Glossary of terms relevant to backlinking

IM: Short for Internet Marketing.

Backlink: A backlink is a hyperlink or linked word/phrase on another site (not yours usually) on the Web pointing to one of your site pages or articles. Unlike Yahoo and Bing, Google places a great deal of emphasis on backlinks as a measure of trust and authority.

Outsourcing: When routine Internet Marketing jobs such as creating Web 2.0 accounts, building backlinks, writing articles or other jobs (depending on your particular IM model) are carried out by freelancers, usually living in other parts of the world where labor costs are lower. The main means of outsourcing are through websites like elance.com, odesk.com and guru.com.

Double-pass backlinking: The process of setting up backlinks in two stages or ‘passes’ on other sites. The first ‘pass’ is to create the account with genuine-looking biographical details and photo, the second pass is to drop the links in. A week is a good general timeframe to allow between your first and second pass and this gives the backlinks a considerably better chance of not being deleted as the account will look more genuine. The newest memberships on community sites (like forums) are often the most scrutinised and least trusted.

Single-pass backlinking: Creating a new account and leaving the backlinks in one step. As new accounts are more likely to be scrutinised by moderators/webmasters, this can be riskier if a new member on a forum about Facebook Application Development has backlinks to, for example, acne, weight loss, forex and debt reduction sites.

Nofollow: nofollow is a form of HTML coding used to instruct Google that a hyperlink on a page should NOT influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to combat spam. Using a tool like SEO for Firefox from here:

Dofollow: The opposite of nofollow. Without a nofollow HTML tag, a link will pass ‘Link Juice’ to the hyperlinked site.

Link Juice: The power of trust and authority (and therefore Google Organic Search results significance) coming from one site or page to another via a link (kind of like ‘electricity’).

Link velocity: The speed at which links are built to a particular page. I know of some very well resourced companies who build literally millions of backlinks a year to a single page to compete in VERY competitive niches. Our monthly members are building backlinks at a Link Velocity of 400 a month. Consistency is the key rather than velocity as truly viral articles across the Web can attract big numbers of links.

OBL: Outbound links. This refers to the number of backlinks on a single page of a site. In theory, the more outbound links (links to OTHER sites) a page has, the less Link Juice will pass to each link as the PR power is shared between them. However, I’m very doubtful about this and will be presenting my counter-argument soon on this forum.

Crawled/Spidered: When Google becomes aware of new material on the Web by visiting a particular page or site (from a link elsewhere), this is called getting spidered or crawled. However, what you really want is for Google to regard that new material as worthy of being added to their overall index. Getting something crawled or spidered is pretty easy - getting indexed can take a little longer and often occurs on a somewhat unpredictable timeframe e.g. I’ve had sites or articles that took a month to get indexed whereas others have been added in a day.

Indexed: The Google Index is kind of a giant virtual library of the entire Web - sort of. When new material appears on the Web, Google figures out how quickly it should be added to its Index. Some new material probably never gets indexed at all - ever. Why? Simply because the incoming links to that new material (if there are any) are not regarded as of sufficient trust or authority to justify that new site/article/page being added to the index.

Tips on Hiring a Freelance Writer for Your Web Content

If you’re building a content site, one of the biggest problems you’ll have is filling it with good, keyword rich content. Even if you’re an expert on a certain subject, it’s difficult to write about that every single day, day in and day out. At some point, you’ll run dry, so to speak. But your need for content doesn’t stop.

One thing you can do to solve this problem is to buy content. There are several ways to do that. You can buy what’s called PLR (private label rights) content, or you can just hire someone to write your content for you. Let’s talk about both of these.

PLR Content

Private Label Rights content is any content that someone else wrote or otherwise made, which you buy. You also buy the rights to put your name on the content and make it look like it’s from you. In a way, this is similar to hiring a ghost writer. The writer writes the content, and you pay them for the right to claim it for your own.

There’s nothing unethical about this. About 80% of the non-fiction books in your neighborhood bookstore are ghostwritten. The writer is doing nothing more than selling a service.

The difference between PLR content and something that’s ghostwritten is the PLR content is sold to more than one buyer. This is kind of like an artist making copies of a print and selling the copies. PLR articles are generally sold to a limited number of buyers, 25, 50, or 100. Something like that.

Buying PLR content is about the cheapest way for you to get content that you don’t have to write. You can buy 10, 500 word articles on most any topic for $4 to $10. Once you purchase the content, you can re-write it, use it as it, cut it up and use it, use it with other content. You can give it away or you can sell it.

