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Marketing Pond Review

I ran across Marketing Pond just the other day, and it’s an interesting enough concept to deserve an in-depth review.

The website makes the following claims:

  • An autopilot income: this is something most every opportunity claims, so no surprise there.
  • Free advertising
  • Free website
  • Free opportunity
  • Free ebooks

The website mentions a downline, so right away we know we’re dealing with some sort of network marketing. My basic rule with network marketing is that in order to be a reasonable opportunity, the people you recruit cannot be paying your income. Otherwise it breaks down eventually.

Since Marketing Pond advertised itself as free, I signed up to get a closer look at what they offer.

The website itself isn’t extremely clear on this. When you sign up, you get to a page listing 27 different programs (11 free advertising programs, and 16 money making opportunities). Each program has a spot where you can put your affiliate id for that program, and a link to where you can signup for the program.

After puzzling through the rest of the website, it turns out that Marketing Pond is what I’ll call an “opportunity aggregator”, but the rest of the world calls a “downline builder”. All of the programs listed provide some benefit for referring new members to the service. Promoting more than a few of these programs individually would be a pain, and dilute your efforts.

What Marketing Pond does is provide a central place for signups for these programs. You promote Marketing Pond, and anyone who signs up under your referral will then sign up under each of the 27 programs under your referal for those programs, automatically (Marketing Pond automatically puts your affiliate id in the right spot for each program).

When I realized what Marketing Pond was doing, I was a bit amazed that I hadn’t thought of it myself. As a programmer, I could create a website like Marketing Pond with no trouble. And it makes a lot of sense to promote a single website rather than try to promote dozens. I’d never thought of it, but someone did.

The hardest part about getting started with Marketing Pond is signing up for all the programs. If you’re already a member of a program, you just put in your affiliate id. There’s no requirement that you sign up through Marketing Pond. You should sign up for any you aren’t already a member of through Marketing Pond, though, to give your sponsor proper credit and make sure you get credit from your referrals.

It took me a few hours to sign up for all the programs. Some are more involved than others, and all had confirmation emails and an opt-in process.

I want to give a brief overview of each of the programs involved. I’ll post more detailed reviews of the interesting ones later. The programs fall into two general categories: opportunities and advertising.

The opportunities are where you make money, and the advertising programs all provide a boost to your marketing efforts as you get more and more people signed up under you at Marketing Pond.

Opportunities at Marketing Pond

  • Agloco: Get paid to surf the web. I’ve written about this before.
  • Inbox Dollars: Get paid to read email and take surveys. You get $5 for just signing up.
  • Take the Internet Back: Get paid to look at advertisements. You get $10 for just signing up.
  • Slash My Search: Get paid to make web searches, or for referring others to make web searches.
  • Treasure Trooper: Get paid to participate in free trial offers. Make a portion of what your referrals make.
  • Cash Crate: Get paid to complete surveys and join websites. Make a portion of what your referrals make.
  • Clicks Matrix: Primarily a traffic exchange, but you can also get paid to view websites
  • Donkey Mails: Get paid to read emails and view advertisements.
  • No Minimum: Get paid to read emails and view advertisements.
  • MyLot: Like MySpace, but you’re paid to participate.
  • Clix Sense: Get paid to view advertisements, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • AdBux: Get paid to view advertisements, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • LinksGrand: Get paid to view advertisments, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • Word Linx: Get paid to view advertisements, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • Hits4Pay: Get paid to view advertisements.
  • Deals N Cash: Get paid to view advertisements, plus $5 for signing up. Make a portion of what your referrals earn.

Now, clearly you’re not going to be active in all of these. Inbox Dollars and Take the Internet Back are easy enough, since they send you emails and pay you to read them (generally about $0.05 per email). One or two of the others may strike your fancy, but you won’t participate in them all. Go ahead and sign up for each through Marketing Pond, though, to take advantage of the referral bonuses.

