Posts Tagged ‘keyword phrases’

If you want to get serious traffic to your website, you’ll want to do is rank well in the search engines, like Google, MSN and Yahoo, for keyword phrases related to your site, that people are actually searching on.  Students of Alex Jeffries, like me, have the fun of trying to rank for highly competitive phrases such as “internet marketing”, “listbuilding tactics”, “making money online” etc.  Ranking for these keyword phrases takes more than just on-page SEO tactics. It takes backlinks, and lots and LOTS of them.

 ”Don’t Wish It Was Easier – Wish That You were Tougher” – Jim Rohn

A backlink is an inbound link to your website - from the owner of another website or blog linking to your site (BTW – my BLOGROLL page live backlinks to all the Alex Jeffries coaching students I know of, so if you’re not on, leave me a comment!). 

When someone links to your site, it’s like a positive vote for your site.  The more “votes” a site has, the more important the search engines think it is and the higher they rank your site … generally speaking.  Arguably, fewer high-quality backlinks can be far more significant to your page rank than anything you do ON your own website to draw traffic.

What do I mean by “quality backlink”?  Well, search engines also consider anchor text, ie the visible clickable text for the link. For example, the anchor text, Hot Niche eBooks is the anchor text for the website, octisageebooks.com (hover over the link). Search engines use anchor text as a way of determining what your site is.  Make sure your anchor text for your backlinks includes your main keywords and keyword phrases whenever possible.

Quality backlinks can also be obtained from “authority” sites, such as sites with a high Page Rank, anything by the US Government, major charities etc.  Very difficult to get… unless you know different!

So, if one certain way to get traffic to your website or blog is to get hundreds of backlinks coming in to your site, HOW do you do it?

One method I’ve come across recently is Jon Ledger’s 1 Way Links network.  If you set up a “donor” wordpress blog to accept general blog posts (and Alex’s students should all be able to do that!) , you are given a monthly quota of 250 blog posts (at present), each of which can contain up to three links of your choice.  That’s 750 UNIQUE Backlinks each month!  You choose the anchor text too.  The posts, once approved, are submitted into the network to give GENUINE 1 Way Links to your sites.  (1 Way Links are arguably the most revered by the GoogleBot when deciding on Page Rank and traffic!)

This is a paid option, which you may not be able to afford right now.  He also runs a 3WaysLinks programme which gets you 250 unique backlinks.  But there are lots of FREE strategies too.  However, rather than the “set and forget” options above, be prepared for these to be (REALLY) time consuming, sometimes unproductive and unltimately “long term” in traffic generation, rather than generating “immediate results” (ie traffic). 

1. Make it as easy as possible for other websites to link to you.  Set up a “Link to Us” page that contains snippets of html code (containing keywords anchor text!) that can simply be cut and pasted onto their site;
2. Write some articles and submit them to article directories with your (unobtrusive) link in the Resource Box.  A single article could bring you dozens of backlinks.  This will be the subject of future blogs
3. The Direct Approach – Try contacting a few sites within your niche and ask if they will link to you.  You could offer to write a regular column for them as a sweetener.
4. Submit your site to free directories that are related to your niche.
5. Find blogs or Forums in your niche and post comments to some of their posts. DO NOT SPAM.  Make sure your post is interesting, relevant and actually ADDS something to the discussion.  

All of these work, although they are time consuming.  There is however, one major FREE traffic driving strategy which I’ve not mentioned here.  I’ve tried it for the first time today, so let’s see how it goes.  I’ll blog about it later, and let you know how it’s gone so watch this space!