Hiring a Freelancer

At the other end of the cost spectrum is hiring a freelance writer to write your blog posts or articles for you. You can do the same things with this content that you can do with PLR content. The only real difference is your content written by a freelancer is unique. It’s not sold to other people.

Of course, there’s a cost difference. At the low end, freelance content should cost you $4 or $5 for 400 to 500 words. At the high end, this could cost upwards of $25. More experienced writers usually charge more. Also, writers from third world countries can charge less.

Either way you go, at some point you’re probably going to have to buy some sort of content in the future. If you’re going to hire a freelancer, then make sure you get an article or two from them so you can see if they can write. Then order your content in small amounts until you’ve established a relationship with the writer.

Outsourcing your content is a great way to save money, and get quality content. Try it! You’re probably going to be pleasantly surprised.

How to Write an Effective Ezine Style Article

Don’t let anyone kid you. Article marketing is one of the most powerful tools there are for traffic generation. What’s even better is that the traffic you get from article marketing is both long-lasting and highly targeted. You get fewer tire kickers from article marketing. Also, when someone clicks through the link on your article to your webpage, you can bet they’re already pre-disposed to be interested in what you’re offering, be it just more information, CPA offers, or even buying an expensive coaching program.

Unfortunately, when it comes to article marketing, a lot of people do it wrong, and it doesn’t work for them. The problem is not with article marketing, however. So that you don’t make these same mistakes, let’s learn how to do article marketing right.

For the purposes of this article, we’re assuming that you’re not writing articles just to get your name in print, or just to entertain or even teach people. We’re assuming that article marketing is part of a money making venture for you. Basically, you’re using it to drive traffic to some sort of web page, be it a squeeze page, sales letter, or a blog.

In other words, you have an action you want your reader to perform when they get to the bottom of the article…click through to your “money site”. Just making this realization should make your article marketing efforts two or three times more effective. You see, an article is not just information. It’s essentially a sales letter. You’re trying to sell your reading on taking action when they’re done.

If you look at an article as if it were a sales letter, then, of course, the most important part is the headline. Right there is where you’re going to hook your readers. Look at the headline of this article, “How to Write an Effective Ezine Style Article.” That headline does several things. One, it weeds out the folks who are not interested in writing these sorts of articles. They’re not going to be interested in clicking through to your website, so who cares about them! Two, it makes a promise, that hopefully the article fulfills. It’s going to teach you how to do something.

“How to” headlines are some of the most effective headlines around. People use the Internet for information. Telling them how to do something they want to do is exactly what your hungry readers are looking for.

Of course, if you’re promising to tell your readers how to do something, hopefully you’ll deliver. At least, you’ll deliver enough so that the reader thinks there’s more to learn, if they click on your link. This is why a lot of your best article marketers never actually nail down the end of their articles with a heavy conclusion. They want the reader to feel a sense of needing something…like clicking on your link in your bio box.

How to Build a Squeeze Page that Works

One of the key skills in internet marketing is knowing how to build a squeeze page that works. In case you don’t know, a squeeze page is a webpage where there’s only one option for the visitor, usually to fill out an opt-in email form. They either do that, or hit the back button and leave. In other words, you give your visitor no option. You “squeeze” them into either “fishing or cutting bait”.

Some marketers feel like squeeze pages are too harsh. They don’t want to offend their potential buyers by saying “either take it or leave it.” Sure, if you don’t know how to build a squeeze page that works, you can offend some of your traffic. But there are two things to say about this.

One: The folks you offend weren’t real customers, anyway. They were just tire kickers. Look at it like this…if someone won’t fill out an opt-in email form, they’re not going to pull out their credit card later on and pay you for one of your products.

Two: This is actually the flip side of One. People who really want the information you’re offering want to give you their email address. For whatever reason they like you and have some degree of trust associated with you. If you know how to build a squeeze page that works well, you can capitalize on this trust and get them to give you their information.

A big part of how to build a squeeze page that works is what you’re offering for your customer’s email address. No one’s going to just fill out your opt-in form and give you their email address just because you asked them. You have to have something they want.

With internet marketers this “thing” usually takes the form of a report or short e-book that has information your customer wants. Of course, in the body of the squeeze page copy you need to explain this. You need to make it clear that you’re offering them, completely for FREE, a report which will tell them stuff they want to know.

Looked at like this, a squeeze page is basically a short sales letter. The “sale” is your getting the email address. What you’re selling is your giveaway. It’s going to “cost” your visitor their email address to get the report.

