways you can create highly optimized links that search engines love.

1. Avoid String URLs

Many ecommerce websites use dynamic page generation for product pages and articles.

These pages often look like http://www.example.com/?=9821_Article.

This type of link structure, although still possible to index, is highly troublesome and irrelevant for search engine spiders.

Most CMS systems provide a method to change dynamic links to keyword rich strings. Modification through the htaccess file is also possible but does require additional technical knowledge.

To build a highly optimized url (without strings) you should focus on the main keywords you want your page to rank for.

Omit unwords such as:

•    the
•    and
•    of

Converting your string url structure to a keyword rich url will help with your search engin optimization, placing you higher within search results, driving you a fair amount of traffic.

2. Use Keyword Rich URLs

The previous example touched on the use of keyword rich urls but to further explain the importance of these urls here are a few more reasons.

Search engine optimization is often broken down to:

•    Off Page Optimization
•    On Page Optimization

When you provide a link in a blog comment, author byline or anywhere within your previous articles, using a descriptive and keyword rich url string instead of the traditional “click here” helps tell the search spiders what the next page is about.

Instead of using “Click here to jump to page 2″, you could use “View Additional Information About Bicycles” if you happen to write about such topic. This method can be applied across any niche or topic, simply substitute out the words.

The point is to create a link that users want to click that also provides additional information.

3. Go For The Long Tail

The long tail keyword is simply a search phrase instead of one or two keywords internet users type when searching for information in search engines.

It’s very difficult to rank for a single keyword because major businesses pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to rank high for the term.

The more practical way to rank well in the search engines and improve your search engine optimization is to target long tail keyword phrases users type.

Instead of “bicycle” you could narrow down your urls to include phrases such as “how to ride a bicycle”. This method of optimizing your urls will be much easier and give you more relevant traffic as you know people are searching for specific information.

Adopt An Optimized URL Habit

Once you become accustomed to creating keyword rich urls, you’ll be able to interlink, back link and develop your url structure that converts sales and gives you better search engine placement.

Apply these tips across your website to give search spiders an easier time to find your content and rank it for the correct terms you aim for.

Continue reading »]]> Everyday thousands of blogs appear on the net, giving each writer a voice and a platform for readers to share their opinions.

The fundamental difference between a blog and a static website is the interaction. Blog commenting gives readers the ability to continue a topic of discussion while simultaneously promote their own links.

Proper and respectful blog commenting is a very simple and effective way to drive traffic to your website.

With millions of niche websites and blogs on the net, becoming an authority and being active with blog commenting will put you right in front of the same rabid visitors that are eager to learn more – by directing them to your own website.

The following is a few ways you can use blog commenting as a way to increase your search engine optimization and drive wild amounts of traffic to your website.

1. Use Correct Etiquette

Blog owners use their precious time to write articles for their readers. Commenting is a natural way for readers to extend the topic but there are certain guidelines you should obey when leaving your own comment.

First off, you should never spam comments. Comment spam is detrimental to both the blog owner and blog reader. Spamming links will place a negative image within the minds of people interested in your niche while being promptly deleted by the blog owner.

Second, you should try to keep the topic flowing. Derailing the topic with hateful speech or drama is a quick way to break proper blog comment etiquette – don’t do it.

Lastly, don’t leave a comment that doesn’t fit within the scope of the blog. If a blog is talking about tech news, it doesn’t make a bit of sense to leave a comment and link about a diet product, it comes across as spam and is very rude.

2. Provide Helpful Insight

Blog commenting is utilized to keep a discussion going. Although a writer will do the best to their ability to cover the topic of the post, blog commentors will be able to pick up from where it left off, lending helpful and insightful information.

To drive traffic to your website, comment on blogs within your expertise, continue the discussion and give more than you take. When users come to know how helpful you are, they will follow through your provided link, landing on your page.

Likewise, a reader which provides excellent comments can sometimes be highlighted by the blog owner. As appreciation for your interaction on the blog, they may talk about you in later posts, giving you additional links and spotlight to drive traffic to your website.

3. It’s All In The URL

Common blog format calls for:

•    Name
•    Email
•    URL

The URL is your opportunity to share additional websites that fit within the scope of the blog or blog post. Readers will be eager to seek out additional information and when you are on the forefront with your link, they will follow through, driving free traffic to your blog.

Why Blog Commenting Matters Most

When you provide helpful, respectful and informational comments, you capture readers that are already hot on topic.

These “hot” readers are now emotionally driven to find additional information or products. Being active on blogs within your niche will help add authority, branding and traffic to your website.

Not just random traffic, but highly motivated readers that will devour your content.

Continue reading »]]> Youtube has now become one of the most used websites in the world, rivaling Google in terms of search traffic and website usage. But what does this mean for a website or business owner? One word: traffic.

