Guide to make money online!

Obviously the obsession for most is off page SEO (building or getting links from other websites)…Well, I have a little secret for you, authority trumps it all. An authority site can rank using less backlinks, pages or keywords that any other type of website; so, doesn’t this indicate where you should apply your focus?

With so many ranking factors that can impact your position, who you link to (forward-linking or up-linking from your website) is often overlooked as a viable way to expedite the authority process.

By definition an authority site is a popular website frequented often by the virtue of the content/information or experience it provides. Considering the potential to create real value by providing a product, unique angle, news, cool tools, widgets or a service that is phenomenal, that website can be deemed an authority.

One way that they make the initial impact is (a) to do something worthy of being linked to or (b) by linking to enough authority sites that it tips the scales of relevance in the site providing the forward links. In essence, linking to authority sites can expedite the process for your website developing authority. What you do with it after that is up to you.

The reason why linking out is important is, authority sites often link to other authority sites and they is how they preserve the purity of the link graph online. The mark or seal of approval a site gets when it gets a heavy link from a real player can do one of two things immediately.

First, it can toggle a barrage of traffic, which also indicates that your website is a target from a referrer (with authority). Can you see how Google and other search engines might measure this in tandem with popularity?

The second thing it provides is a solid backlink to your website if they provided a do follow link. If you were to appear in a local newspaper, a national story or anything syndicated (even if it is an RSS feed) you can expect for someone, somewhere to latch on to the content and (1) reference it (2) scrape or reproduce it or (3) hopefully just provide a link back (as their way of saying thanks)…

Even if it is scraped, Google and other search engines are smart enough to know who the original source was, so eventually, your site will get credit for starting the ripple effect across the web.

Just like a grappling hook, if you link to the #1 website that ranks for that keyword you are targeting, have relevant titles, strong internal links and additional backlinks pointing at your page, the synergy can provide search engines with a robust array of information to feed their algorithm.

Considering that most would never uplink (since they feel that is supporting the competition) which is what keeps most websites stuck in a certain plateau. Authority sites are generous (if the quality is present), yet other sites that greedily horde the link flow within their own website, only isolates themselves from the rest of the web.

If you are isolated and emanating another signal entirely than what search engines have identified as the prime cluster of websites returning relevant hits for the main keywords for any given root phrase, can you see how this would leave your pages out in the cold.

Shameless self promotion can only catapult your rankings so far, and if your website is always a destination and never a path to another more relevant or equally relevant source for additional information, then you will never attract the type or quality of editorial links that other authority sites get by default (as a result of providing visitors with a range of options).

Linking out by providing in-depth mash ups, top 10 or top 20 lists and consolidating an array of resources on your pages for others is (a) the right thing to do from time to time as well as (b) that value of hub status can come back and reward your site with the ability to rank for the keywords you intend on with a fraction of the effort.

Wikipedia is in my summation, the grandest authority site to date. It has user generated content, is self moderated and constantly provides information and traffic to all of the links it assumes, devours and emulates.

As a result, there is hardly a search phrase you can enter without cross-referencing some shingle in Wikipedia. The reason is (a) the depth of content on multiple topics (b) tons of deep links to each page from a variety of IP addresses and types of sites and (3) the fact that they link out (even though its nofollowed) to so many other types of websites.

Take some time and start looking at the backlinks from some authority sites in Yahoo to get an idea of what really strong links really look like (link:google.com link:Wikipedia.org, link:cnn.com), you will note that there are similarities of co-occurrence; and that a like links to a like (authority sites to other authority sites). Also, take a look at where they link to using MSN’s linkfromdomain:google.com | linkfromdomain:Wikipedia.org | linkfromdomain:cnn.com

SEO is full of minute details with a multidimensional array of granular layers to explore, fine-tune and create, so, instead of thinking of attacking a ranking of an authority site, look behind the site and see who is propping it up. Perhaps you can either get a link from an editorial sponsoring “authority site” of scale the tipping point needed to push past that page by concentrating your websites ranking factor.

Even though the “nofollow” attribute was intended to stop the flow of link juice “something always gets through”. Trust is a ranking factor as well…and that is something that can wear down a nofolllow tag over time and seep into all of the sites embedded into its link graph (the sum total of all the internal and external links that site connects).