There’s no real trick to knowing how to build a squeeze page that works. It’s not magic. You just need to explain (usually through bullet points) what your prospect can get by giving up their email address. If you give them more than they feel like they’re giving up, you’ve got a sale. And another email address to sell stuff to over and over again.

2 Great Tips for Creating Profitable Websites

A lot of internet marketers think that driving traffic to a website is all there is to it. Knowing how to create traffic is critical, but that’s only step one. It’s like you’re playing baseball, and you’ve gotten on base. Better than striking out, but there’s still a lot to do to get the runner home, or in your case to get money in your PayPal account.

Once your visitors get to your site, they have to want to stay there long enough to actually take some sort of action. You want them to either buy something or give you their email address. Although not everyone would agree, visitors who just take a look at a couple of pages then leave are not going to do much for your bottom line.

Don’t depend on people bookmarking your site either. Virtually no one bookmarks sites anymore. That is on their browser. Sure plenty of people participate in social bookmarking, but that’s not really to “remember” a site they liked. It’s more to share their finds with others.

In other words, you really want your visitor to either give you their email address or buy something. If they don’t do that, at least they could leave with the feeling that your site has content they really liked and that they want to come back. Given the number of sites most people are exposed to, though, don’t depend on them ever coming back.

So, here are some tips to help you either make sales or get your visitor’s email address.

Tip 1: Use an opt-in email form with a giveaway

Decide what kind of information your market really wants. If you’re in weight loss, then your market probably wants cutting edge information about losing weight. If you’re in FOREX trading, then it’s got to be about how to trade FOREX. You can find this level of information for free on the Internet. You don’t have to be a “guru” for this. All you need to do is to write a three to five page report that outlines a few tips that your market probably wants to know. Then you put an opt-in email form on your website.

Tip 2: Banners Don’t Work

Of course, you want to sell stuff through your website. And one “action” you want your visitor to take is to buy something, either your product or an affiliate product. Although you see a lot of websites with graphic advertisements (usually called banners), banners don’t work that well. What works much, much better is text links. Whether you’re sending your buyer to an affiliate offer or to your own offer, text links have been proven, time and time again, to be much more effective than banners.

If you follow just these two tips, you can exponentially increase how much you make from your website! What’s even better, is you’ll be collecting email addresses that you can sell to over and over again!

4 Tips for Better Article Marketing Success

Article marketing is hands down on of the best ways to get targeted, ready-to-buy traffic to your website. Not everyone has success with article marketing, however. In this article, we’re going to look at what separates winning article marketing strategies from ones that don’t work out as well. Here are four tips you can use to take your article marketing right to the bank!

Tip 1: Write your articles like sales letters. Now, you don’t want it to sound like a late-night infomercial, but you do need to understand that your article is more than just information. Your goal is to get the reader to click on your link, either in the article body or in your bio box.

Tip 2: Write a headline that arouses curiosity and makes people want to read your article. In general, readers find your articles via a search engine search. In other words, when they decide if they want to read your article, they can’t see the whole thing. They just see a headline and also a description. You want your headline to be a call to action. Something that’s going to interest people.

Tip 3: Make your articles at least 400 words long. If you want to publish your article on a lot of article directories (and you should), it needs to be at least 400 words long. A lot of directories don’t publish articles that are shorter.

This makes total sense. A directory makes money through traffic. They want readers to feel like they learned something, or at least made their lives better, by reading their articles. An article that’s less than 400 words just seems a little unsubstantial.

Tip 4: Make your bio box look like it’s part of the article. At the end of an ezine style article, there’s an author’s bio box. Although you can try to put links back to your website in the body of the article, not all directories allow that. The place to put your link is in the bio box.

Don’t think of the bio box like it’s an afterthought for your reader. Your bio box needs to fulfill the same function that a call to action does on a sales letter. This is so important, let’s spend some more time on it.

This is what you don’t want (but what you usually see).

“Joe Johnson is a career animal lover who has spent countless hours learning the ins and outs of the lives of ferrets.”

Okay, that was meant to be funny. But really. Looked at from your reader’s point of view. They are interested in themselves, not you. Unless you’re the inventor of the South Beach diet or someone with as much authority in your given niche, who you are and what you’ve done is secondary.

What’s primary is this. If you did a good job with your article, your reader should be thinking…”Hmm…I liked that…I wonder what else this gal (or guy) has to say about all of this.”

That’s the kind of response that gets the click. That’s what we call “pre-selling”! And, that’s what article marketing is all about—pre-selling your reader so that they click through to your money page.

A better idea for the bio box would be to make it essentially just the last sentence in the article, with a text link embedded in it. Something like this would be better.