If traffic is the lifeblood of the internet, than more traffic to your website or ecommerce stores simply means more revenue.

Youtube has many opportunities to drive traffic to your website, this article will take a look at 3 of the most powerful ways.

1. Demonstrate Your Products or Services

When web users begin their search to learn new skills or catch up on particular hobbies and interests, they often turn to Youtube. It’s a no brainer, many more people would rather watch a video than read an article.

With Youtube, you could easily create a video on-the-fly to demonstrate your products or services. This visual approach to showing what you offer can better display the benefits you can give to viewers and potential customers.

If a pictures speaks a thousand words, a video must be millions.

How-to videos are some of the hottest and most searched after videos on Youtube. By doing just a little work converting your copy to video, you’ll be able to capture viewers while using Youtube.

Google, with its caffine update, has begun placing video within top search engine placement. If a keyword is too expensive or difficult to obtain, video will help you land in that prized spot – just remember to include a link back to your website.

2. Voice Your Opinion About A Product Or Service

On the opposite end of using Youtube to promote your own products or services, you could turn the tables and use video to highlight others.

Product and service reviews are highly sought after by many web user. Traditional write ups by marketing teams are quickly ignored as they come across as too “salesy”. A honest video review will help users decided wither or not a product or service is worthwhile.

Think about it for a second, how many times have you bought a product or service simply because a friend or family member raved about it? That’s the power of video.

If you can tell an honest story and review to your viewers, you’ll easily be able to convert them to sales. Be sure to add a call to action within your videos, telling the user to visit the destination website, click a link or subscribe to your channel.

3. Go Viral And Build Links

The greatest benefit of video is the ability to go viral. Viral video spreads across the net at an incredible speed.

Often enough, these videos are created by average users however many companies have tried their hand at crafting viral videos – with great success.

As your video spreads across social media, blogs and websites, people will be able to identify your brand, click your link, visit your website and drive massive amount of traffic for next to nothing.

You’ll be the talk of the net with the correct video hit, it just takes a little bit of massaging to create a video that is viral worthy.

As you can see from these 3 powerful examples, Youtube gives website owners many great options to drive massive amounts of free traffic to their websites.

Video production is becoming easier each day with simpler programs and outsourcing. The cost of an ad campaign could easily cover the costs for a handful of great videos.

The web is transforming from a dominant text medium to multimedia, video is the future, how are you going to harness this powerful way to drive free traffic to your website?

Continue reading »]]> I have started another blog, On The Allotmentспални комплекти which is a blog tracking the progress of my new allotment. I am using this blog as an experiment in many of the things that I have learned about blogging.

I thought that I would report back on a small success I have had with that blog. This weekend I decided that as I was going down to the allotment to do some work I would take some video of the plot and the first bits of work that I did on the allotment. I then uploaded them straight to YouTube and posted the videos on the blog.

I created a youtube channel, on which I put a description of what I am doing, ensuring I used some keywords in the description, and placed a link back to the blog. I also used the tagging facility on all the videos and he descriptions of the videos to provide more links back tot he blog.

I was please with the positive response in the numbers of hits this has generated for the blog. Which in the last few days has seen a ten fold increase in the number of visitors.

Now, this is a new blog and as such only has a handful of visitors at the moment, but it was nice to see the positive impact on the work I had put in.

In addition I was pleased to note that the site now ranks 4 in google for the phrase ‘Allotment Plan’ not bad for a site that is only a month or two old.

Continue reading »]]> As another post in my series about my Google Ranking Monitoring Software. Over the last week or so I have extended this to include Alexa Ranking, Yahoo Back Links and Google Back links, I will be posting a new version very soon. However this work has got me thinking about how you monitor and judge the success of your site.

I guess the simple answer is the success of the site is reflected in how much it earns, however I like to look deeper than this. There is of course the age old methods of number of unique visitors, page views and how long each user was on your site, however I think that there are now other was in which, if not judge the success of a site, monitor its performance especially in the success of SEO.

As indicated above my software now monitors Google Page Rank and back links, Alexa rank and Yahoo Rank. I plan to add other search engine rank monitoring into the software such as MSN, Altavista and others, but also something that is of critical importance these days rankings and link backs on social networking sites.

This may present too much information at too finer a detail, however this is proving to be a little experiment for me. With this level of detail I am hoping to see effort I am putting in to a site on building its social networking presence for example. I am hoping that these efforts will be reflected in the results of my SEO monitoring software.

Eventually I would like to see if there is indeed a correlation between increases in these various results and the sites performance in its number of visitors and income. I would like to get to the situation where I can graph these results and prove either way if the efforts are worthwhile. My instinct tells me that yes, the effort will pay off right through the chain, in terms of increasing rankings right through to increased revenue.