The takeaway here is (a) don’t be greedy (b) be careful where you point your links (better and more trusted neighborhoods are better than questionable ones) and (c) realize the long term value of building authority for your website, instead of just building links and you are one step closer to ranking for more keywords with less effort as your website scales the ladder of relevance on its way to the top of thousands of relevant and competitive keywords.

Many times website owners who are new to link building simply don’t know what to expect when it comes to the timeframe for registering backlinks.

Here’s a common question I get:

“I’ve just started marketing my brand new website, and I know I have backlinks coming into my site, yet when I do a check for incoming links, nothing shows up. Am I doing something wrong?”

Probably not–A backlink check will tell you how many incoming links are registered with a particular search engine, but it will not tell you how many backlinks you actually have.

Why is that? Well, it usually takes search engines months to re-evaluate incoming links, so if you do a backlink check today, there are likely links that are going into your site that haven’t yet been calculated in.

It would be nice if we could build links and then immediately have them show up in a backlink check, but that’s just not the way the internet works.

As you’re building links to your site, here are some ways to keep track of your progress and build links effectively over time:

How To Do A Backlink Check

It’s incredibly easy to do a backlink check for your site. In Google, just type this into the search box (replacing the ‘yourwebsite.com’ part with your URL):

• link:http://www.yourwebsite.com/

The results of that search will bring up a list of sites that are linking to your website address. In the upper right hand corner of Google you’ll be able to see a total count of your registered backlinks.

An even better tool is Yahoo Site Explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com which provides a list of your registered backlinks and much more detailed information. Both of these backlink checking tools are free, so you can try each one out (or do both).

Why Are Backlinks Not Showing Up For My Site?

Let’s suppose you know that you’ve build links to your site, but nothing is showing up when you do a backlink check (frustrating, I know!).

There are some logical reasons why backlinks may not be showing up:

1) Perhaps your website is brand new and has not yet been indexed by Google.

When you launch a new site it does not automatically appear in Google–it usually takes several months for Google to realize that the site is there and to index and categorize it.

Until your site is indexed, it will not show up in any search engine searches and no backlinks will be registered. You can even do a search for your exact site name or URL and nothing will show up–that is how you know that your site has not been indexed yet.

If this is your situation, don’t fret! This waiting period is something that all website owners go through, and Google (and the other search engines) will eventually index your site.

It can take anywhere from 3-5 months for a new website to be indexed.

I remember the last time I was launching a new site it took about 5 months for the site to be indexed in Google. On that 5th month, all of the backlinks that I had been building over the preceding months finally showed up–whew!

2) Not enough time has elapsed since building the links.

Even if your site is already indexed, it usually takes search engines several months (3-4) to recalculate the backlinks. So, if you have been doing article submissions for the past 2 months and you know for a fact that you have quite a few incoming links, those links will not show up in a backlink check for another month or two.

This doesn’t mean the links aren’t there–they are! The search engine just hasn’t registered them yet.

As you can see, one necessary component of any link building campaign is PATIENCE. There will be a time delay from when you build the link to when you see the fruit of your labor in Google.

Keep in mind, this time delay does not impact your marketing campaign–whether the links have started to show up or not, you should continue to market your website and submit articles. Immediate results are not the goal–you should be going for a long lasting impact on your search engine ranking for your keywords, rather than a brief shot of traffic that fades away after a day or so.

When you’re link building, you need to market your site consistently–develop an article submission schedule for yourself and stick to it, submitting articles each and every month.

You will be rewarded in the long run with an increased search engine ranking for your major keywords, which can of course build traffic dramatically for the long-term.

Buying text links for your website is a highly controversial subject online. Like it or not, approve of the practice or disapprove, it does exist and there are many website owners who are doing it. I’m not going to debate the issue one way or the other; just shed some light on what some consider a “gray subject.”

So why would you want or need to buy a text link on another website? It all goes back to “link popularity.” Search engines look at how many other sites are linking to yours when deciding on your ranking. Granted, this is just one criterion, but nevertheless an important one to pay attention to.

