The clock is ticking .. no not THAT clock.

I’m probably fairly slow to know who some people are online, but being a member of the secret forum The Pond I ran across someone called Fraser Cain.

For those that don’t know (although I suspect most of you do), Fraser is the webmaster (is that the correct term these days) of the über popular blog Universe Today.

According to statistics it get’s 100,000 visitors per day.  Yes you read that right.  100,000 PER DAY!

Fraser’s main method of getting this traffic is not backlinking, guestposting or writing articles on other web 2.0′s or other sites; it’s simply to write more keyword focused quality content for his own website.

By writing more content for his own site he has effectively build a behemoth of a site that contains anything you wanted to know about space, physics, the universe and more.

Without building a single backlink.

Impressive.

Of course he does have millions of backlinks which he has gained over the many years that the site has been running (and I’ve just given him another one).  But these have come from other’s linking to him, he didn’t actively acquire these links himself.

All of this has got me questioning my current method of getting traffic which is write a post, build some backlinks to it (using something like BMR) and move to another blog (Yes I know I have too many blogs to keep up with).

A method while reasonably successful, has not gotten me to the levels that I really want online.

So are building backlinks a waste of time?

Should I instead be focusing any spare time I have (spare time – ha!) to focusing on just ONE website and building up content on that site exclusively.

I already use a method of keyword selection on my blogs (not on THIS site though obviously) so that isn’t new to me, and I do (for the most part) try to make the posts that I write informative, entertaining, and useful.

But what I don’t do is really take the time to build ONE site up and build lots and lots and lots of content for it for every conceivable keyword I can think of.

I’m starting to think that that’s what I should be doing.

Not spending a week here and a week there writing the odd post on my many blogs.  Which by the way I have been getting much better at – I’ve recently let about 50 domains ‘expire’ because I just don’t have the time for them.

And not spending any time on HubPages, Squidoo, Wizzley, Blogger or other web 2.0 site either.

But my own site.

But which one?  Which one do I focus on?  I’ve got so many babies (website babies that is, not real babies of which I only have two) I don’t even know which ones I should even pick to build up.

This one?

My Simple Rules Site since it promotes my books?  Any of my many affiliate sites (and no I’m not linking to my good ones from here).

Man, I just don’t know.

But what I do know is that I think Fraser Cain is a genius.  I’m thinking his method is more and more the way I want to go.

I’m starting to really believe that backlinks ARE a waste of time.  Really.

Thoughts?

Thanks for reading Are Building Backlinks a Waste Of Time?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

How many links to get to #1 Google?
Do I blast out an xrumer OR try and be frugal?
I’ve heard that backlinks are king, is it true?
And can I do it on my website that’s brand new?
Tell me do I use the exact anchor phrase?
Or when it comes to linking are there better ways?

Thanks in advance
Newbie.

Dear Newbie,

Links definitely do help you, that much is true
But it isn’t about how many you accrue
It’s about quality my friend, quality and trust
If you get the RIGHT links you can leave the others for dust
So let’s look at what a quality link really is
(By the way I learned all this stuff from Griz)
The best are in content and not the blogroll
A link from a good website is definitely your goal
It helps if the site is similar to yours
And one that Google already adores
Contact the owner and see if they guest post
Then write a kick ass post with the most
Or build your own network of sites if you dare,
They really can help if they are made with care
Even some web 2.0 sites will work
But write good stuff there too and don’t be a jerk
If you don’t like to write then make a video
See Allyn for tips and go check out his mo!
If you put the work in then your site will improve
It’s not that hard if you get in the groove
Just ignore all the ebooks asking for $97 cash,
They are written by guru’s who like to flash, cash then dash,
Focus on quality links then your rank will rise
And you’ll be able to sell more white socks and ties
When you’re counting your cash as the sun goes down,
Sip some champagne and watch Cougar Town.

Tracey
P.S. No really, Cougar Town (unfortunately named) rocks.

P.P.S.  Merry Christmas Everyone!

