The Steps To Successful SEO

When starting to build an online business, it is important to concentrate on building an asset essentially. If you decide to get out of the niche and you’ve got four or five sites, you’ve got HubPages, you’ve got Squidoo pages, you can always sell the whole package together, if it’s an actual business. If you actually build Squidoo pages with quality content on them and if you make an effort, rather than just building for their own sake, I think you’re going to be in a lot better standing with the search engines. I do think there’s a great value in having your own network to leverage off.

Let us say we picked a website and we picked some relatively low hanging keywords and perhaps we picked some tougher keywords to go for the home page. It is important to understand the typical time cycle that you’d go through to start applying your SEO technique.

SEO is obviously not an overnight business. It’s not like an AdWords account where you turn it on and you’re driving traffic. It can take time to start building up the links and building up some page rank.

We now put directory submissions as one of the first things we do.

We try and get as many directory submissions as we can because we’ve found that some of these directories that we use, even though sometimes we used to do only PR2 and above, now we’re happy to take whatever because we know a lot of these directories will evolve into higher PR ranked websites and sometimes paid websites and you get in for free.

Also, the reason I’m using directory submissions is not so much for those links, as it is the link diversity and making sure that we’re getting a good amount of inbound links with the url as the anchor text.

So we start off with directories, we do some of the article submissions as well. When we go through the step by step process, we try and basically go for, I’ve broken it up into two areas where we have what is most leverageable, what we can outsource easiest and apply that.

We throw that against the wall, see how the site sticks after a certain amount of time, then we start to identify where it is you’re strong, going back and being really targeted in your link building campaign.

The web 2.0 and using video and things like that, typically we do in our second wave of link building. The first wave is all about the articles, the directories, a little bit of social book marking, that’s more so for indexing, not so much for links. We try and do it in a little bit of an automated process rather than jumping out there and doing it manually.

We try and get through the first part, like I said, the directories, the articles and then also using some of the blog networks as well and a few other little things we do. We try and do that, I’d say, within the first month. Then usually we just let it sit for a little bit, a good few weeks, just to let everything settle, and some things are dripping out anyway. Then we go back and we start to monitor and have a look at our Google Analytics, identify where we are getting that biggest bang for buck.

Then we’re a lot more targeted and we say, right, we can start to see what keywords are getting us the right type of traffic, the keywords that are converting. Now when we start to build out some of those web 2.0 and video things which are a little more difficult to outsource and need typically a higher quality outsourcer which obviously usually commands a higher price, we can be a lot more specific in targeting what it is we want to go for.

To recap, you’ve got a good month for the first part of the campaign, let it sit for a little bit, do some analysis and then we start the second part which is, I’d say, another month. After that, you just have some slower ongoing link building processes, just to keep it looking natural and keep those links building. Do these and you will be an SEO expert soon enough.

Serious Inquiries Only: SEO Can Be Fun...

Every once in awhile, no matter how passionate we are with what we do as SEO experts, we need to take a break and let the soothing sound of our own laughter permeate through our veins... so give yourself a break form all the SEO techniques and what not in your life and enjoy...

Link Building Is The Lifeblood Of Internet Marketing

Back linking is a vital part of building any website. However, people tend to use a sledge hammer to do their back linking. There are some brilliant services out there in terms of back linking. AMA is one that immediately comes to mind that does a very good job. They will provide links over time that have some actual value, which is a brilliant service.

Otherwise people take the complete other end of the spectrum and they have a high tech sweat shop in the Philippines or India or Costa Rica or wherever it happens to be and they just pay people to just go and get links wherever they possible can. Most of that effort is wasted, of course, because they come up as spam comments and people who own the blogs knock them off or they just go on blogs that Google has already written off millions of years ago.

I think you can be a lot smarter than that when building a website. You can use Market Samurai to target sites that have authority already and that you can provide some specific content for and you can bring a bit of brains to it.

The markets I love are where real things are being sold to real people, hobbyists and how tos and all sorts of things where there is nowhere near the competition. That’s where this really works effectively and you don’t have to work as hard to do it.

I think with reverse engineering what your competition is doing as well, you can begin to pick out, is this keyword worth going after? You can sit there and know what the value of my product is and then look at what the competition is doing to get that position and using some of the analysis tools, find out how much traffic that particular keyword’s getting. Then you can say, is it worth me investing $1000 to hire this person to get enough links to take this position? You can then pick those battles.

I think that right there, the idea of reverse engineering your competition, is something that can just completely open the landscape up and it’s like you’re knowing where to punch and not wasting any energy when link building.

How many times do I ask someone I’m trying to help out on a site what are the top ten phrases that are delivering traffic? They don’t know and they haven’t gone through and reverse engineered all this. It’s such a shame, because the only thing it’s costing you is time, particularly with something like Market Samurai, it’s so easy. In the old days, this used to take a huge amount of research, now, not even close. It’s just so much easier.

Of course there is another quantifier here which is really interesting. You should also know how much that traffic, and Market Samurai tells you this too, how much it will cost you for the pay for click of that equivalent phrase. You will then know the average cost per click for that particular phrase in that particular market. You will start to see value for what that is worth to you.

Then, if you can do that and you know your conversions, and you know if you’re getting x visitors, you’re going to make y sales which is worth z dollars and you can factor that back and understand how much you can afford to pay for traffic and make a decent profit. It’s all maths. It’s cool maths, it’s exciting maths. But people don’t do it and that’s a tragedy.