If you don’t know how many other sites are linking to yours, go to any search engine and type this in: link:http://www.yourdomain.com … you should get a pretty good idea of your “popularity.” Keep in mind that Google never shows all sites linking to yours, so what you see in the results will not be an accurate presentation of those linking to you. Why they do this is not clear (it’s one of those “Google Secrets”), but a possible explanation is that it’s one of the methods they use to keep their ranking algorithms private.

When considering a link purchase, only buy from sites that are related to your theme and use the Google Toolbar to check their page rank. You can download it here:
http://toolbar.google.com/

A page rank of 4 or above is pretty good but a 7 or 8 is excellent. Never buy a link based on page rank alone. If the site doesn’t relate to your site’s content, don’t do it.

Here are some things to keep in mind before making any purchases:

There are two types of links: one-way and reciprocal. A reciprocal link is when two sites agree to link to each other, a one-way link is just one site linking to another without linking back. Purchasing a text link is an example of a one-way link. One-way links are counted higher by most search engines and therefore are more valuable then reciprocal.

When supplying your text link to other sites, make sure to include your keywords in your anchor text. The anchor text is the part of the link that is clickable. Use a variety of key phrases so as not to raise any red flags with the search engines.

You also want to be consistent with your url. Use the “www.” part in all incoming links, as links to “yourdomain.com” and “www.yourdomain.com” could be treated as two different websites by the search engines.

Another tip when buying links is to do it slowly. Don’t buy too many at one time. You want it to look natural to the search engines. Hundreds of sites deciding to link to yours in a week is not “natural” and may catch unwanted attention from the powers that be.

Stay away from link farms when choosing link partners. Just associating with “bad sites” can be enough to get you banned by the search engines. You’ll also want to make sure you’re getting links from different IP addresses. Search engines will give the links more weight if they don’t all come from the same IP.

So now that you have the basics, where do you buy the text links? I thought you’d never ask.

1) LinkHaul: http://www.LinkHaul.com

Purchase static links to PR 4, 5,6, 7 or 8 websites. Pricing starts at 3.00 per month.

2) Text Link Brokers: http://TextLinkBrokers.com

Offering a variety of link building programs to increase your link popularity.

3) LinkAdage: http://www.LinkAdage.com

Buy or sell text links within an auction format or buy direct thru a broker.

4) Text-Link-Ads: http://www.Text-Link-Ads.com

Offering $100.00 in free text link ads when you spend $125.00. So you only have to spend an initial investment of $25.00

5) BackLinks: http://www.BackLinks.com

A service that allows webmasters to trade, sell or buy text links.

When you buy a link, it’s usually billed on a monthly basis and you’ll always pay more for a site with a higher page rank, and also for having them put your link on their main page compared to a page deeper down within the site. Once you purchase a link let it run for a few months at a time, search engines will need it in order to find and spider them.

Right or wrong, purchasing links is one way to improve your link popularity quickly and move your site up the ranks in the search engines. Remember, there are many ways to increase your website traffic, and buying text links is just another means to an end.

Experience really counts! I’ve been blogging for a while on many different blogs. Before turning into a partial-pro blogger, I did some research on ways to get traffic my blog, and I would like to share my points of view with you. What is the good, what is the bad and what is the ugly way of generating traffic.

Natural Backlinks
Every blogger dreams about this. As the number of natural backlinks increase, your authority will also increase. But the point here is, are those natural backlinks really worth it? The answer is yes. It is a kind of virtuous circle. The higher the number of backlinks you have, the higher your authority, and the higher your authority, the more natural backlinks you will get.

In my blogging career, I’ve learned only two ways to get good backlinks: hard work and patience. By hard work I mean the content you write. Blogs like SixRevisions and Hongkiat are among the most popular design blogs. If you visit them, you will realize the reason: the publish a lot of high quality content on a very frequent basis.

Comments
I think I don’t need to tell you why you should be commenting on other blogs. For instance, I still remember the articles TechCrunch articles where I managed to leave the first comment. At that time, my blog used to get around 40 visitors a day. On that particular day (when I left the comment) my visitor count increased to around 110 visitors.

Some tips while commenting on other blogs:

1. Try to be the first one to leave a comment. Definitely it requires you to be pro active or to have some luck.

2. Try to ask a question on your comment. This is a 100% proven way of getting traffic. But of course I am not telling you to ask “How you doing buddy?” but something which will make readers think and incite them to visit your blog.

