So far the posts I’ve written have made $1831 in three weeks.

I noticed some interesting things this week:

• People are linking to my posts. I’m not asking, it’s just happening. That’s what can happen if you really get into the mind of the searcher and deliver the information they’re looking for. This is obviously helping and is most likely responsible for a lot of the earnings increase this week.
• The earnings from posts varies wildly. One post will do really well one day and then won’t produce much for a few days. Sometimes I won’t be able to find the post at all for a few days. It will then come back and do really well again. A lot of people in the comments here as well as in the forums see this happen and freak out. They think that something it wrong. This always happens when you’re dealing with new posts – it doesn’t mean that something is wrong.

I have to laugh because I know that I’m going to get a new slug of comments asking how many ‘readers’ I had on the site before the experiment. It seems like the common explanation is that this money is being made because of existing traffic. This is frakkin hilarious because it shows me how little some people actually know about making money with Adsense. Guys, regular visitors do not click ads and never will. If you think I’m doing this because my ‘readers’ are clicking ads, you obviously don’t understand the game. Searchers are the ones who will click ads and if you want to get ad clicks, you have to draw the searchers.

As a side note, the site I’m working with had less than 10 readers before I started the experiment.

There are no tricks in how I’m reporting this stuff. I know how to find the right keywords and I understand how to write about them. If you’re wondering if I’m somehow leveraging my existing traffic to make this money let me put your mind at ease – I’m not. The traffic on this site is WAY up right now because of the addition of these new posts and it happens to be search traffic – the kind of traffic that clicks ads.

I’m a little surprised by how well this is going and at the same time I’m not. I’ve never added this much content based around solid keywords to a site before. Now that I’ve done this, I can’t figure out why this is the first time I’ve tried it. To me it’s pretty obvious that it would help any site but for some reason I hadn’t connected how much benefit I could get from this.

I think that some of you probably have the knowledge to pull something like this off and others need to learn more about keywords – how to find the right ones and how to target them well. There’s no way I could get these results without knowing what I know about keywords.

The whole point of using sites like Ezine and HubPages to get links is to increase your site’s link juice, and ultimately its rankings. You can of course use a bunch of different methods but links from HubPages and Ezine are quite strong, which is why I recommend using them. Stronger links make a much bigger difference in rankings than links from weaker sites.

Steps For Getting Links From HubPages

1. Sign up for a free HubPages account.
2. Build a hub that’s related to your topic. If you need help, check out the HubPages quick start guide.
3. Create a link back to your site, within your hub.

It’s that easy… BUT there are a few things that you should know about getting links from HubPages.

First, they are extremely efficient at not getting spammed. In order to get real links from HubPages you’ll need to create some quality hubs. If your author score isn’t 75 or higher, your links will have nofollows, which take away the link juice. You will have to create a handful of decent hubs to be able to get your score above 75. I would make sure that each of your hubs has at least 400 words of unique content – most of mine have around 800. Yes, that’s a lot but is also the reason that my hubs rank well in Google.

Second, you are only supposed to link out to your site once within your hub. If you link out more than that it will make the hub overly promotional, and it will be de-published until you fix it.

The bonus that comes with this method is that you can use Adsense and affiliate programs to make money with HubPages.

Most people sit back hoping that somehow the biggest sites in their industry will magically find them and link to them. Honestly this isn’t just going to happen by itself. It will happen only if and when you make it happen.

There are a lot of different ways to get to know the people that have solid sites in your industry but the first step is simply making a list of the people/sites that you need to get to know. There are a few key things that I would note down when you make your list:

• Name of each site owner
• URL of each site
• Contact information for the site owners
• Whether each site has one author or multiple authors
• If the sites accept guest articles/posts

Keep in mind that you aren’t going to get to know each of these people all at once. You’ll start by trying to get to know that ones that have sites that are more at your level. The people that have really popular sites probably won’t be as approachable because they’re going to have a bunch of people trying to contact them every day.