Advertising Programs at Marketing Pond

  • Traffic Digger: Typical viral advertising, the more people you refer, the more times your ad is shown.
  • Ad Grid Network: This one is an ad exchange. You show their ad block on a website, and your ad gets shown on other people’s websites. You can see an example of the ad block on my personal blog.
  • Page Swirl: They provide ad rotating on a page swirl page. If you upgrade to paid options, they’ll use various traffic exchanges to advertise your page swirl page.
  • Traffic Swarm: You get credits by viewing other people’s pages, that are then used to show your page. The best option is to include Traffic Swarm links on your website. That way your links show up on other people’s website, rather than just being seen by other Traffic Swarm users. Here’s an example of Traffic Swarm links (these opportunities are not being recommended, this is just an example of using Traffic Swarm):
  • Traffic Roundup: Another one where you earn credits by viewing other people’s sites that are then used to show your site.
  • Free Viral: In this one, when you go to the Free Viral page, you see 7 advertisements. To sign up, you must click on each advertisement to get a code. After you signup, your ad is put into the list (through the above link, my ad is in the #1 spot), and as people sign up under you it gets pushed down the list. Eventually it can be seen by thousands of people as they signup.
  • Link Referral: Another view a site to get credits deal, but they also include the option to review a site for more credits. A reviewer is going to pay more attention to the site, so is a better prospect.
  • Link Scout: By promoting your Link Scout page, you get your ad viewed. You can also earn credits by viewing other ads.
  • Traffic Wave Profits: Another advertising aggregator that has one or two programs in common with Marketing Pond, but also has a paid program or two.
  • Big Daddy Pays: A search engine that lets you place ads by bidding on keywords. Everyone who joins gets one top spot on any available keyword for free. Your ads cost credits, which you earn by viewing other ads or by reading email announcements from Big Daddy Pays.
  • Hits2U: Your ads are displayed on the Hit2U page. This also seems to be a feeder for GDI (Global Domains International), which is a company that sells .ws domains and hosts them for $10 a month. They pay you to refer new people to them.

One of the key points in most traffic exchanges is that you only have a few seconds to interest someone who is really only interested in getting credits for their own website. So your page has to catch their attention quickly.

The advertising programs can be used to advertise any opportunity, not just Marketing Pond, so it would be useful to join just for those if you already have an opportunity you’re promoting.

Conclusions

While the number of programs in Marketing Pond can be overwhelming, it’s quite a clever concept. You promote one website rather than 27, and automatically get referrals for the 27 programs.

That said, you probably won’t be able to keep up with all the traffic exchanges. Most give you some free credits to get started, though, which you can use to advertise Marketing Pond itself.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this with Free Viral, though, since the only people who see your ad are the ones you’re referring (e.g. the people already signed up with Marketing Pond). Instead, pick another opportunity to advertise with Free Viral, something you think Marketing Pond users would appreciate (e.g. something free).

With the signup bonuses and a few paid emails, I made about $22 the first day. That isn’t sustainable, since the signup bonuses accounted for $20 of that. But that was just from reading emails and taking a couple of surveys.

Will I keep up with taking surveys and reading free emails? Not to that level, since the amount of time needed is large enough I can’t justify it. Someone who needed the money more than I do might have a different perspective.

The concept of the opportunity aggregator or downline builder is an interesting one. Marketing Pond is themed around traffic exchanges and easy ways to get a little bit of money online. I could see the idea being used for other sorts of network marketing opportunities, too. As a free service, Marketing Pond beats page rotators hands down.

Let me know what you think!

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New Theme!

I’ve changed WordPress themes, so if you’re reading this on a feed or through email, come to the blog to let me know what you think.

The new theme has a more graphical look and feel, as opposed to the straight text of the previous theme. I found that some of the features I wanted to add were causing the text theme to feel cluttered. The new theme has an a couple of additional sidebars to use, including a footer for rarely used widgets.

I’ve added a “top commentator” widget, so the people with the highest number of comments over the last 30 days will get a link in the sidebar to their website (assuming you entered one when you left your comment). This link is a “follow” link, as opposed to the “nofollow” links in the comments, so it’s a bit of a reward for contributing to the blog.

I’ve also added the MyBlogLog widget to show pictures of recent visitors from MyBlogLog (thanks for coming!) To see your picture there, go over to MyBlogLog.com and join up. There’s a free version of their service that’s very suitable for small blogs and includes some useful statistics.

