As a continuation of my Building Links to Your Website post, I want to do the same thing with the subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A lot of people are confused about SEO, PageRank, search engine rankings, etc., especially if they’re just starting out.

I’ve been asked a number of questions recently via email and Facebook regarding this subject, so I wanted to share them with you all so that if you have the same or similar questions, you can get them answered here.

I’ll quote the questions and answers, and if I have anything to add, I’ll post it below that to keep Q&A’s separate from my afterthoughts.  Confused? You’ll see what I mean.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Q&A’s

Questions: May I ask you one question about SEO? What do you think about PR calculating? Is it really possible to achieve a PR 6 with 19 backlinks from a website that also has a PR 6? I mean, if I write 19 articles for EzineArticles.com, will my new website also achieve a PR 6?

Reference: http://www.fuzzone.com/blog/346/search-marketing/how-to-calculate-your-pagerank/

Is it a good idea to make backlinks from one site with a high PR, (for example, write articles to ezinearticles.com), or is it better to get backlinks from different sites? For example, EzineArticles, forum signatures, bookmarking, comments on blogs, etc.?

Answers: There are many variables to how PR is calculated. Simply getting a few backlinks from a PR 6 site like EZA will not make your site a PR 6.

I recommend getting backlinks many different ways; through articles, forum postings, blog commenting, social bookmarking, etc.

Afterthought: For more competitive niches, you definitely want to vary your link building strategy. However, if you’re building a micro niche site in which you only need a few good backlinks, then submitting a few articles to EZA would do the trick in most cases.

Question: What is your opinion about article marketing? Is it possible to achieve Google’s first positions ONLY by writing articles to ezinearticles.com (The niches would be with low competition)?

Answer: I highly recommend article marketing. As long as your competition is low, it is possible to get to the first position of Google by submitting to EZA alone. However, keep in mind your anchor text would need to be the same keyword phrase for every article you submit, and getting to the first position will take time.

Afterthought: The less the competition, the easier and quicker it will be to rank at the top of Google. If you’ve been following along with me for a while now, you’ll remember it took me all but a week to get my micro niche site to the first position in Google for my main keyword phrase.

Questions: I submit my articles to additional directories but they’re rewrited by software, so all articles are different from 30% to 50%. So, all is well there, but a lot of them are NO FOLLOW backlinks, so about 30% of my backlinks will be not counted, and they will not affect my sites in any way?

I have seen that search engine rankings are more important than PR, because many times I have seen that on the 1st place is a website with 2 PR and some count of backlinks, and on 2nd place is a website well known with 6 PR and much more backlinks, and I have always wondered why? Looks like that second site should be on the first place with the same keyword?

About bookmarking, I have a question. Must I bookmark only my site’s first page? I want to get good rankings for my home page, and all my backlinks are directed to the home page, so I must keep doing the same? Or, could I redirect backlinks to other pages on my site? One more thing, what if I bookmark some of my ezine articles? I heard that is good for PR and search engine ranks because the links will make the link between my site, ezine and bookmarking? Is it worth doing that if those bookmarking sites are nofollow?

Answers: As long as the article is at least 30% different, then they should be fine. In most cases those backlinks from those articles would count, and as long as the links are DO FOLLOW then PR will get passed through to your site. No Follow links are still beneficial for rankings, though.

Yeah, more baclinks doesn’t mean higher rankings… all the time. Each baclink is weighted on varying factors; factors that include the site’s PR, relevance, type of backlink, etc.

One social bookmarking site I use (http://www.mmosocialnetwork.com) does give you a DO FOLLOW backlink. May want to check that one out. I’m sure there are others as well. Perhaps a quick Google search will present a few.

When bookmarking, it’s important to bookmark individual blog posts and not the home page. When building backlinks in general, you do want to build backlinks to your home page, but at the same time you want to build links to your internal pages as well.

Bookmarking to NO FOLLOW sites won’t help with PR but will help for rankings.

Afterthought: Just remember when bookmarking you also want to bookmark other people’s stuff… it’s best to keep a good mix rather than bookmarking only your pages. You’ll be seen as a spammer and could have your accounts deleted.

That concludes the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Q&A.

Note: I don’t proclaim to be an expert in any field, especially anything related to SEO. I only speak from personal experience and what I’ve done and am doing to increase my search engine rankings for the sites I have, including this one.