Thanks for reading How To Rank #1 in Google – A Poem. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

All my testing seems to point that you can easily get a penalty in Google from some sort of filter that can detect if you have an unnatural linking profile i.e. using the same anchor text to rank your page.

It used to be that you could spam your anchor keyword to hundreds of places and it actually HELPED your page to rank, but my testing is showing that this isn’t the case anymore.

You CAN still get away with it on big sites like Hubpages and Squidoo, but try it on your own sites and it’s likely to do more harm than good.

Not too long ago a test was done by Search Engine Watch on a relatively popular term ‘outdoor clothing’ to determine the backlink profile of the top 10 sites.

Interestingly enough the #1 ranking site for the term only had about 2% of its total backlinks using ‘outdoor clothing’.  And the remainder of the top 5 also had a low % of anchor backlinks using that phrase.

It’s pretty much what my testing is showing as well.  While links themselves are still a MAJOR ranking factor, the anchor text used isn’t quite as important, and can in fact harm your site when overused.

Now I know what some of you are going to say.  Yeah if it were that easy to harm a site then all a competitor would need to do is spam your main keyword to thousands of sites and your ranking would drop.  And well, um, yes it’s actually possible.  Not on bigger ‘authority’ sites, but on your basic niche site it’s VERY possible to give a site a penalty. I know – I’ve done it to some of my own sites in testing.

So what’s my conclusion?

Pretty much what most white hatters have been saying all along – vary your anchor text.  And also vary the length.  Use one word, then five, then three.  I’ve had good results with just using a single word as the anchor.  It doesn’t seem to matter what the anchor text is, as long as it’s somewhat related.

Branding

The one incidence that using the same anchor text hasn’t harmed the site (in my testing which of course is quite small) is when using the brand name of a site.  How many times do you think people link to Amazon using its name only? or eBay or FoxNews or Oprah, or – well you get the idea?  All the time.  Most people don’t think ‘keywords’ they use the name of the site when linking to it.

At first I thought the reason this didn’t seem to incur a penalty may have been due to the size, trust and authority of these sites (and to a large extent it probably is), but I have found a similar pattern on some of my smaller sites as well.

I have no idea if small one or two word anchor links are being treated differently than long tail anchor links but I’m leaning towards that theory for now.

Thanks for reading Should You Vary Your Anchor Text?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Overall my rankings haven’t changed that much. My good sites are still ranking top 3 (and my best site #1). My shitty sites still aren’t ranking great, but they are improving as I work on them by adding content and sending backlinks to make them better. My hubs and lenses are still doing ok.

So then what’s the problem, are people just not buying this year?

Checking my stats, my visits are down on last year. Heck they are even down from a few months ago, so I suspect that something else must have changed in the last month or so ..

Can you guess what I think is responsible?

Yes, I think it has something to do with Google Instant.

It’s changing the way people put in keywords. So before when people were searching for, say, Fisher Price Smart Cycle they’d type that in. All the keywords. And of course the sites that were optimised for that keyword would appear.

Now things are a little different.

Now if you start typing in Fisher Price Smart Cycle it’ll start suggesting keywords and changing the results as you add each letter. In fact which each extra letter entered the results on the page will change.

What do you think most people will do? They’ll stop when they see what they are looking for whether they’ve finished typing the keyword or not.

So it’s quite possible that you are not optimised for “fisher price smart c” yet that is now what people are using to find what they are looking for. They are too lazy to continue typing because they’ve found what they are looking for and chances are that it’s not your site.

Damn you Google Instant!

So how can you overcome this?

Like you’ve been hearing over and over, the smaller sites which only target one or a few keywords are getting lost. Especially now that now it seems that nobody is heading to page 2 or further anymore – they are just typing different keywords in.

If you are not coming up page 1 (and preferably top 5) then you are probably getting lost.

The first quick solution is to start typing your keyword into instant and check when the results start to match what people will be looking for. Add that word (or letters) to your tags or meta keywords. I’m still testing if this helps much and will let you know – but for now it certainly can’t hurt.