Finding Sites/Contacts To Add To Your List

There are a couple techniques that I use to make a list of contacts to add to my list:

• Searching Google for my keyword and for related keywords
• Searching Technorati for my keyword and for related keywords

Usually I can add a ton of contacts to my list by going through those two sites. The sites that rank well in Google will be the ones that can help you the most, but will also be the hardest to get help from. The next step in the 30 Days To Better SEO will cover contacting these people so today we’re going to stop here. Make your list!!

I put the site online and started trying to figure out how to get links. I understood at least partially that links were the key to success with an online business.

The huge disadvantage that I had was that my little site didn’t get any links for itself. I could have left it online for 100 years and it never would have been found. It wasn’t in Google, wasn’t listed anywhere, and most definitely wasn’t being visited.

I worked on getting links for about six months before anything significant started happening. I didn’t understand most of the methods that could be used to get links so I had to do some really monotonous stuff. I had a job back then and I spent most of my free time searching sites like Linkmarket.net for link partnerships. I didn’t know of any other ways to get links so that was the only choice I had. They were mostly low quality links BUT they still worked and I made a lot of money with that site ($3,500+ per month at its peak).

While I owned that site, it did really well for me. However, getting links for the site was extremely difficult. It was really ugly first of all and it didn’t generate any links on its own.

Blogs have a ton of advantages over static HTML sites and I firmly believe that any site that’s serious about getting traffic with search engine optimization should be a blog or add a blog to their site. If you already have a static HTML site and you don’t want to change it to a blog, add a blog in a subdirectory, i.e. yoursite.com/blog. Here are some of the advantages you can get with a blog:

• Blogs literally create their own links. When you hit publish on a blog you can expect to get links from blog search engines and other sites. WordPress, Blogger, and most other blog platforms notifiy search engines and other sites that you have published something new and they will link to it. Other sites also find you on blog search engines and will link to you if they like what they see. I sometimes talk to bloggers who complain because their sites get a small amount of search traffic. What they don’t know is that there are people who complain in the static HTML community because they haven’t had a search visitor EVER and that can go on for years with static sites because they don’t create their own links. The owner is on their own to get every single link.
• Blogs are a lot easier to update than static sites so you can easily focus on producing more content. When I had my static sites I would spend all day trying to figure out how to create a link structure and that was ridiculously frustrating. Looking back I can’t believe I did all that work when I could have been focusing on the content for the site.
• Bloggers are by far the most generous group of online entrepreneurs. When people complain to me about how hard it is to get links to their blogs I just have to laugh. I would love for everyone to have to work on a static site for a year or two so that they can appreciate all of the advantages that come from blogging. Bloggers are very generous and will help you out if you know how to ask the right questions with respect.

People ask me all the time how much they need to post on their blogs. You need to post as much as you can. Everytime you post you get new links that will help you to get more search traffic. You will also be adding content that will help you to get more search traffic.

What some of you are really asking is for me to set the bare minimum of work that can be done and I would urge you to shift the way you’re approaching it. I would start to think of ways to get as much done as possible and try to figure out how to get satisfaction out of the work itself.

A few years ago I had a partner that I was working on a site with. He would ask almost every day how much more we had to do until the site made a lot of money. All day long it was, “How many articles do we have to write for the site?” or “How many people do we have to email?”. He was thinking about things the wrong way and wasn’t willing to change. I had to walk away from that partnership because I could see that my partner wasn’t willing to pay the price. You can’t expect to make money if you aren’t willing to put in the time.

I have always tried to figure out how to do more and have tried to focus every day on making things better.

Whether you have a site that’s a blog or a site that you have a blog on, your focus should be the same. Post as much as you can or hire someone to do it for you. In the long run, the link juice you gain will pay off nicely.

We’ll be covering more and more ways to get links over the next few weeks as we continue the 30 Days To Better SEO.

Google looks at how sites link to each other to figure out which ones are the best. To show this in a way that’s understandable, let’s show a few examples. Let’s say that Site A and Site B are both about ’some keyword’ and would both like to rank for ’some keyword’.