The logo was designed by the great folks over at LogoDesignTeam.com. They came up with four or five initial designs based on very minimal input from me, and then put up with about a dozen edits before we ended up with the final result. I’d highly recommend them for anyone wanting a professionally done logo.

So, like it or hate it, let me know what you think of the new theme!

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Squidoo Lens of the Day Tips

These are not tips on how to get your lens to be lens of the day, but rather tips on how to make the most of the lens of the day traffic if one of your lenses is chosen.

Monetize Every Lens

Every lens you write should have some way to make you money, beyond the normal Adsense profit sharing that Squidoo provides. Squidoo makes this easy to do.

Adding an Amazon module to your lens and find books on your topic to recommend is very easy in Squidoo. There are also other modules where you can find nearly any product imaginable to recommend.

Your conversion rate on those modules won’t be very high, though, because the lens of the day traffic is not targeted. They’re viewing your lens because it’s the lens of the day, not because they’re looking for information on your topic. Few of them, if any, will actually buy anything while they’re there.

Consider instead signing up for a pay-per-lead program. These programs pay you when someone signs up for a free report. A free report is an easier sell than paid products, especially for casual visitors.

If I had it to do over again, I’d have put the Squidoo Secrets ebook on the lens. I’ll review Squidoo Secrets in a later post, but you can get paid a bit for giving out the free ebook. That’s the closest you’ll come to targeted traffic in a lens of the day. The visitors are mostly lensmasters coming to see what your lens is like, and giving them a link to a resource that can help them to improve their own lenses might convert well.

The monetization on a lens should be a small portion of the lens. The majority of the lens should provide quality content and links.

Create Lens Topic Groups

Any topic, even a niche topic, is broad enough to write several lenses on it, each covering a different aspect of the topic. This lets you keep each lens focused on its subtopic.

Lens of the day visitors like to see other lenses you’ve made on similar topics, so creating topic groups from the very start will ensure you’ll get some spillover traffic onto the related lenses.

A great way to make it easy for them to find these other lenses is to use the lensroll feature in Squidoo to add each lens in the topic group to every other lens’ lensroll. When a user views one of the lenses, the others will appear in a “More Great Lenses” section.

I’d had only one other related lens, and hadn’t thought to link to it from my lens of the day lens. Despite this, about a third of the visitors found their way to it. Given a couple more related lenses linked together with a lensroll, I’d expect the spillover traffic to be higher.

Link Internally Between Lenses

If you only have a few related lenses, you can link directly between them in a text module. I had too many and too varied of lenses for this, so I created a Who Is Jay Shaffstall? lens that links to most all of my lenses, and then linked to it from every lens.

That way, every lens is close (click-wise) to every other lens.

This works better for the general public than for other lensmasters, though. During my lens of the day traffic, I saw only a handful of clicks through to my Who Is Jay Shaffstall? page, while the one related lens I had received a much higher amount of spillover traffic (see the lens of the day analysis post for traffic charts).

And that’s about it. I have a list of opportunities waiting for reviews in future posts, so for a while we’ll get back to the main topic of the blog, making money online.

Have a great weekend!

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Welcome JustFree.com Users!

I noticed that the blog was getting some users from a link on JustFree.com’s site. Turns out that the JustFree.com staff was Googling themselves and found my series on how to make your own website for free. They were nice enough to mention it in their news page, so some of their users have been coming through to see how to setup WordPress.

When I realized this, I immediately started feeling guilty about the horrible state of those posts. I’d written parts 1 through 3 of that series before I discovered Windows Live Writer (a most excellent blog authoring tool that makes embedding images into your posts nearly trivial), so they were just a bunch of text instructions.

I spent today rewriting them using Windows Live Writer, and embedding screen shots to guide people through the process of getting signed up with JustFree.com and installing WordPress there. Now I don’t have to feel guilty about JustFree.com users having to wade through a bunch of text instructions with no screen shots.

That’s my excuse for not posting the Squidoo tips I’d promised today, and I’m sticking to it. Expect the Squidoo tips tomorrow.