Continue reading »]]> Following on from my post about consistency in your link back strategy which was a brief post looking at what URL you give you when asking for a link to your site, and suggesting that the best thing it to be consistent.

Our discussions have moved on and have highlighted an error, perhaps a fundamental error I am making with this very site.

When I originally installed wordpress way back in those early days of learning Linux hosting etc, I installed wordpress in a folder. Therefore as you will see from the address bar, the blog is actually located at http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/ I then redirect traffic with Apache from http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com to the /wp directory.

Although I still maintain that I am correct in giving out just the domain name as the address and being consistent in what I give out i.e. http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://earningfromaffiliates.com etc. I am probably suffering from Google not liking the fact that this is redirected to the /wp/ directory.

I am now in a quandary, do I change this and thus breaking any links that are linking directly to a post? Can I write something into Apache to catch these old addresses and route them to the post without the /wp/ folder? indeed will this have any affect what so ever and is it worth the effort?

I think I will ponder this for a little while and do some research to find what others think. If you have any opinion please do post a comment.

Continue reading »]]> The Google Rank Monitor Software I launched a few days ago has raised some discussions as to what page rank to monitor. The software actually allows you to enter the exact URL that you wish to monitor, therefore if you want you can monitor several sections or individual pages on a site.

This has lead to deeper discussions as to how your link back strategy should work. In my opinion consistency is the key. If I am building link backs to Earning From Affiliates for example I will always use http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/?p=183 unless I want to refer to a specific post.

More over I will also always use the www and on sites where I have two or more domains I will focus all my marketing strategy on one domain while the others just cover miss-types and the odd incidental visitor.

I wonder what others opinions of this is. Are you consistent? Indeed does it make a difference?

Continue reading »]]> I’ve recently advertised for a freelancer to generate some links for Break Away Holiday Cottages, I have asked that these links be on sites with a page rank of above 3. I have also asked for some blog posts and comments to include a link back to my site. I have given details of the types of site and site content that I want links backs from so hopefully in terms of Google they will be quality links.

Having never done this I will see how it goes, my concern is that there is a danger of the freelancer spamming on my behalf, however I have made it clear that permission should be gained and proof of that permission be given along with proof of the link before payment is made.

I will keep you up-to-date on how this goes and what sort of impact it has on visitors and in turn commissions.

Has anyone else gone down this route? if so how successful was it?

Continue reading »]]> What with the current storm over Googles changes to their page rank system I have been getting rather worried about what sort of page rank I would get for this site. As the site has only been going for a few months I have been working with a zero page rank.

Today i have checked my page rank and found that after Googles latest review I now have a page rank of 3/10 for which I am rather pleased. Ok these is still improvement to be had, but for a site of this age I am very pleased with that.

On with the work… there is improvement to be had!

Continue reading »]]> The Alexa rank of this site has improved this month from 1003979 to 810467 dropping 200,000. Looking at the weekly average it is set to drop at least the same again, if not more. This proves the work that has been put in to network and market the site is working and also reflects the increasing number of visitors to the site.

Still awaiting Googles page rank updates but very positive about the way it is going.

More hard work to be done! So back to it!

Continue reading »]]> Building links to your web site is a key task when promoting your online presence and you cannot expect to thrive in the virtual internet community without good quality, relevant links to your site.  Links to your site help generate traffic in two key ways, firstly by attracting traffic that clicks on the link and is carried through to your site and more importantly, indirectly by getting you a higher rank with the search engines.  Search engine ranking is determined by a number of factors and the number of links pointing to your web site is one of the top two methods of achieving a high ranking with interesting SEO optimised content being the other.

While this is simply restating what has been written about by the bucket load,  how to go about finding good link partners and completing the process is a topic upon which a deafening silence falls.

What Are We Looking For?

Sites that you are looking for to create inbound links for your own site need to be:

• from web pages that are relevant to your web pages
• should contain keywords and phrases which your own web site is looking to rank highly for
• should not have the same link text as other inbound links – this replication of the same link text does you no good with the search engines
• should have varied but relevant link text to show the search engines that your site does in fact have content that is relevant and worth ranking

The key thing to bear in mind is that quality by far beats quantity so concentrate your efforts and don’t just link with anything.

Inbound Links Come in Different Flavours

Having different types of inbound links is thought to be a good idea though we don’t know for sure because the search engines do not tell us what they are looking for exactly so it’s hit and miss.

Common types of inbound links include:

• links that have been obtained in exchange for a link from your site
• links from users who find your site interesting
• links from internet directories such as DMOZ
• links created by including them in articles, Press Releases and blogs that you may or may not have a hand in producing.

How Do We Find Sites That Will Link to Us?