3. Try to keep it simple. Never write lengthy comments. Nobody has time to read a comment by someone they don’t even know.

Forums
Forums are always a good way of bringing in traffic to your blog. You can either ask your blog related question there, or you can put your signature as your link there.

Things to remember:

1. Never ask useless questions just for the sake of getting some extra traffic. There are always smart people who can ban you from the forum forever.

2. When you put your blog link as your signature, try to use some eye catching anchor text. For example, “How I earn few extra bucks working part time” sounds way better than “Click here to earn money”.

3. To take maximum advantage of forums, be regular. Devote 5 minutes every day to post there or start a new thread. This means 5*30 =150 minutes a month. It can get you at least 300 visitors a month and is very good in the long run.

Twitter
Twitter has always been a very good friend of mine for getting Traffic. Mostly the traffic depends on the kind of content you write. Twitter traffic is crazy about social media. If you are writing something like “10 tips that can make you Twitter rich” then I am sure your followers would love to retweet it for you.

One thing I really like about Twitter is that your articles which never get attention on social bookmarking sites can also drive you a lot of traffic.

TIP: Twitter will only pay you off if you are regular. Try starting from 10 minutes a day and keep ReTweeting stuff. Most of your followers will reciprocate you and will RT your links too.

Search Engines
This requires no clarification. But before starting your blog, you have to decide whether you really want organic traffic or not. If you do, you will inevitably need to play around with SEO. It is also worth remembering that some blogs will naturally perform better than others as far as organic traffic is concerned. This is usually the case with tech related blogs, for instance.

Buying links
If you are really passionate about blogging and following “natural standards” without any black hat tricks, then buying links is BAD. Period!

Social Bookmarking
There are multiple ways of looking at things. Some think it is good and some think it is bad. Let us know the reason why is it so.

Why social bookmarking traffic is bad for my blog?
Social bookmarking traffic is very smart. If you are trying to make money with contextual ads like Adsense, for example, you will notice that such traffic will covert very poorly, if at all..

And why is social bookmarking traffic is good for my blog?
This is no brainer. More traffic means people like your content. Just imagine even if 1% of those visitors link to your article from their blog. Also imagine if 1% of of those people visiting your blog for the first time become your subscribers.

TIP: If you want to have success with social bookmarking sites, work on the quality of your titles. They can literally make or break your social media success.

Family and Friends
If you are deliberately asking your mom to visit your blog and check out some geeky stuff over there, then I think you need to go back to Blogging School and try harder.

On the other hand, it also depends on your niche. If you are writing about cats and dogs and your content is making your family and friends at least grin, then you’ve done a very good job.

For a website to generate a regular flow of traffic and climb up the traffic engine rankings, it needs to be well linked into a network of related websites. In simple terms, that means that other websites will have links on them that point to your website.

Until recently, one of the most popular ways for Internet marketers to build website backlinks was to exchange links with other website owners. This is considered especially valuable if the website where the link was to be placed was highly ranked and in a similar niche. However, a lot of people focused more on quantity than quality of links, causing Google to downgrade the importance they associate to reciprocal links when calculating website ranking.

Bear in mind, however, that Google's chief, Matt Cutts, has suggested on his blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2007/05/page/2/) that reciprocal links are not automatically bad in themselves. If you find a good quality website in a niche market related to your own, by all means link out to it from your website and contact the Webmaster to explain what you have done and request a reciprocal link.

One good way of linking out to other websites is to set up the resources page on your site with links to a range of sites that may be of use or interest to your visitors. Do not worry that this may cause you to lose traffic, because by adopting a policy of freely giving out information, including links to other sites, you are promoting yourself as an expert in your field and building a sense of goodwill with your website visitors. A useful resource page is something that will attract traffic to your website, which is exactly what you want.

Another bonus of this type of page is that it gives you plenty of scope for link baiting. Link baiting is simply a process of adding content to your website or blog that people will be likely to want to link to. So if you add a mini review or a few sentences of commentary with each link on your resource page, you will find that some of the people who visit your page will be more likely link to it on their own website.