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Squidoo Lens of the Day Effect Analysis

Okay, I think things have died down enough to do some analysis on the effect of having a Squidoo lens chosen as lens of the day.

A couple of factors complicate this analysis: first, as a result of being chosen lens of the day, my lens was pushed into the top 100 lenses. This may have brought additional traffic. And the lens was also placed into the Explore section on Squidoo’s front page, which may have also brought other traffic. The first couple of days were all lens of the day effect, though.

Rather than show results for all my lenses, I’ve picked three to highlight. The Roleplaying with Kids lens is the one that was chosen as lens of the day. The Computer Game Making for Kids lens was on a similar topic. And the Who Is Jay Shaffstall? lens is directly linked to from all my lenses.

The Effect on Lens Traffic

This is the traffic chart for the Roleplaying with Kids lens. As a niche lens in a niche without much search engine traffic, it normally received two to four visitors a day. The spike to 229 was the day it was announced as lens of the day. This represents everyone on the Squidoo mailing list who checked their email that day and decided to look at the lens. The 119 visits are the people who don’t check their email daily (and my Mom, thanks Mom!).

The third day is when the extra factors come into play, but it seems as if the traffic is dying down naturally, so perhaps the extra factors didn’t affect traffic significantly. By the fourth day traffic is back to a normal level.

In terms of high traffic sites, this amount of traffic is a drop in the bucket. But for anyone doing niche marketing, this is a great opportunity to get a lot of people who might not otherwise see your page to look at it. Not targeted traffic, certainly, but exposure.

This is the traffic chart for the Computer Game Making for Kids lens. This one receives about half a dozen visitors on a normal day. The spike to 69 is the day of the lens of the day announcement, so represents spillover traffic from the Roleplaying with Kids lens.

My other lenses, on different topics, did not experience this same level of spillover traffic. So visitors who were interested by the Roleplaying with Kids lens went looking for other lenses I’d made on similar topics. In fact, they had to go looking, because this lens is not linked to from the Roleplaying with Kids lens.

This is the traffic for my Who Is Jay Shaffstall? lens. I had just created this and linked all my lenses to it a couple days before the lens of the day announcement, so I can’t judge what its normal traffic would be. I suspect it would be next to nothing, since the only keyword it targets is my name. The purpose of this lens is not to attract search engine traffic, but to provide an easy way for a visitor to one of my lenses to find the others.

The day of the lens of the day announcment, the number of visitors was 5, with 14 page views. This tells me that 5 people clicked from Roleplaying with Kids through to this lens. While here those 5 people visited other lenses, and each time returned here to visit more, for an average of three other lenses per person.

So this lens did what I wanted it to do, serving as a way for visitors to discover my other lenses.

Interestingly enough, the number of visits to my Who Is Jay Shaffstall? lens cannot account for even a portion of the spillover traffic to the Computer Game Making for Kids lens. So most people, when looking for other lenses I’d made, used the “More Lenses By” link Squidoo puts onto each of your lenses, rather than clicking through to my personal page.

Note that the analytics provided by Squidoo are nearly nonexistent. The above traffic charts were provided by StatCounter.com by embedding their tracking code into a text module in each lens.

The Effect on Lens Rank

Before the lens of the day announcement, my Roleplaying With Kids lens was ranked #2,184 out of over 100,000 lenses. This isn’t as impressive as it sounds, since most lenses are what Squidoo considers to be “unimproved”, which basically means the authors have put as little work into them as possible. Any lens that has had some loving attention put into its creation will automatically be in the top 10,000.

The traffic the day of the lens of the day anouncement pushed the lens to #105. I fully expected it to drop in lens rank after this, since it was clear the traffic was short-lived. However, the next day, when traffic dropped, it went up to #57. Traffic over the past 7 days, as reported by Squidoo, was 365.

The lens rank on the Computer Game Making for Kids lens started at #537, jumped to #237 on the day of the announcement from spillover traffic, and then down to #250. Traffic over the past 7 days was 92.

The Who Is Jay Shaffstall? lens started at #21,308 (its default rating from just having been created), then went to #3,423, then to #1863. Its 7 day traffic was at 13.