If you seek professional advice or the wisdom of a “guru”, you won’t find it here. Search Google.

Final Thoughts

I want to thank you for sticking with me through this lengthy post. I hope you got value from these questions and answers and can apply them to your own SEO efforts.

Ask Your Question!

Do you have a question that wasn’t covered here? What specific SEO question do you have and would like answered? Let me know in the comments below.

I look forward to answering your questions!

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of questions related to getting traffic to a website, search engine optimization (SEO) and building backlinks to a site. My email and Facebook inboxes have been flooded with all kinds of questions, so I thought it would be great to post them here in case you had similar questions.

The topic I’m going to cover in this post will have everything to do with getting traffic to a site, for the most part. Some questions may stray a little into the other areas I mentioned, but for the most part they deal with traffic.

I’ll quote the questions and answers, and if I have anything to add, I’ll post it below that to keep Q&A’s separate from my afterthoughts.  Confused? You’ll see what I mean.

Traffic Q&A’s

Question: My site for the main keyword is #1 on Google. The local searches Google shows 6000, the webmaster tool as well. So I suppose it would be 6000 divided by 30 (month days) = 200 visitors per day. However, with Google Analytics I see that my site visiting only 70 unique visitors per day? My webmaster tool shows Search queries – Impressions – 6,600, Clicks – 1,000. Is this some kind a rule that if Google shows some number of searches you will never get all visitors to your site and must be divided by two?

Few times I have tried to change the description, but nothing happened.

Answer: When using Google’s keyword tool, those monthly search numbers are only estimates. So, sometimes they may be accurate, sometimes they may not be. The only thing to do at that point is to start ranking for other related search terms which will increase your overall traffic.

Afterthought: Another thing you want to remember is that just because your website may be in the number one spot, you still have the Sponsored Listings to compete with along with the other natural search results. Granted, being number one is going to bring in the majority of that traffic, but not all of it.

So, as I recommend, start trying to rank for other terms as well to increase your overall traffic.

Question: Maybe you could advise what should I do to fix this problem.

On my Google Webmasters account, I see that on my site, which is on #2 spot, have a very small amount of clicks – 73, but impressions – 1900. I’m wondering that here should be something not right, I understand that Google shows my website’s link – 1900 times, but visitors clicking on it only 73 times, am I right Alan?

What should I do to get most of those clicks from those 1,900 impressions?

Answer: My first reaction would be that the ads being displayed on your website aren’t targeted to the content on your site. Or, the people coming to your site aren’t targeted for the content on your site, assuming the ads are relevant. That would be where I would start.

Afterthought: You could also try Adsense Section Targeting so that more relevant ads show up on your site. I recommend reading through what it is and note the caution if you do implement it.

Question: Hey, do you know much about buying traffic to your website? Is that a bad idea, or do you recommend it?

Answer: I have nothing against it. However, make sure you do some homework and have a budget for it. You can easily lose money if you don’t know what you’re doing it. I’ve done it in the past… made some money, lost some money.

I’ve heard Yahoo and MSN are pretty good, so those are possibilities too. I’ve never used them, though, only Adwords.

Afterthought: Yahoo is pretty much non-existent now, and MSN is now Bing. So, I’m not sure where the PPC side of things stand for either as I haven’t looked into it since these happenings. The majority of people do use Google Adwords, though.

Question: Hey, I was wondering if you would be able to help me improve my Google ranking? I know it wont be easy, but I would LOVE to get my page to appear on Google page 1 at some point within the next 6 months. Is that at all possible, under such a competitive keyword phrase like ‘keyword‘?

Answer: Sure, I’d be happy to help. That term is going to be very tough after looking at the sites currently on page one. Perhaps there is a long-tail keyword you could shoot for? This would help you rank faster and at the same time position your site to be in a better position to rank for your main keyword. That’s just my thoughts.

Afterthought: I always recommend going after long-tail terms especially if your niche is very competitive. For instance, my niche is the ‘work from home’ niche, which is SUPER competitive. It could take you months or years to be ranking well and earning money for that exact phrase, unless you targeted a long-tail phrase instead. FYI, my site is on page 2 of Google for the ‘work from home’ keyword.