Google is going to take a look at links to determine which of these two sites is likely the best. At the most basic level, let’s say that Site A gets a link from a site that Site B doesn’t get:

Site A now looks better to Google and will outrank Site B. Let’s say that Site C decides to link to Site B, as well:

Now they both look the same to Google, who will now have to look at another ranking factor to determine which one is the best. There are other factors but none of them is nearly as important as the link juice factor.

Let’s add two new sites into the mix to further illustrate different scenarios that can happen:

In the above example, we now have Site D linking to Site A and Site E linking to Site B. To figure out which site is better between Site A and Site B, Google will have to look at the sites that are linking to Site D and Site E:

In the above example, Site D has more link juice than Site E because it’s getting links from Site F, Site G, and Site H. That means that Site A has more link juice than Site B. Site A will therefore outrank Site B.

Google is able to map out link relationships on an enormous scale and that’s what makes them Google.

For competitive keywords, the ranking sites have millions of links from other sites who have hundreds of thousands of links from other sites who have links from other sites who have links from other sites.

There are also non-competitive keywords that would require very few links to get ranked #1 in Google. I have #1 rankings that were achieved because of one link. This happens because all of the other sites have zero links from other sites or they have links only from sites that have no juice.

Every keyword is different and if you want to rank #1 for your keyword, your job is to get more link juice than the other sites that currently show up for that keyword.

To increase your juice you need to get more links, especially from sites that have a lot of juice.

I’m guessing that a lot of you will dismiss this post immediately when you start to read it. It’s hard to look at yourself and realize that you might not be prepared mentally for what has to be done. Others might take this to heart and move forward. I guess we’ll just have to see. Please don’t take offense to anything I’ve written here. It won’t apply to everyone but will be extremely helpful for some people.

The fundamentals of search engine optimization aren’t that complicated. The problem is that the implementation is extremely challenging mentally. Most people fail at the implementation and I’m going to explain why. You can do what you want with this -  I’m going to tell it how I see it.

Fundamentally, link building is pretty straightforward. There are two main aspects that you really need to consider:

1. The most link juice wins (I should say anchored link juice).
2. The most link momentum wins.

Link juice and link momentum go hand in hand. Each one can gain you a lot of benefit and each can override the other (kind of).

If you have a ton of link juice you’ll be really hard to beat. This is the case for us with CourtneyTuttle.com. We haven’t tried to add a link for like 8 months for that site and we still rank in the top 10 for ‘internet marketing’. That’s because the site has tons of sites linking to it – it has a lot of link juice. It doesn’t have good link momentum right now because it doesn’t have that many new links. The content on that site is still generating some links but most of them don’t point to the homepage. They still help but the link momentum isn’t anything like it once was.

The link juice in this case is enough to override the fact that the momentum isn’t there. With more link juice or link momentum, the site would climb higher in the SERPs (rankings).

Link momentum can also override link juice somewhat. The Keyword Academy is starting to rank for some really good terms even though the link juice isn’t really that high right now. That’s because the site has a lot of new links – the momentum is really high right now. If we stopped getting new links the rankings would tank fast because the overall link juice isn’t there to sustain the rankings.

If you have both you can be virtually unbeatable, but most people don’t get either.

People always take offense when I write posts like this but honestly I find them necessary. If you’re already making money by all means stop reading this post. There may be some beginners that truly need more information before moving forward. However, if you’ve been around for a while and aren’t reaching your income goals, I bet you have a mental barrier that’s getting in the way. That barrier will have to be broken down before you get anywhere. Here are the two biggest culprits:

Analysis-Paralysis

You get a few links and think that your ranking should change immediately. You start watching the rankings on Google and find that your ranking doesn’t improve or that it gets worse. This causes you to think that everything that you’re doing is wrong so you stop trying to get links and that stops your progress. You feel that what you know must be wrong or that you’re getting the wrong type of links.

The solution to this issue is focusing on the fundamentals and forgetting about rankings for a while. Links influence rankings, period. If you have convinced yourself that a link didn’t help you’re watching rankings too closely. There are about 8,000 things that can make you move down in the rankings and watching them everyday isn’t going to help you (unless you are REALLY experienced). It could take weeks or months for Google to find the new links.