My conclusion from this is that lens rank depends highly on traffic over the past 7 days. I’ll expect to see the Roleplaying with Kids lens drop in lens rank as the traffic spike ages, unless being in the top 100 creates enough traffic on its own to keep it there.

Ratings from other Squidoo users also affects lens rank. Roleplaying with Kids has 23 ratings, Computer Game Making for Kids has 9, and Who Is Jay Shaffstall has 4.

Lessons Learned

This has gone on a bit long, so I’ll save for tomorrow a list of tips I’ve developed to get the most out of having a lens named lens of the day.

If you have any thoughts or insights on the analysis, please leave a comment.

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Squidoo Lens of the Day Effect

I’ve written about Squidoo in other posts, so it should be no surprise that I have a growing list of pages (lenses) I’ve created on Squidoo.

What was a surprise was the first lens I’d done, about the benefits of roleplaying with kids, being chosen as the lens of the day. The lens of the day is featured in an email sent out to around 10,000 subscribers, and is also featured in the Hot Stuff menu on Squidoo’s home page.

Needless to say, the lens of the day gets a traffic spike.

My kids roleplaying lens was getting a handful of visitors each day. The day that the lens of the day email went out, it received over two hundred visitors. Those visitors also stuck around long enough to look at some of my other lenses, so there was some spillover traffic. A couple even found their way here, which required clicking through a couple of Squidoo pages before getting to the link here.

Okay, the Digg effect this isn’t. But extra traffic is extra traffic, and the boost in lensrank might get your lens into the top 100, which will generate more traffic.

I’m still analyzing all of this, and will put together a post looking at the results of the lens of the day traffic spike, and what I should have done before having a lens picked as lens of the day to take better advantage of the traffic. I want to see how the traffic tapers off in the next day or two, so I should have the complete analysis later this week.

Note that you can’t really know if a lens if going to be picked as lens of the day. The first I heard about it was when I received the lens of the day email along with everyone else. But by positioning your lenses properly to start with, you can be prepared to take advantage if it happens.

I don’t want to leave you empty handed today, though, so I want to give you an ebook that gives a good introduction to Squidoo and describes some of the advantages of using it. Despite the name, there are no real secrets revealed here. The ebook does provide the opportunity to get free access to an interesting audio interview with the author.

Click the cover up above to download the free book, or click here.

To get started making Squidoo pages, sign up here. If you get over to Squidoo and want any advice, feel free to contact me. While I won’t claim to be an expert, having a lens picked as lens of the day means I’m doing something right.

Have fun!

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On Demand Profits Review

I’m taking a break from SEO to do another ebook review, this one of “On Demand Profits“.

“On Demand Profits” is one of those $7 ebooks. I’m finding a trend with these sorts of ebooks. They each give you one technique, and explain it in great detail. In this ebook, the technique is a way to get your affiliate links out to where people can see them, and to people who have a motivation to click on them.

The ebook itself is very professionally done. There’s a cover page, table of contents (9 sections, no less, for a single technique!), and the writing is clear and understandable. It was written by Alok Jain, who has apparently put out a number of these $7 ebooks (Two Minute Profits, reviewed in an earlier post, was one of his).

I normally don’t reveal the technique in these ebooks, since I don’t want to hurt the author’s sales. In this case, though, the technique is one I regularly recommend to people for free, so I don’t think it’ll make much difference if I tell you what it is.

The technique is this: join forums relevant to the product or service you want to sell, and put your affiliate link in the forum signature. Make sure the forum is one that allows affiliate links in signatures.

My normal advice goes like this: do not promote your link (e.g. posting “Click on my link”), but make quality forum posts and people will follow your link naturally. If you’ve targeted your forum properly and make quality posts, you’ll see some action.

Now, the ebook has 9 sections, so I certainly didn’t do justice to it in two paragraphs. Some of the other topics the ebook covers are:

  • What products to promote
  • How to find suitable forums to use
  • Creating clickable signatures
  • How to track which forums are converting best
  • What not to post in forums

The ebook really is well done. One thing I would not recommend following is his advice to market On Demand Profits to forums related to Internet Marketing. Those forums are saturated with people who aren’t creative enough to find their own niche. Find a new product in a field you’re passionate about, and find forums relevant to that product.