Question: Yeah I thought something as common as “keyword” would be too tough to compete with, but I do like your idea of using a long-tail keyword phrase. Do you have any suggestions as to what I could go for? I was thinking terms like “keyword1“, or “keyword2” etc… would you think it is possible to appear on page 1 under those kind of search terms?

Answer: I haven’t checked Google page one to see what all sites come up, but it’s something to start with. I use this tool: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer.

This tool is very handy to find the number of searches per month. Make sure to check “[Exact]” match type. Then, go to Google and type in the search terms you want to see the competing sites for. That should give you an idea of what you’re up against. Also look at the total number of sites that come up. The less the better.

Afterthought: Some people will tell you to search for the keyword with quotes when looking up your competition. This is fine; however, no one searching for that keyword is going to put it in quotes, so make sure to also do the search without quotes to get a total number of competing sites. The numbers will be significantly different from each other.

Note: I don’t proclaim to be in expert in any field, including how to get website traffic. I only speak from personal experience and what I’ve done and am doing to get traffic to the sites I have, including this one.

If you seek professional advice or the wisdom of a “guru”, you won’t find it here. Search Google.

Final Thoughts

These questions covered a wide variety of traffic techniques and strategies, but I realize there are so many other topics that could be discussed regarding traffic.

Ask Your Question

I’m turning the floor over to you now…

What do you want to know about getting traffic to your website? What question/s do you have that weren’t covered in this post?

Leave a comment below with your question/s or you can contact me directly.

I look forward to answering your questions!

The following is a guest post by Darrell Lischka of about-internetmarketing.com.

You decided that you had enough at your job and want to start building an online business to make money. Great, welcome to the internet club. Now what are you going to do? In today’s article, I will describe the process of creating an authority site and how you rank it on page 1.

The article will go over the essential elements that one should focus their time on, if they truly want to see results. This is not the fluff type of article that tells you how to make 10K a month in only 3 months. Nope, far from it, because if you truly want financial freedom, then you will have to pay a price to fire your boss. My article will cover keyword research, domains, back linking strategies to rank on page 1, niche marketing ideas and strategies, and even mentioning some software that will leverage your time more effectively.

The fact is Google is the most popular search engine and because of that, my methods will be related to ranking well on their search engine.

Authority Site

My definition of an authority site is simple. It’s a website that ranks on page 1 of G. The fact is authority sites come in all types and sizes. They can range from a 1 page website, to hundreds of pages.

How to make money with proper keyword research

When I first got started, I listened to someone that I honestly believed knew what they were talking about. I found out later, they were just trying to up sell me with their own marketing system. So I learned the hard way and wasted a lot of time trying to figure out keyword research. I was new at this SEO game several years ago. I made the same mistakes the that newbies make, by going after the big keyword categories. Forget the big keywords when you are starting off. Go after the low competitive terms. It will literally save you time, money and of course some sleepless nights.

Niche Marketing Tactics – What The A-Listers Won’t Tell You

My advice in terms of niche marketing ideas and niche marketing strategies, is to start at the low end and work your way up the keyword ladder. For example, search for key phrases that range between 10 to 20 searches a day. Your competitors will be lower in that niche market, than attempting to rank for large key phrase categories. Better to start out small, build up your rankings for a number of low phrases and start earning some cash, than waiting 6 to 12 months or more to see results. Successful individuals who earn money online, use this approach all the time.

Domains

Before you register any domain names, first get your keyword research out of the way. The reason, you should when possible, try and include your keyword phrase in your domain name. You certainly don’t have to, but it will give you a little extra SEO juice based on personal experience. You can of course take any domain name and rank it on page 1 for essentially any keyword category. But any advantage that you can get, make sure you do because your competitors are doing it.

Another tip that you can do when registering a domain name, is to see if there’s a domain available for sale with that term. Now, I would never suggest you invest hundreds or thousands of dollars, but depending on the niche and your financial situation, it might be worth it. I would suggest you only do this when you have some experience first.

The Importance of Getting Back Links

Back-links are the back bone of the ranking game. One way links should be mostly external, but you will also need to do some internal linking within your website. An external links means, when you post an article at an article directory like Ezine Articles, you hyper link your keyword term back to your website. That is what the SEO community means by back links.