You need to make yourself a spreadsheet that you can start to use for keeping track of the links you get. When you get a link from another site, add it to your spreadsheet. Find the satisfaction in blowing up your spreadsheet, not by looking at rankings. If you add enough links to your spreadsheet (and site), the rankings will come.

I’ve had quite a few conversations with people whose rankings are fluctuating. Recently I talked to a friend whose site is fluctuating between #1 and #8 in Google for his main keyword. He keeps telling me stuff like, “Court, I’m never going to understand Google. I just can’t figure out why I keep moving up and down in the rankings.” I keep telling him, “Brian (name changed), you’re never going to get enough links to stabilize because you only think about the rankings.”

My friend for some reason thinks his situation is different than every other situation and he thinks that there’s a variable that he doesn’t understand. There isn’t. His rankings are fluctuating because of the daily fluctuations of link momentum and link juice. Maybe yesterday Google found a new link and that gave him a boost. For two weeks before that Google didn’t find any new links so he started to slide. Maybe last month Google found some new links for a competitor. His real problem is that he’s relying on link momentum because he still doesn’t have enough link juice. Link juice is what brings stability.

My friend’s keyword isn’t really that hard. If he would figure out how to get two links per day for about two weeks he would be taken care of for a long time. He doesn’t do it because he chooses not to. He would rather try to ‘figure out what’s going on’.

ForuBlog-Rotunditis

The fun for you is in running around learning about the marketing and you’re too lazy to do the implementation. You find yourself arguing about theory with people that are much more successful than you. You may not realize this about yourself. The only way to know if you have this issue is if you feel like you know what you’re doing but aren’t reaching your income goals.

If you have this issue, link building will be extremely difficult for you because you’re seeking the high of reading a great piece of information – in other words your focus isn’t on making money.

To solve this issue you might have to go on a media-fast for a while. You may have to rediscover yourself. If you can’t find satisfaction in making yourself successful, I would honestly walk away or I would at least try to admit to yourself that this business isn’t for you. I find it fascinating that people like the information more than making money. I have actually been criticized for focusing too much on ‘making money’ on my sites that teach people how to make money.

Step one, in my opinion, is realizing that you aren’t working when you’re reading. You’re working when you’re working. You need to at least set a percentage-based limit for how much you’re going to let yourself read. The rest should be spent working and the majority of your work time should be based around getting links.

My friend with the fluctuation problem also has ForuBlog-Rotunditis. Since he doesn’t understand his fluctuation he tries to figure it out by visiting forums, blogs, and by calling me (very ironic that he won’t listen to me). I’m pretty sure that the next time I talk to him I’m going to tell him that I’ll solidify his ranking for $1000. It would probably take about an hour to get enough links to do that. Instead of getting the links he chooses to waste dozens of hours reading about his problem.

The Big Picture

He who gets the most/best links, wins. No matter what picture your mind is showing you, if you aren’t ranked #1 for your keyword, you’re getting beaten with links.

Yes, this is day 7 of my 30 Days To Better SEO series.

Don’t try to make a career out of making Google look stupid.

Google needs to return useful information to searchers to stay in business. The better they become at that, the more profitable they will be. Google will continue to get better and better at getting rid of the junk so if you want to continue to rank well long term, you will need to align yourself with Google. In other words, you’ll need to give searchers what they’re looking for.

Learning to make your web pages more useful will have a great effect on your search engine optimization, in a lot of different ways:

• It protects you long-term from spam complaints
• It creates natural links, in the short term and the long term
• It creates a positive branding effect
• It protects you from being penalized after visual inspections

If you’re competing against a web page that’s getting more natural links than you, it’s going to be tough to complete. You need to get it switched around so that you are getting the natural links.

Additionally, sooner or later, you will have a Google search engineer on your site, especially if you rank well. I want to help you to get ready for that day by showing you a few ways you can improve the usefulness of your web pages. I’m going to challenge you to implement at least one of them, as part of the 30 Days To Better SEO.