If you want to purchase the ebook, you can do so here: On Demand Profits

Let me know how you do with the technique!

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SEO: How To Get Backlinks For Your Site

I’ve talked about backlinks before, but rather than refer you to that post I’ll cover it again here.

What Are Backlinks?

A backlink is a link from another web page to one of your web pages. From a search engine perspective, a backlink is a vote for your site being relevant to the topic of that other page. After all, the webmaster wouldn’t be linking to your page if it wasn’t relevant.

So the more backlinks you have from pages that are relevant to yours, the more relevant search engines find your site. Which means the higher you rank in search engine listing.

What Are Reciprocal Links?

A reciprocal link is a link from your website to another website, when that other website also links to your website. These are most often done as part of an arrangement between the two webmaster (“You link to my site, and I’ll link to yours”).

Search engines place a discount on the important of reciprocal links, since they are not always an indicator of relevancy. A non-reciprocal link always counts more highly than a reciprocal link.

What Are Three Way Links?

A three way link is a tricky reciprocal link. Let’s say that you run a website about dog grooming, and there’s another website about dog grooming you want a link from, since that would improve your relevancy. You don’t want a reciprocal link, but the other webmaster also runs a website on cat grooming.

So they provide a link on their dog grooming site to your dog grooming site, and you provide a link on your dog grooming site to their cat grooming site. As long as all three sites have different domain names, to search engines it looks like two non-reciprocal links.

You’ll find some free directories using three way links to improve the value of their directory to webmasters, and to promote other sites they run.

What Are No Follow Links?

The HTML tag that is used for links is the anchor tag. It looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Example.com</a>.

This is an example of a good backlink. Search engines, when they see this link in a page, will follow this link to get to your site and improve your site’s relevancy.

Here’s another version of the link:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.example.com”>Example.com</a>

In this version, the extra rel=”nofollow” attribute has been added. This tells search engines that this link is not to be counted as a vote for relevancy for your site.

So you can get traffic from a nofollow link, but it won’t help your search engine rankings.

What Are Free Links?

A free link is a link you don’t have to pay to get. These can be the result of someone liking your site enough to link to it, or the result of getting put into one of the many free directories on the web.

The main value of a free link is the increase in relevancy it can bring, pushing you higher in search engine results for your keywords.

What Are Paid Links?

A paid link is a link you pay money to get. The amount of money you pay is generally proportionate to the popularity of the site linking to you. There are many directories that charge a fee to be listed, or charge a fee to be a featured listing. Featured listing are displayed before non-featured listings.

Another way to get a paid link is to donate to an open source project that features a donor listing page. Most will allow you to link to any URL and choose your own anchor text.

A paid link is useful if it increases your relevancy, and/or brings you relevant traffic.

What Is Anchor Text?

The anchor text for the link is the text that appears in the web browser. For example, in the following link to Google, the anchor text is Google Search Engine.

Whenever possible links to your pages should use some variation on the main keyword for the page, since search engines also use the link’s anchor text to determine relevancy. However, it’s unnatural for all the links to a page to use the exact same text, so if you are able to specify the anchor text for links to your pages (e.g. you’re buying a link) vary the text from link to link.

What Is Page Rank?

Page rank (PR) is a number from 1 to 10 than indicates how popular your site is. It’s calculated through the number and quality of your backlinks. Having a more popular (e.g. high PR) site link to your site lends some of that site’s popularity to yours.

PR does not play a large part in ranking higher in search engine results. Relevancy is far more important (see the last two posts, on keyword rich content and page optimization for details) for ranking higher.

Where PR comes into play is if you want to sell links from your site. Most people who buy links do so to increase their site’s PR, so having a high PR for your site means you can charge more for links.

You’ll often find new webmasters buying links in order to increase their site’s PR. But increasing your PR just for the sake of increasing PR doesn’t make sense unless you want to go into the business of selling links.

So don’t get hung up on PR, unless you’re going to want to sell links yourself, or you’re trying to use Pay Per Post to get paid for writing blog posts (Pay Per Post advertisers will require minimum PR for blogs).

So Where Do I Get Backlinks?