Link baiting is a great method for building one-way website backlinks or blog backlinks, so it makes sense to approach all of your content writing with Link baiting in mind. Your articles should be full of content that is original, useful, and also entertaining. This building is just one way of making a link baiting page. Finding an unusual angle, writing with wit and humor, taking a contrary position are other great link baiting tactics.

You can also build one-way website backlinks by posting comments on forums and blogs. For this to add anything to your website ranking, find relevant blogs and forums that allow "do follow" comments. You can quickly find a whole bunch of do-follow blogs and forums by doing a search on Google.

If you follow these tips consistently, you will have no difficulty building website backlinks and improving your ranking on Google and other search engines.

I wish you the best of success,
John Baril
Copyright © John Baril

I recently received this question from someone who had just started article marketing his brand new sites:

"If I know that a link exists to one of my sites via an article which has been published or indeed from another website, how come I don't see it when I do a backlinks check? For instance, at the moment, www.mysite.com definitely has a link from www.myothersite.com and also from articles that have been published. So how come a backward link check registers no links? Just hoping to find out how this works."

That is an excellent question–I think that's a common point of confusion, especially for people who are marketing brand new websites.

Let me help you understand how the the backlink registering works and give you some tips on building more traffic to your site with article marketing.

Here are 2 ways I would recommend doing a backlink check:

*Go to Google, and in the search box type in link:http://www.yourwebsite.com/

You would of course replace the 'yourwebsite.com' part with your real URL.

*And/or you can use Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer actually gives more detailed information, so you may enjoy using that tool.

Both of these link checking methods will tell you how many backlinks that Google or Yahoo has registered.

Now that is *not* telling you how many backlinks you actually have–it's telling you how many links are registered at Google/Yahoo.

Search engines typically take 3-4 plus months to register backlinks for a site, and it can be longer if the site is brand new.

This is just the way that search engines work–they do not reevaluate links on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis–usually it is more like every 3 or 4 months.

I remember when we were first starting our blog, it was only in the 5th month that the links started turning up in a backlink check. We had been building links for all that time, but it just took 3 months for the backlinks to be registered by Google. Then all of the sudden in the 3th month a whole bunch of links showed up.

For a brand new site, you need to give Google a chance to…

1) index your site, and

2) register your incoming links.

That can take anywhere from 3-5 months.

As the site gets more established, the backlinks tend to register sooner (like every 3 months or so), but especially for a new site it just takes Google a bit of time to recognize the site and count the new links.

So, stop looking at your watch, and start looking at the calendar

During that time, you should be busy–busy marketing your site and submitting articles.

I have a few resources that should really be helpful for you as you're starting to market your site:

5 Things To Do Before You Start Article Marketing… (this is a great resource that tells you how to gauge your progress and how soon you can expect to see results–please read it)

Use Yahoo Site Explorer

So, just to go back over things–there are 2 reasons why you might not see backlinks for your site yet:

1) Your site is brand new. Until your site is indexed by Google, no links will show up at all in a backlink check, even if you know for certain that you have links coming in. Once your site gets more established the backlinks will register more regularly, but at the beginning it takes longer.

2) Not enough time has elapsed since you have submitted your articles. After you start article marketing, it will take 3-4 months for the backlinks to register in Google and other search engines. This does not mean that the links are not there or that they are not accumulating with each article you submit–it just means that the Google spiders have not gotten around to visiting your site and checking you links. The links will show up in a few months.

Here's What To Do:

*Read over the resources I gave you above.

*Develop a submission schedule where you're submitting articles for your site(s) every single month.

*If you're very interested in keeping on top of your website's progress, follow the instructions in the post I referred you to above 5 Things To Do Before You Start Article Marketing. You can keep track of your stats every month, but know that it will likely take anywhere from 3-5 months for the backlinks to be registered. There are still other ways to measure progress even as you're waiting for the backlinks to show up. See that post for the other ways.

*Be patient, I know it's tempting to want to see results right away (we all want that immediate gratification!), but this is a marathon, rather than a sprint. The links created with Article Marketing have long lasting impact on a site's ranking and traffic, but it does take months before seeing the impact of your work. Even after you see the impact of your work you should continue to submit articles to build on the momentum, as it's just a natural part of marketing your websites and your business.