#1 – Provide A More Complete Resource On Your Subject

Take a look at the other sites that currently rank in the top 10 of Google for your keyword. Are they providing information that you aren’t? If so, I would highly recommend improving the quality of information you’re providing. This might be as simple as adding a few additional sentences or paragraphs to your informational article.

If you’re selling a product on your web page, you can provide user reviews, or a video of the product being used.

If you’re selling your own product, you may have to improve your product to be the most useful.

#2 – Add Links To Relevant Content Within Your Site

There are tons of cases where a user could benefit from being pushed to another page of your site. Let’s say for example purposes that a user came to my site searching for ’search engine optimization’. It would be very useful to that user to find what I have about ‘link building’, ‘keyword research’, and many other topics. That means that I can add to the usefulness of my web page by creating links that a searcher might find helpful.

#3 – Add The Ability To Leave Comments

Many of you have blogs, some of you do not. Allowing users to comment can really add to the usefulness of a webpage. Not only will you get free content for your page, you will also get insight into what the searcher was originally looking for. This can help you to make the resource more complete (#1). You will not only get questions in your comments, you will also get answers. In some cases this aspect can be covered by adding a forum to your site.

#4 – Add Images To Your Web Page

Images can often really add to the presentation. No, you don’t need to use images on every web page you create. However, you may be able to add to the usefulness of a web page if you do. In some cases, graphs or charts may make your page more useful.

#5 – Apply Formatting

No one wants to read a huge block of text. You may have the greatest resource in the history of mankind (for your keyword), but if it looks terrible, people will think it’s terrible. Adding some bullets, headings, and some bolded text might change the feel significantly.

#6 – Add Video

I’ve found that explaning things with video or with a screen cast is about 100 times easier for me than typing it out. Videos also take less time for me to make than writing posts does. I wouldn’t recommend going solely with video on a web page but it can really add to the presentation if you include a video or screencast on your web page.

It’s All Relative Folks

Google’s job is to list the best resource first. Sometimes the best resource on a given keyword isn’t that great. Sometimes it’s amazing. Take a look at your competition and provide people with something better than is currently being provided. This might take a lot of work if your competition is solid and it might be a piece of cake if your competition is weak.

Challenge

Make your web page a little better today. Apply at least one of these techniques, or apply all of them.

In the next 30 days, I wanted to walk through 30 different techniques that can be used for better optimization. Whether you have a niche site, a blog, an ecommerce store, or any other type of site, you should be able to benefit from these lessons. I’m going to highly encourage each of you to ask questions. If your site is different from the examples, let us know. We can probably figure out together how to make your site work with the lessons.

Pick a page that you want to optimize. It can be a home page or any other page. 30 days to better SEO has already begun:

• Day 1 – Optimizing Your HTML Title
• Day 2 – Improving The Usefulness Of Your Web Page
• Day 3 – Optimizing Your Body Text
• Day 4 – Extending Your Domain Registration Length For Better SEO
• Day 5 – Increasing Your Internal Links
• Day 6 – Add Content
• Day 7 – Prepare Yourself For Link Building
• Day 8 – Add A Blog To Your Site
• Day 9 – Get Links With EzineArticles
• Day 10 – Build Your List Of Industry Contacts
• Day 11 – Get Links With HubPages

Google accounts for 72.70% of all searches in the United States, according to Hitwise:

Google accounts for 62.9% of all searches in the United States, according to comScore:

As you can see, there is a huge gap between Google and everyone else.That gap gets bigger every day. Focusing your efforts on Google will give you the most traffic and that’s why Google optimization and search engine optimization are becoming more and more synonymous. This lesson will focus on Google but will also be useful if you’re trying to optimize for Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

Search Engine Positioning and Traffic Potential

Typically, the earlier your web site (or web page) appears in Google’s search results, the more traffic you can expect to get. If you’re #7 for a term or phrase related to your business, you can expect to get more traffic than you would get at #13. If you’re #1 for the term, you would get more traffic than you could get at #7.

Each search phrase is entirely different in its ability to bring traffic, because different numbers of people search for different phrases. ‘Food’ is searched for over 6,000,000 times each month in Google but ‘beach food’ is only searched for about 500 times per month.