A new website just starting out should focus on getting backlinks for the purpose of increasing relevancy and generating more traffic. There are two important criteria for sites when you’re looking for backlinks:

  1. The site be relevant to yours
  2. The site get actual traffic

Relevancy is something only you can determine. Traffic you can estimate by going to Alexa.com and typing in the domain name of the web site. Do not use a site’s PR as an estimate of traffic, since PR just says the site has links, not that the site gets traffic.

Here are some easy ways to get backlinks:

  • Find a relevant discussion forum and post messages on it. Most forums allow you to have a link to your own website in your forum signature. Do not promote this link, just make quality forums posts and people will naturally follow the link to see your site.Be sure that the forum signature isn’t a no follow link if you want to improve your relevancy through this technique.
  • Write an article about your site’s topic and submit it to EzineArticles. You will get a backlink from EzineArticles. They do not use no follow links, so you’ll get a relevancy boost (since your article is about your site’s topic) and some traffic. The bonus is that another website might republish your article, giving you another backlink and more traffic. A single popular article can pay off.
  • Answer related questions on Yahoo Answers, and provide as your source link pages in your website that address the question asked. Yahoo Answers does use no follow links, so you will not get any relevancy boost from this but you should get some targeted traffic. Track your website stats after doing this to see if the amount of traffic is worth the time.
  • Create Squidoo pages about your site’s topic and link to appropriate pages in your site. This will get you a relevancy boost, since you can tailor the Squidoo page to the exact topic and control the anchor text of the link. This will also help with traffic, since Squidoo pages often rank quite highly in Google search results. For more details on Squidoo, see my post on Making Money With Squidoo.
  • Create a blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com (or both!) about your site’s topic and link to appropriate pages in your site. Again, you have control over the content and anchor text, but search engines will see this as a separate site and so improve your relevancy.
  • Find a blog that’s about your topic and post comments to the blog. Most blogs will use nofollow links, but you should get some traffic through the link. Blog owners will often see who is posting comments and visit the sites. If they like the site they may feature it in a blog post.
  • Find blogs that are relevant to your topic and send a polite email asking for a review of your site. Most of these emails will be ignored, but you may get a couple of reviews and links from them.
  • Find a small company that could use exposure and write a review or tutorial for their products or services. Be sure to add value through the review, and your chances of them giving you a backlink are quite good. This often happens without asking, as in the case of my tutorials on getting a blog setup with JustFree.com

This should be plenty to get you started. Remember that the goal with getting backlinks is to improve relevancy and generate traffic.

Good luck!

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SEO: Optimizing Pages For Keywords

This is what most people think of when they think of search engine optimization. How do I modify the actual HTML of a web page so that it ranks higher in search engine?

The key is to go back to the concept of relevancy. We talked about relevancy in the context of creating content, but in a web page there are other ways to measure relevancy. We’ll go through some of the basics here.

Think of each of these tips as a little boost to your page’s relevancy for your chosen keyword.

Put Your Main Keyword In Your Domain Name

If you’re lucky enough to be starting a site from scratch, and don’t have a domain name yet, you have the additional choice of a domain name that can affect search rankings.

Having your main keyword for your site in your domain name does help with search engine rankings.

This means that you have do to keyword research even before buying a domain name. If you already have a domain name, don’t panic! Having a keyword in the domain name helps, but your rankings can still be good without it.

Name The HTML Files Appropriately

It hasn’t been that long since you’d find web pages with files names like “links.html” or “money.html”. The name of the file isn’t limited, so it’s best to put the main keyword for the web page in the name of the file itself.

If the main keyword for the page was “make money using ebay”, then instead of a file name like “money.html”, use a file name like “how to make money using ebay.html”.

Use An Appropriate Title

Every web page has a title, and not surprisingly search engines expect the title of a web page to be a good indicator of its subject. Make sure your main keyword for the page appears in the title of the page. If you’re writing the HTML yourself, this means that the keyword must be between the title tags.

Please also put enough other words in the title to make it make sense, but try to have your keyword be toward the front of the title. Let’s say your keyword is “cheap web hosting”. Don’t just use that as the title of your page. Instead, use something like “Cheap Web Hosting Reviews: Get More For Your Money”.