As well, you can improve your own site by making sure your internal link structure is set up correctly. For example, for some of your pages within your website, link that page back to your home page. Don’t do it for all of them, but a few of them. As well, you can pass some link juice from 1 page to another page. Those little tips can again, give you a little bump in the rankings.

To Rank Well – You Need a Back Linking Plan

Now that I covered what external and internal links are, lets discuss how you go about getting the maximum back links for your website. It really revolves around creating content and submitting it to various article directories and Ezine directories. The most popular is Ezine articles. The best thing to do is simply type in top article directories or do follow article directories in G to get a list. There are literally thousands of places to post content.

My general approach is to post 5 to 10 unique articles at the top article directories and move on. However, there is one key piece of information that must do, to rank well and make your site strong. When you link back to your website, make sure you are deep linking 80% of the time to pages and actual articles on your website.

If you are confused, just hang on for a minute. Deep linking means your URL that you hyperlink from your article will link to an actual article within your site. Fail to do this for competitive terms and you will likely never rank on page 1. Trust me, I have made this mistake in the beginning.

You can help you website by doing some comment marketing at other forums and websites. My only caution is to make sure you add value to the discussion and not some spam type comment. Over time, you will gain recognition as someone that can be trusted and other readers in time, might start checking out your site. The more readers that go to your site and spend time there, will count towards the overall ranking game because how much time someone spends at your site is part of the algorithm for Google or better known as the bounce rate.

One final comment about back links. They are not created equally. For example a back link from Ezine articles is not the same as a back link from a brand new article directory. So, when posting your content, go for established and authority directories. To look natural, you will end up with a variety of links for all over the place. Just getting high quality back links could flag Google and that’s the last thing you want is a manual inspection and get de-indexed from the search results.

Strategies To Help Your Article Marketing Efforts

If you struggle for time like most people because they work full time, you can leverage your time more effectively by looking at software tools that help you create more versions of your article. They are referred to as article spinners or an article rewriter. If used properly, you can create dozens of unique versions. Just keep in mind, you still want quality content, but I have found it saves me time on manually editing articles and being able to post to more places.

Well, there you have the essential elements on building and ranking an authority site. Just keep in mind, start with good keyword research, picking the right domain name, niche marketing strategies and the most important part, building back links for your website.

If you want to dramatically improve your article marketing efforts and get more back links to rank higher in the search engines, Go Here: Article Rewriter.

Another month has gone by. Seriously… is it going as fast as I think it is? I seem to keep losing more and more time each day and getting further behind on stuff. I apologize for the minimal amount of posts. I’m doing my best to keep up and provide quality content to you all.

Alas, another time for a blog post roundup of last month’s posts. I have some awesome posts included in this, as well as some awesome ones to come. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them so far and have benefited from them.

I don’t take my blogging lightly. I put a lot of thought into what I’m writing and always have you, my readers, in mind. As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated.

Okay, without further delay let’s get started. Be sure to check out any posts you may have missed.

Affiliate Marketing is the New Job on the Market

30 Ways to Get Free Website Traffic In Minutes

Are You a Struggling Internet Marketer?

Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Generate Sales

Legitimate Worldwide Work From Home Opportunities

Are You Targeting ‘Paying’ Keywords?

How I Get Backlinks to My Blog Posts Resulting in Sales

Google Celebrates Valentine’s Day – They Gave Me $100!

The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide

I was very pleased to see the first post on this list had gotten Re-Tweeted 27 times so far. Thank you to all who spread the word to your Twitter followers.

The Twitter Tweetmeme plugin has proven to work well and makes it easy for Twitter users to Re-Tweet posts. If you’re not yet utilizing it on your own blog, you should be.

Again, thank you to all my readers!

If you know anything about SEO, then you’ll know that keyword research is so important in attracting the right kind of traffic to your website. I consider the right kind of traffic as being people who are looking to buy something, assuming you’re wanting to sell something.

If you’re doing business online, then obviously you want to sell stuff. So, wouldn’t it make sense to target ‘paying’ keywords?

Yes, I made that name up.

I go into all the details in my guest post and provide a video which I previously posted on my blog.

To check out the article, head to David Leonhardt’s SEO Writer blog where I had the pleasure of writing, Target Paying Keywords to Maximize Your Online Sales.

This neat little tool will help you pump out more sales by targeting the right kind of keywords for your website.