Secondly you are going to have to bulk your site up. Yes that means making it more of an authority sites. Lots more pages. Lots more backlinks.

Yes that means lots more work too. But at least your lazy competition probably isn’t going to bother with this right, so you might just win out in the end.

Don’t just think in the tens anymore, think hundreds and thousands (no not the colored sugar balls that make fairy bread – but the picture is making you hungry yeah?) – Hundreds of pages on your site, Thousands of backlinks. Yes, I said thousands of backlinks.

We can beat this Google monster as long as we put in some more work. And remember there’s always Yahoo and Bing.

Backlink update week 4

Stats:

KW2 – 160 (last week 86)
KW3 –47 (last week 27)
KW4 – 23 (last week 41)
KW5 – 127 (not ranked last week)
KW6 – 139 (last week 111)

Backlinks indexed in YSE = 71

As you can see some of the keywords have slipped back this week. Although they have been dancing around a lot too – for eg kw 3 has gotten as high as 21, but seems today to have slipped again. Some of the keywords are ranking VERY well in yahoo and bing though.

The article run has finally been done and is being dripped out as we speak (and will continue to do so over the next few months). I suspect I’ll need to do another backlinks run from BP though. Plus I need to go back and optimise the pages better myself. I didn’t want to tweak the pages because I wanted to test just backlinks, but I do want to add some keywords and play around with meta descriptions a bit so I think I’ll do that this week.

Thanks for reading Where Did My Amazon Sales Go?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Now I could drag out this post and tease you along a bit before revealing the answer like it was some huge secret but really it ain’t anything you probably didn’t already know.

But on my sites. 60%’ish of the time it’s text links that get clicked and 40%’ish of the time the image link. Oh and yes that image over there is typical of how I do my images. A big pic of the item, the Amazon stars (only if it has a good rating LOL) and of course the buy from Amazon button. And for those that are wondering YES IT’S AN AFFILIATE LINK. Because to be a good internet marketer you NEED to own Cougar Town yeah? 

If you want the “buy from Amazon” buttons you get them from the associates site here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t6/a9

Oh but of course have both. The text link AND the image link. Good.

Backlink update week 3

Stats:

KW2 – 86 (last week 192 – it’s also jumping around a lot right now)
KW3 –27 (last week 138)
KW4 – 41 (last week 75)
KW6 – 111 (not ranked last week)

Backlinks indexed in YSE = 65

Nice jumps huh! And the article run still hasn’t been done (don’t ask – they lost my order and grrr it SHOULD be done this week) so these results so far are purely from forum profile links (Backlinks Philippines and MakeBacklinks.com) Who says those links are dead?

Thanks for reading More Clicks from Links or Images?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

You need good website traffic

I’ve been getting quite a few emails this week from people saying that they just are not making money online yet. Usually this is due to one of two factors:

1. You don’t have the ‘right’ type of traffic
2. You don’t have a product that converts

So let’s look at traffic first. Traffic in and of itself means nothing. You could make a website that shows funny YouTube video’s and get thousands of people that come to your site. But they probably won’t buy anything. Sure you might get an odd Adsense click here or there but this site isn’t going to make you any money.

If you are serious about making money online then you need either people ready to buy or people desperate to solve a problem.

If you want to promote ebooks or CPA offers then you will probably be looking for desperate people looking to solve their man boobs, yeast infection, how to pick up women, etc . You give them a bit of help and tease them that this cream/ebook/magical potion is going to make them rich/beautiful/thin whatever and they crave and hand over their credit cards.

Or

You can focus on people that already know that they want to purchase something. This is the crowd I mainly target which Amazon products. They usually either know what they want to buy but are looking for some sort of social proof by testimonials or reviews, don’t remember the name of the product and are searching online to try and find it, or don’t realise that they can go straight to Amazon to purchase it so find your website first (this is my favourite type of traffic).