The advantage of a longer title is that you’ll maximize your keyword exposure (in this case, adding in a keyword like “web hosting reviews”). Anytime you have keywords that overlap slightly, you can usually get two of them into your title.

Use An Appropriate Header

Every web page should have a single header. The header is what goes between the h1 tags in the HTML for the page. That header shows up in larger font and bold when people look at the page. So search engines see it also as an indicator of the web page’s topic.

Put your main keywords into the page’s header. Use the same rules as for the title, but do not use the same text as the title.

Do not put more than one h1 header into your web page! Some search engines will then discount the content of all the headers.

You can use h2 tags to break up subtopics, and use appropriate keywords for the subtopics in the h2 tag.

Provide An Image

Graphics are good for web pages, making them look nicer for visitor. Keep your use of graphics low, so you don’t affect the load times of your pages.

When you have a graphic, you can specify what’s known as an alt tag for the graphic. This is the text that displays when the mouse pointer hovers over the graphic.

Put your main keywords into the alt tag of one picture on your page.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are invisible pieces of HTML that suggest relevant keywords to search engines. These days, most search engines will not use meta tags to establish relevancy. Instead they’ll read the text of the page itself to determine relevancy.

The description meta tag is used to display a summary of your page on search engine results. So it’s worth putting a few minutes of effort into creating a decent description, rather than allowing the search engines to just use the first few lines of the page.

Make sure your main keywords appear in your description. Even if the search engines ignore them, humans will see them.

If you do all this, you’re ahead of most other websites out there in establishing the relevancy of your site to search engines. Blogging software such as Blogger and WordPress make all of this easier, but it’s still up to people to do the keyword research and create appropriate titles, headings, and descriptions.

Other factors that play into search engine ranking include:

  • The age of the site (older sites are considered more reputable)
  • The page rank of the site (higher is better)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug the SEO Book again. This ebook has all of the above in it, plus loads more. It’s targeted toward SEO professionals, but the techniques in it can be used by any webmaster or blogger.

Next post I’ll talk more about getting back links, both to increase your page rank and to get more traffic to your site. Until then, enjoy!

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SEO: Creating Keyword Rich Content

The term relevancy is probably a mantra over at Google HQ.

Any search engine wants to deliver relevant content, but Google is positively fanatical about it. Relevant content means that the top pages in the search listing provide an answer to the question the searcher was asking.

The basic pool of search results is built from a fairly brain dead algorithm. If you type in a search term like computer keyboard, you’ll get a pool of search results that include all pages having either the word computer or the word keyboard, or both.

Doing the computer keyboard search on Google gives us this result today:

So the pool of possible search results is over 64 million web pages! Where relevancy comes into play is when search engines decide which results to show first.

Showing up on the first page of search results is the goal of search engine optimization. Few people go to even the second page; instead, they’ll try a different search if none of the sites on the first page answer their question.

By doing keyword research, we’ve ensured that we will be in the pool of search results. To get onto the first page, we need to create keyword rich content and optimize the page for the keyword.

In years past, a common tactic for ranking high in search engines was called “keyword stuffing”. This basically means that you take the keyword you want to us and repeat it over and over again in your content. For example, if your keyword was computer keyboard you might have content like this:

The computer keyboard has a long and varied history. Computer keyboards evolved from the dials and switches used to communicate with computers before computer keyboards existed. Computer keyboards have greatly improved our ease of interacting with computers.

You get the idea…repeating the keyword ad nauseam. These days some search engines will penalize sites that do this by moving them lower in the rankings.

The best way of creating keyword rich content is to simply write about the topic described by the keyword. Use the keyword in your content, but vary it a bit. If you have a multiple word keyword, split the words so they don’t always appear together. And don’t use the keyword more often than is natural.

The keyword you’re targeting should appear in the first line of your content, and then again in the last paragraph. In between, just focus on writing quality content about the topic and avoid keyword stuffing, and search engines should find your page relevant.

In the next post I’ll talk about optimizing the HTML on the page for the keyword. This helps to break ties when more than one site has keyword rich content.

Until then, write some content!