The inexpensive way to find sites that are relevant and will link to you is to look within your own business sector.  That may seem strange as why would one of your competitors consider sending traffic to you?  The answer is simple, as though you are in the same business you may in fact not be competing directly.  Someone selling widgets in John O’Groats can safely refer traffic to a widget supplier in Lands End with no loss of business to themselves.  That would constitute a good inbound link and you can easily find dozens of potential link partners in this way.

Another tack to explore is by looking at providers of complimentary but non-competing products in your own area as well as more widely.  A mortgage broker linking with an estate agent makes good sense and also would constitute a good inbound link.

These methods require no expense except some time on your part, but there are service providers who can take the sting out of all of this for a moderate fee and who use professional SEO software to manage link building campaigns.  We’ll continue to focus here though on cost effective link building i.e. free.

We’ve Found a Site We’d Like to Have Link to Us.  Now what?

First check to see if they have a “link page” which will tell you how to go about asking for a link. If they have a link page then follow those instructions.  If there isn’t a link page then you will need to contact the webmaster with the request and how you want the link to be set up.

You can email any webmaster simply by using “webmaster@thesite.co.uk” and that should get through and place “Link Request” or similar in the subject header.  Better still, do a little digging to find out who is behind the site and again this is not a big issue.  I use www.dnsstuff.com as this will give you an email address and a named contact for whoever administers the web site and possibly you will also find the owner of the site and their email too.

Experience has shown that when emailing a webmaster for a link, following some basic rules will help you get a positive response:

• Do not ask too much of the webmaster and remember you are the one asking for the link not the other way around;
• Don’t teach Granny to suck eggs by telling them all about SEO – they probably already know why you’re asking for the link;
• Keep your email short;
• Don’t bother webmasters if the site has no relevance to yours;
• Provide a link to their site first and tell them you’ve done it with a hyperlink to show it;
• Be polite;
• Offer an incentive if they link to you such as a blog post reviewing their product or service offering; and
• Include your contact information including a telephone number as well as your email, and try not to use a free email account such as hotmail – it makes you look like a spammer.

Guaranteed to have your link request rejected is emailing the webmaster a couple of days later asking why they haven’t set the link up yet.  Don’t!  Leave it about a month and then drop them another email and I find that bringing to their attention something on your own web site that may be of interest tends to elicit a response.  Tact and diplomacy are the way forward in these instances.

While You Are looking for Link Partners Others Will Be Looking for You

I’ve already mentioned that you should check a possible link partner website for a link page with instructions on how to ask them for a link.  It’s easy to do and simplifies the whole process so why don’t you set one up for your own website?

Cheap and easy to arrange and if you want inbound links it makes sense  to simplify the process for link partners.  Provide clear instructions on what needs to be done together with a contact email for the webmaster or whoever will make the decision.

The Holy Grail – Links from Higher Ranking Sites Than Mine

This is not as hard as you might think!

You are looking for sites that will link to you and who enjoy high ranking because this makes them more authoritative as far as the search engines are concerned.  Such links provide you with a greater boost in search engine ranking as well.  Getting a link with them may be as simple as following the process outlined already but there are other ways you can get links from higher ranking sites.

Take a look at these two sites – www.Zimbio.com and www.Squidoo.com – both have very good rankings and are considered authoritative by the search engines.  Both also allow you to post articles and blog style posts on their sites with links back to your own web pages as well as the ability to leave comments that also include linkbacks to your web pages.  These count as inbound links that are one-way and count towards your link rating as well as being completely free.

Using Press Releases with links to your web pages achieves the result in a similar fashion and taking it further with social bookmarking sites such as reddit.com, del.icio.us, MySpace and Technorati.  These sites are all high ranking and provide numerous opportunities for growing your links.  You can establish a blog off your main site which covers what you do and every post is linked back to your web pages where relevant and appropriate but it may take some time to gain a high rank on it’s own account.  That does not mean you cannot find a high ranking blog and ask them to feature your business or products and in some cases, a blogger may actually do so for a fee.

Leaving comments on other peoples posts and articles is an excellent way of driving traffic to your web pages and it is easy to find a relevant topic thread that dovetails with your own business.  Using this practice of linkbaiting to place flattering comments on someone else’s work is a sure fire method of getting the attention of the writer and who knows, maybe they’ll feature you in their next post or article.  This may sound corny but it works and it’s how it gets done in the real world.

Summary

Link building is not something that can be just done overnight.  It takes time to build up good links and it takes planning and preparation to maximise the benefits from gaining relevant links.  Don’t go for quantity with your links, instead go for quality links to sites that are relevant to your own.  Manage your link building efforts and get yourself organised in terms of how you perform link building and following up link requests. 

We’ve covered some of the common methods for building links but there are many more techniques that can be used.  These methods as described here do not cost you money but there are many SEO service providers who do this on a professional basis and can achieve impressive results but you must manage them carefully.

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