You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out how many times each phrase is searched for. I have prepared a short video that will show you how to use this tool effectively:

If keywords have search volume, they can bring traffic to your site. It’s your job to do proper SEO so that your site can rank as highly as possible.

Major SEO Ranking Factors

Once you have a keyword phrase (or keyword phrases) that can bring traffic, you will want Google to rank your site well for that keyword. That means you need to learn what Google wants to see and then give it to them. There are a lot of different factors that you need to learn and some are more important than others. It’s widely believed that these are the most important 10 factors that Google wants to see:

1. Keyword use in title tag
2. Anchor text of inbound links
3. Global link popularity of the site
4. Age of the site
5. Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
6. Topical relevance of inbound links to site
7. Link popularity of site in topical community
8. Keyword use in body text
9. Global link popularity of linking sites
10. Topical relationship of linking pages

SEO is highly debatable, but this information is taken from 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization and published in a study by SEOmoz. I also agree personally that these are very strong factors that can not be discounted. That said, the terminology is brutal so I want to explain each of these factors and put them in context.

Keyword Use In Title Tag

When we refer to the ‘title tag’, we’re referring to the piece of code for a web page that creates the text that appears in the blue bar that runs across the top of a web browser (I put a red box around the area):

Other common names for title tag: title, page title, HTML title, HTML title tag

If you look for the code that creates the HTML title for your webpage, it will look something like this:

<title>Your Title Goes Here</title>

Most search engine optimizers believe that having your keyword phrase in the title tag of your web page is one of the most important ranking factors to consider. In my experience this is a crucial aspect of SEO – you must have your keyword in the title tag of the page you’re trying to rank.

Google ranks each page of your site independently so you don’t need to have the keyword in the title tags of all of your pages. It only needs to be there for the page you want to show up in Google’s search results. This allows you to target many keywords with each site because you’re only limited by the amount of relevant pages you want to have on your site. Wikipedia ranks in the top 5 for hundreds of thousands of different keyword phrases because they have hundreds of thousands of pages that cover hundreds of thousands of keyword phrases.

Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Ask also use the title tag as a ranking factor.

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

Links have an enormous affect on how well any web page ranks in Google. Wikipedia ranks so well because millions of web pages link to them. This happens because Wikipedia has become the go-to place for definitions on just about everything.

If I wanted to help Wikipedia to rank for ‘dog collar’, I could link to their page about ‘dog collar’, like this: dog collar. As you can see, I used the term ‘dog collar’ to make the link and that means that ‘dog collar’ is the anchor text for the link I made.

Definition: Anchor text is the text used to create a link. Anchor text = link text
Example: online pets – ‘online pets’ is the anchor text of this link.

When a web page gets linked to with anchor text that matches the keyword phrase they are trying to rank for, it will help them to move up in Google. That means that getting anchor-text links from other sites is a fantastic way to move up in Google’s rankings. Here’s a short video that will help you to understand more fully the relationship between anchor text and rankings:

Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Ask also use the anchor text of inbound links as a ranking factor.

Global Link Popularity of The Site

Global link popularity is the total amount and strength of links pointing at your entire site. If you have a brand new site you probably have weak global link popularity. On the other hand, if you own The New York Times you have fantastic link popularity. As of this morning, The New York Times website has about 39,500,000 links pointing at it.  Yahoo’s website has over 100,000,000 links pointing at it.

The incredible global link popularity of these sites is what allows them to rank quickly and easily for most things that they write about. If you search Google for news stories that break, you’ll find sites like these most of the time.

You don’t need to have equivalent link popularity to these sites to be able to rank well for your keyword phrases. However, the more you can increase your global link popularity by getting more and more links from other sites, the better rankings you’ll have with Google (see Link Juice).

This factor is quite different than many others because it isn’t black or white. If you look at global link popularity versus using your keyword phrase in the title tag, an entirely different mindset has to be here. With the title tag, your keyword is either there or it isn’t. With link popularity, you can build an infinite number of links. This concept isn’t black or white and actually ‘hot or cold’ would be a much better comparison. You can keep increasing the heat forever (by continuing to get more and more and more links), or you can leave your site at maximum coldness (without links at all).