Check out Raising Ferrets for Fun and Profit to learn more about these wonderful critters.

(Where the underlined part is a text link to your site.) If your article directory doesn’t allow text links (and there are still some that don’t), then just include the whole address so that your reader can cut and paste it into their browser window.

There’s certainly more to know about article marketing than just this. But these four tips will make this type of technique start to work like gang busters. Apply these tips and watch the traffic start rolling in!

Tips To Optimize Your Website

You understand why website optimization is so important, yet you can’t quite seem to get it the way you want it.  Your traffic is still lower than you would like and you’re not sure why.  You’ve followed all the suggestions.  Or have you?  There is a possibility that you may have to start from scratch and redesign your website.  It’s not as bad as it sounds, and if you use the following website optimization tips you will probably find it easier than you thought.  Here are some website optimization tips to help you revamp or even redesign your website so that you get maximum traffic flow and results.

Website optimization tips #1: Know what you want your site to look like before planning your layout.

You need to know exactly who you are designing your website for.  Who is your target audience?  How can you make your website stand out from your competitions?  Is there a theme to it?  Pick out your colour scheme ahead of time and figure out if you want the site to be traditional or modern looking.  By knowing who your site is aimed for and how you want it to look before you start you will be ahead of the game.

Website optimization tips #2: Don’t let the current website trends pull you in.

Use shiny accents to accent your website, but that’s all.  Try to keep your website professional looking and simple so that your site is attractive and not an eye sore.

Website optimization tips #3: Emphasize elements to make some things more eye catching than others.

Don’t make all of your headlines the same size.  Emphasize the elements you want your customer’s eyes to be drawn to and leave the minor elements minor.  If everything is the same, your visitors won’t know what to look at that’s important.

Website optimization tips #4: Use repetition sparingly.

Don’t be afraid to use different fonts, arrows, buttons, border styles, layers or colour schemes throughout your website.  Diversifying your style will make your website more interesting to look at.  Just make sure everything works together for that professional look.

Website optimization tips #5: Current technology is your friend.

Flash elements are handy on a website, especially if you do not want your content easily copied.  Don’t back away from it simply because you don’t think it’s conventional. Talk to a programmer about how you can use it on your site while maintaining that professional edge.

Website optimization tips #6: Go ahead and mix and match your design elements.

This is your website after all.  You can mix elements as long as they go well together and do not take away from the overall site and the product or service you are selling.  Feel free to play with them and see what you like and if it works for you, run with it.

These website optimization tips can help you attract traffic to your site and really bring in your clients.  Don’t be afraid to play with the elements.  You can always change them later down the road.  And remember, these website optimization tips are a guide.  Your website should be what you want it to be.

Should We Create Sites For Users Or Search Engines?

Should We Create Sites For Users Or Search Engines?
Knowing whether to focus more on users or search engines can be a hard dilemma for all website owners. However, the truth is you should design your website for both purposes. Designing your website for only visitors without any concern search engines will provide you with few visitors. On the other hand, if you fill your site with tons of keywords and you don’t make your site user friendly, your visitors will not come back. It is actually very simple to optimize your site for both purposes. Search engines want to see that your site is built properly to provide valuable information for visitors. You can actually have your search engine ranks fall if you do not use visitor friendly techniques.
Optimize Your Web Pages
The first step in making your website user and search engine friendly is optimizing your web pages. The first step is to use the keywords that you want search engines and users to recognize you for. The text on your pages should include these keywords throughout the page. Do not simply shove them in anywhere; make sure they flow along with the text. Your keywords should also be used in your website name and page titles. Make sure that if you are using a specific phrase, you use it in the correct order. You will also want your keywords used in your meta keywords and meta phrases. Make sure the flow of your pages is also easy to go through; you should use a site map for the search engines.
Offer Links to Information
The search engines want to see links from your website to other information, as well as links into your site. This is also helpful to your visitors. If you run a wedding planner service, you might consider offering links to bands, florists, or even caterers. This will bring visitors back to your site, since they can find all the information they need. You also need to have links from other websites, so users can find you. In the same way you would place radio ads for your local business, links are like ads for your website. There are many ways you can build up your links with help from other website owners you know, or you could build your own links using social sites like Myspace or Blogger.
As you can see, many of the things you do to bring visitors to your webpage will also make the search engines rank you higher. One of the main factors in how high you rank in search engine results is the number of visitors you average. If you can build a site that is popular and has a lot of visitors, the search engines will find you important. Make sure that when you are developing your site, you use ethical practices. Don’t link to pages that have bad sites or build your pages in a way that forces your keywords on your visitors. The best way to get results is by slowly building your link campaign and offering a great, user friendly web page.