Feel free to browse David’s blog as you’ll find other helpful articles on SEO, which I know can be rather bothersome to some people.

This post is going to contain the simple, yet effective techniques I have learned during my time online to generate targeted traffic and generate sales. These are strategies I’m using for my own online business and have found to be working well and improving over time.

If you’ve been following along with us, my last post was about a struggling internet marketer who is reaching out in a desperate attempt to generate sales with his affiliate marketing website.

One of the questions asked was, “How do I drive traffic to my site that can generate sales?”

This is going to be the topic of this post, and I’ll be going very in-depth, starting with the basics and moving towards the more advanced strategies.

I apologize in advance if this turns into a very lengthy post, but please bare with me as it will be well worth your time to read through everything.

So let’s begin, shall we?

The very first thing you must understand is that everything revolves around keywords. Keywords are the life-blood of websites and how they become seen by internet users using search engines.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation of using keywords effectively, and this is how you’re going to target specific internet users to generate sales online.

Rather than going in-depth on the subject of SEO on this post, I have a few previous posts that should cover this subject thoroughly enough for you to understand. Please check them out, and if you have questions use the comment section:

• Web Page Optimization
• Easy Free Keyword Research
• Discover Commercial Intention of Keyword Phrases

Optimizing your web page for specific keywords is critical and is the foundation for which you’ll build the rest of your marketing efforts upon. Seriously, nothing else matters until you’ve done this. Don’t ignore it!

One thing I’ve learned is that backlinks are KING. Okay, so content is still KING, but backlinks are a very close second, and here’s why. Backlinks to your website or web pages are what helps to drive your site or pages higher in search engine results pages when someone searches for a specific keyword phrase. See how this is coming together?

Without building backlinks to your site, you won’t generate enough traffic to your site to generate sales. Now I know what you’re thinking here. There are other ways to generate traffic without building backlinks, and that’s true. However, the best traffic is free search engine traffic, and the only way to get it is to rank on the first page in Google, or Yahoo and Bing. I’d focus on Google as it produces over 70% of search traffic across the entire web.

Now that you understand the importance of building backlinks and getting your site or web pages to the top of search engines, you now need to start the backlink building process. There are numerous ways to go about this, and luckily for you, I’ve written many posts on the subject. Here they are:

• Improve Search Engine Rankings the Easy Way
• Get 80 High PR One Way Backlinks Each Month
• Build Long-Term Traffic to Your Work From Home Site with Article Marketing
• Build Your Online Business with Article Marketing
• Forum Signatures
• Free Traffic System

Remember when building backlinks that you want to use your keywords for the web page you’re linking to. This is the only way that your backlinks are going to be effective in boosting your search engine rankings.

Okay, so you now have  a great start in getting backlinks; however, I’m not done just yet.

Well… sorta. I have a post planned that will discuss another very effect backlink building strategy and will be posted soon, so stay tuned for that.

Hopefully right now you have a solid understanding of doing keyword research and web page optimization, and how it all ties in to building backlinks. This is all part of building targeted website traffic that will result in sales.

As always, if you have any questions about anything discussed here, leave a comment below.

My next post will discuss the second question asked by a struggling internet marketer, but in the meantime, start applying the tips I mentioned today to your website, and you’ll soon see an increase in traffic and internet income.

After reading the title you’re probably thinking there’s no way that keyword research can be easy, let alone free. I think that too many people make keyword research a lot harder than it has to be. And, while paid tools are great when researching keywords, I think that for the majority of people they’re not needed.

What IS needed though is knowing how to do some basic keyword research when you’re looking to rank your articles, blog posts, and web pages on the first page of Google.

Keyword research is essential, and it’s a lot easier than you might think. I put together a video explaining how you can use a free tool to find “golden nuggets” that are going to provide the traffic you need. Follow that up with a little research on your competition, and you’ll be well on your way to getting a top 10 listing.

Once you find the keywords you want to use, remember to include those keywords when building backlinks to that article, blog post or web page. That’s how you’re going to build up your rankings in the search engines.

And, speaking of backlinks, the two methods of backlink building I recommend to get the fastest results is using Angela and Paul’s backlink building services. They are worth every penny and can produce massive results.

I hope with this little tip you’ll be able to bring in more traffic and sales for your online business.