What happens if you ARE targeting the right type of traffic, but they are not finding your website? If you are not ranked on the first page (and preferably in the top 3 spots) then you need to get more traffic to your page. Probably the best way to do this is by getting backlinks to your site. Try and get 3 or 4 a day (or more if you can handle it). You can buy backlink services or get them yourself by writing articles for blog posts, article directories, web 2.0 sites etc.

If you ARE ranked on the first page but still not getting traffic then either your product doesn’t convert or there isn’t enough people wanting that product.

If you are just not getting enough traffic then the solution is to add more products to your site. Don’t focus on just one thing, add more stuff. If you are promoting an Amazon product then you can get heaps of clues on other products to promote – they tell you things like ‘customers who bought this item, also purchased …’. Create a page or post about this product. Add 5 or 6 more. Backlink those and keep going until your site get’s enough traffic.

But what happens if you’ve got the ranking, the traffic but you are STILL not making sales? Well it could be that your product just plain sucks (some do) or your layout isn’t set up properly and people are confused what to do.

Make it clear how they purchase the product. I use both a big ass image that has a ‘buy from amazon’ somewhere on it. And I also usually include a link in the text somewhere that says something like ‘view more reviews on Amazon’ or ‘Click Here to buy widget BX from Amazon’. (And don’t forget to test your links to make sure they go to the right page – you don’t want your page not to convert because your link is wrong! LOL).

Backlink update week 2

Stats:

KW2 – 192 (ranking in top 200 now)
KW3 – 138 (gone up from 109)
KW4 – 75 (same as last week)

Backlinks indexed in YSE = 37

The article run still hasn’t been done, but the MakeBacklinks and Backlinks Philippines both have been done. There hasn’t been much improvement in rankings yet (and keywords 1, 5 & 6 are still not in the top 200).

I am however ranking quite well in Yahoo which made a few odd sales – $21.44 for this week. So getting slightly better.

Thanks for reading Why aren’t you making money?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

It’s still a bit early days, and the only service that has been done so far has been the Backlinks Philippines run (report delivered to me last Wednesday). The Senuke xrumer blast, and the article blast haven’t been done yet (ordered but not yet delivered).

So there isn’t too much to report, but since I have more time on Monday to write here in my blog I thought I’d update (it’ll get me into a pattern of reporting anyway).

I’m going after a few very competitive and some not so competitive terms. 6 keywords in all. (Each service was targeting different keywords).

Last week the stats were:

23 backlinks indexed in YSE for the site (just a few that I’d done previously).

Only Keyword 3 & 4 had any ranking with

KW3 at 184
KW4 at 103

Today (Monday)

24 backlinks indexed in YSE

KW3 at 109
KW4 at 75

So some decent jumps, but only the BP small run has been done so far but I’m impressed with their service (very fast to get back to me and great communication) so will be using them more in the future.

Once the other orders get done I should see some more changes.

Oh and for those that want to know the $$$ – the site made me $7.19 last month (Amazon sales) and had 82 visits and so far this month has made $3.24 and 175 visitors (so it’s certainly not making me any money yet). Told you this site needed work – LOL.

Until next week.

Thanks for reading Linking update week 1. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

So it’s time for some internet marketing anarchy – let’s break some rules and see what happens! (yeah the baby was up twice last night so there is no oxygen in my brain right now – I’m feeling a little on edge).

So for this little experiment I’m using one of my old sites that I only seem to touch around Christmas time. I started it in 2008 as the ‘mother’ for IPK but never really did anything with it. It had (has) around 50 static pages on it.

So I added a blog on top of it. Only added about 7 new posts (the static pages are still there in the background though).

Three of the posts are reviews of different toys and I submitted the EXACT same article to EZA too to see what would happen about the duplicate content myth. Can both posts get indexed? Hmm – Right now EZA is outranking me for the main terms – but we will see if that continues.

A few of the posts have very little content and a LOT of links to Amazon. In fact one of them has 35 outgoing affiliate links to Amazon in the one post. Will Google still rank me for it? Let’s see.

(Oh and I’ve deliberately left all my links dofollow – just to see what will happen).