Top 7 Most Common Mistakes with Do-It-Yourself SEO

Top 7 Most Common Mistakes with Do-It-Yourself SEO

Most people today seem to understand that they need to optimize their website for search engines. However, with the vast amount of conflicting information on the internet today, many people are still getting it wrong. In recent investigations, it has been found that one out of three websites has at least one of the following seven issues on their website.

Check your website for the following seven mistakes:

1.  Description Tag – The description tag is supposed to describe the page on your website. It should not be used to stuff keywords for search engines. This tag should be about 25 words long and it should include your keywords as part of the normal sentence structure. You also shouldn’t overdo it; a whole paragraph is not going to improve your results.

2.  Keyword Tag – The keyword tag is meant to hold the keywords you want your site listed for. The tags should represent the things visitors can find on that particular page. Do not use things from other pages on your site or keywords that you think people might search for if they are not part of your site. The keyword tag should only contain twenty words or less; do not go over. You also shouldn’t repeat the keywords more than three times. For example, if you sell shoes, you shouldn’t put red shoes, blue shoes, black shoes, tennis shoes, and basketball shoes. You should only use the word shoes three times and each of the descriptions three times.

3.  Anchor Text – Many people think that they should use the name of the link they are providing on their webpage. This could not be further than the truth. Search engines want to see your keywords used as anchor text whenever possible.

4.  Title Tag – This is one of the most important aspects of your website. It is the very first thing a search engine will see when it comes to your page and this is what the engine will look at to decide what your page is about. Don’t include your url in your title tag and your company name should not be in the beginning of the description either. Don’t go over 60 words.

5.  Keywords In Your Text – Your keywords should be included within the text of your page. They should flow as a part of the normal sentence structure, and should not be stuffed into sentences that don’t make sense. The keywords used on your page should be the same ones you used in your title and description.

6.  Abstract Tag – many people are now using abstract tags within their sites. Some are replacing the description tag with an abstract and stuffing it full of unnecessary keywords. This should never be done. Most experts agree that an abstract tag is just that abstract. Leave it out.

7.  Image Tags – While Google and other search engines rarely look at image tags, they do hold value. Many sites like Google Images or Flicker spend their time searching sites for pictures. When they find a picture, they don’t want to see “jpg123,” they want to see “shoes worn at the Grammy’s”.

If you are one of these people, don’t get discouraged.  You might consider hiring a professional SEO expert to give you some advice. The rules of SEO change on a regular basis; you just have to stay ahead of the curve.

Owning a Website Is More than Just Having It Built

Many small business owners think they can buy a website, pay someone to build it, then sit back and wait for the customers to roll in. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. You can’t expect to build a website, and compete against thousands, if not millions, of other websites without some effort.  If you are looking to make online sales or provide information to your customers, you need to understand the way it works. If you understand how customers find you online, you can quickly draw them to your site.

When online searchers type a keyword into the search bar, the search engine will display the most relevant sites for that term. For example if you sell shoes, someone will type in shoes and the search engine will display your site in the search results. The problem is that most terms have thousands of sites that use those keywords. Just like when you search for shoes with Google, you get 307,000,000 different sites. The search engines only show ten results per page, so if you are at the end, you are likely to never be seen. As a matter of fact, recent studies show that over 60% of searchers never go past the first two result pages.

In order to get your site up in the search results, you have to maintain an ongoing search engine optimization campaign. Search engine optimization is the process of making your website get noticed by the search engines. This includes using keywords throughout your site, as well as building links to and from your pages to other pages on the intent. This is an ongoing process that requires a lot of time and effort. You can manage the process yourself or pay a professional SEO company to handle the process for you. It can cost quite a bit to hire a company, but if you do not have hours to spend each week working on your own site it may be much simpler.

Most people choose to hire a company to perform part of the process and then, when the website is ranking higher in the search results, they take over the campaign themselves.  You might be able to find a company that will build your site and optimize it at the same time. This is often the best way to go, since you won’t have to pay for changes later. When you are considering a company, you should ask to see their portfolio and ask for proven results. Not every company can provide the results they claim.

Another option to bring visitors to your site is starting a pay per click campaign. You can use paid ads on Google or Yahoo to get your name on the front page. These ads cost you a certain amount for every time someone clicks on them. The more popular your keyword is, the more you will pay to place your ads. However, on the up side, you could see a quick increase in the traffic to your website. Whichever way you choose to attract visitors, you have to be prepared to stay with it for the long run.

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