The link strength of the sites who are linking to you is also a factor (see Global Link Popularity of Linking Sites, below).

Age of the Site

When I talk to new website owners about this ranking factor they usually tend to get mad. They don’t want it to be true because there’s nothing that they can do to make their site older. Unfortunately for them, Google does use age as a factor in calculating rankings.

When you’re working on getting an older site ranked, it’s honestly easier. The age is a definite advantage. That said, you can outrank an older site by beating up on it in other areas. For example, if your new site has much better global link popularity than your older competitor, you can still beat it for rankings.

Depending on the nature of your site and business, you may want to consider buying an older site or domain. This can put you at a competitive advantage and can take away the lead weight that comes from working with a brand new site.

I’ve done a lot of work on brand new sites and you can always get them to come around. Sure, you need to have patience but an increase in link popularity can almost always override anything else.

Link Popularity Within the Site’s Internal Link Structure

An area where many site owners and webmasters go wrong is in creating a structure that creates strength for the pages that they need/want to get ranked.

Let’s say for example purposes that you have a page about ‘red race cars’ that you really want to move up in Google. You have already placed ‘red race cars’ in your title tag and are working on your global link popularity. One of the most important things you can do is increase the link popularity from within your site. It doesn’t matter if you’re working with a home page or another page, you need to use your site to pass more links to your page about ‘red race cars’.

You can edit your posts about ‘blue race cars’, ‘green race cars’, and ‘purple race cars’ to ensure that you’re linking back to the page you would like to improve the rankings for. Simply put, you want to pass as many links as possible to your ‘red race cars’ page, from within your site. This shows Google that its an important page within your site and helps you to increase your score for this ranking factor.

Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site

If you’re trying to rank for ‘red race cars’, the ideal links from other sites (these are called inbound links) will be from other sites about ‘red race cars’. You will also get a lot of value with links from other types of race cars and for that matter, from any sites about cars. Links from sites that are topically related to your keyword phrase will always pass the most value.

A link from a site about baby clothes wouldn’t pass nearly as much value to your ‘red race cars’ site. A link from a site about monkey videos would also not pass as much value as a link from a more closely related site.

Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community

Google knows that there are lots of sites about red race cars (and most other topics). They also know that if there is a truly spectacular site about red race cars, many of the other red race car sites will probably be linking to it. Every topic works this way and that’s why it’s one of Google’s ranking factors. If you can get links from most of the sites about red race cars, you’ll probably be the best site for this part of Google’s ranking system.

There are plenty of situations where the best site doesn’t get links from everyone else. This can happen because of jealousy or because of the competitive nature of the internet. For that reason Google has many factors that they use to calculate rankings and this is just one of them. You don’t have to be the best for every factor to win, however, if you are the best for every factor you will win.

The best way to get links from other sites in your topical community is to create content that provides value to the community as a whole. Getting links is a lesson for another day but I hope that this lesson helps you to recognize the need for getting them.

Keyword Use in Body Text

This ranking factor is one of the easiest to complete. All you have to do is use your keyword phrase in the text of the page – the part of the page that your visitors can read.

Definition: body text = the text that visitors can read.

Some people use elaborate systems to calculate exact keyword densities and believe that they need to use the keyword phrases a certain number of times to rank well. I haven’t found this to be the case. I simply make sure that I use the keyword once or twice within the body text of the page that I want to rank.

Sometimes it makes sense to use your keyword more than twice within the text of the page you’re trying to get ranked. You may need to use the keyword more than twice just to make sure that it makes sense to the reader, especially in the case of longer articles. You don’t usually go wrong by providing the reader exactly what they’re looking for.

Global Link Popularity of Linking Sites

Another huge part of global link popularity is that not all links are created equal. A link from a really strong site will yield results exponentially higher than a link from a weaker site would. Additionally, a link from the strongest page of the strong site would yield greater results than a link from a weaker page on the same, strong site.