Backlinks – who said you should only get a handful a day. Last week I ordered a Senuke blast of 2000 links (probably only 60-70% of these will stick though), an article spin and submit to UAW, Article Ranks, SEO Link Vine, Traffic Kahuna, MAS & MAN (so probably 2000+ article links), and a Backlinks Phillipines run (40 profile links which now seems small in comparison to the others – LOL).

So that’s about 4000-5000 links in a very short space of time. Will I get penalised? This will be interesting to find out.

I’m keeping a close eye on traffic and rankings and will let you know what happens to this site over the coming weeks.

What do YOU think will happen?

Thanks for reading Breaking the Rules. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

I had never heard of article clustering before so was really intrigued by this strategy for building links and getting both your articles and website ranking better on the search engines.

Basically the technique is similar to a link wheel in which articles, blogs and web 2.0 sites are linking to each other to provide more juice to your money site. But the linking strategy is much more complicated than a simple link wheel (which just links once to your money site and once to the previous web 2.0 site).

The article clustering strategy takes it a step further by interlinking these properties much more extensively so each property essentially get’s a boost in rankings making the links to your main site much stronger.

So how can you incorporate this into your article marketing and SEO plans?

While I haven’t read the main product that introduced this technique, it seems that the quickest and simplest ways of incorporating this is to:

1. Create your main money site
2. Build approximately two articles linking to EACH page on your main site
3. Build a Web 2.0 property (hubpages/squidoo/blogger) that links to both your main site and also to one or two articles. Do this for each page on your site.
4. Write one article pointing to each web 2.0 site you create.
5. Create another web 2.0 site that links to your money site, the first web 2.0 site and one of the articles.
6. Continue as often as you like to improve rankings

Essentially what you are doing is building a spider web/pyramid type structure whereby each new article or web 2.0 site is strengthening the sites above it. It’s like a pyramid scheme on steroids! And like a pyramid structure, whatever is at the top is generating the strength from those below it.

If you want to take it even further you can build supporting sites instead of using web 2.0 properties (or even use a combination of both).

Now that may seem like a lot of work (and it is) but generally for most low to medium competition phrases you won’t need as many links as you think you will. You might only need one or two supporting sites with articles pointing at them and your main site to achieve the rankings you want.

And of course this doesn’t have to be all on the one day, you can write one article per day, or create one mini site/web 2.0 property per day over a period of weeks and months depending on your time schedule.

Each week check your rankings and see if you have moved. If you haven’t then write more articles/ build more supporting sites. Interlink some of them (cluster them). Rinse and repeat.

Time is actually on your side with this because as the sites and articles age they will get stronger naturally anyway (especially if they all have backlinks to them pushing them up).

I actually did this to one website I have without even knowing that was what I was doing (it was one of the first websites I created and I also created articles, a squidoo lens and a blogger blog all linking to each other and the main site). That site ranks number one and brings some really good sales for the term I was targeting (before I even knew what I was doing!) – so this method does work very well.

Thanks for reading Article Clustering – What Is It, and Should You Be Doing It?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

I have just chosen the free options (there is also a paid option where you get an extra link and 10 extra blog’s per article) and while I am seeing a few copies of my articles around they are usually on very low quality spammy looking blog sites.

Because I’m just testing this, I didn’t want to send the links to any of my money sites, so I’ve been sending them to HubPages and EzineArticles that I’ve written instead.

So far the backlinks haven’t significantly shown any improvement in either the EA articles or hubs.

So should you sign up?

Well, it probably can’t hurt since it’s free right? I guess the only thing it will cost you is your time to write the articles and some extra time to put in the unique spinning syntax that they use.

Of course most backlinks in my experience usually take a month or two to show any significant movement in the serps so it could be early days.

But I really don’t think you are missing out on much by not using it.

I’ll continue to test it for a few months, but really I find much better ways to get backlinks that do seem to help.

But if you want to check it out for yourself – feel free >>

Thanks for reading Free Traffic System Review – You Get What You Pay For?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)