A link from a really strong site could make more difference than thousands of links from weaker sites. Google has a metric that you can use to determine the strength of pages and sites with relative accuracy through a system called PageRank. In the following video I will show you how to install the Google Toolbar and use it to determine the strength of sites and pages that you’re getting links from:

Topical Relevance of Linking Pages

So we want to rank for ‘red race cars’. We’re even able to get links from sites about red race cars. However, the actual links are from pages about computer processors. That’s right – computer processor pages on red race car sites. These aren’t the ideal links. The ideal links would be from red race car pages on red race car sites.

We don’t live in a perfect world and search engine optimization doesn’t have to be perfect. Computer processor links would do just fine if they were from sites about red race cars. However, links from red race car pages would be better.

Other SEO Ranking Factors

Size of Site

Sites with more pages of quality content seem to rank more easily in Google than smaller sites. This correlation makes sense in that a site that has 1,000 pages of content on a subject will often be a better resource than a site that has one page of content on the subject.

Thoroughness of Resource

Many SEOs believe that Google uses their understanding of word correlations to alter rankings. For example, this theory would tell us that a good resource on Microsoft should mention Bill Gates.

Keyword Use in H1 tags

The H1 tag of a page is meant to designate the title of the body text. In the code of the page, the H1 appears as such: <h1>Your H1 Title Goes Here</h1>. Using your keyword in the H1 tags of a page allows Google to see that you’re telling your site’s visitors that this page is about the keyword you want to rank for.

Keyword Use in Bold

It’s widely believed that using your keyword in bold as a positive correlation with Google. This should be taken care of if you use your keyword in H1 tags.

Domain Registration Length
Some SEOs believe that there is a negative correlation between one year domain registrations and Google rankings. This ranking factor would definitely be quite small, but could make sense considering that most spammers are going to try to make things as cheap as possible and would therefore only register domains for one year.

Exact Match Domain Names

There’s no doubt that redracecars.com would be a lot easier to rank for ‘red race cars’ than courtcars.com would be. There is an exact match bonus in place for domains that match the keyword that’s searched for. Like anything else, this ranking factor can be overcome by having better scores in other areas.

Keyword Use In URLs

It’s definitely wise to use your keyword phrase in the URL of the page you would like to rank.

Rate of Growth in Links

The strongest sites often have the strongest rate of growth in links. This is generally because people like the site better than its competitors.

Search Engine Optimization Applied

It’s pretty easy to get lost when you try to implement SEO strategies. Obviously, this happens because there are so many different aspects to it. Many people don’t believe that they can ever beat the competition because they have specific disadvantages, i.e. the age of their domain.

In the end, any disadvantage can be overcome by getting better in other areas, specifically in the area of link popularity. If you can’t fix a disadvantage that you have, outdo your competitors in other areas.

The trump card in the search engine optimization world is link popularity. If you can get the most and best sites to link to yours you can almost always override any other ranking factor.

Getting Into Google

Google’s massive index of websites includes each site they think is relevant. Obviously, you aren’t going to get any traffic from Google until you can get into Google.

Getting in is actually pretty simple – you have to show Google that you’re relevant and that’s quite simple. The only thing you have to do to convince them is get another site that’s already in to link to you.

If you have a site that’s in Google, getting in is easy because you can link to yourself. If you don’t, you’re going to have to find someone else to link to you and here are the two easiest ways to do that:

1. Submit an article to EzineArticles.com. Ezine will publish your article for free and will allow you to link back to your site at the end of it. Doing this with three or four articles will give you a better chance at getting indexed (getting ‘indexed’ means getting in).
2. Submit to social bookmarking/voting sites. You can use Social Marker to submit to a load of these sites and each will link back to you.

How Long Does It Take To Get In?

If you use both of these methods you can normally get your site into Google within 24 hours. It can take up to a week so don’t get nervous until a week has passed. If your site was built on Blogger it can take a little longer and this isn’t unusual.

What Not To Do

Do NOT submit your site to Google. This actually slows down the process and if you don’t believe me, test it. It’s the honest truth.