We both know that you’re reading this because …

1. You want to increase your search engine rankings (Google, Yahoo, Bing, and even the small search engines)
2. You want more traffic
3. And you want all of this so that your websites can sustain themselves and make you money.

So, with that said, in this guide I’m going to go through the general Granted, results like this didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen from 100% search engine traffic! I’m not sharing this to brag. I simply want to show you that IT IS possible to get a ton of targeted free traffic to your websites, and outrank your competitors by simply knowing how and why Google is ranking sites where they do.

These strategies can work on any site. An aged site, a new site, an affiliate site, a site that sells products, a blog, or one that is designed to make money from Adsense.

Some of the initial strategies here (not all) are based off of a new site, so take the guidelines and apply it to your existing site. If there are things I have listed in the first few phases that you haven’t done with your old, existing website… I suggest you apply those.

Then move on to the later steps of the formula. Since you may already own a website, you may skip past step 1, but at least read through it to get a good grasp as to why we chose those types of domains in the first place.

The examples, steps, and “formulas” that are listed here aren’t a guarantee of what works for all sites in every niche market, but it’s what we start with and use on our sites. Since SEO is always changing and differs from site-to-site, you will need to adjust some of the specifics laid out here. But this will give you a great starting point.

From there, take off with your own added strategies as you learn more about SEO, more about your competition, and more about how the search engines are liking or disliking your current linking campaigns.

SEO is not an instant thing. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. If your keyword is super competitive, like for example “lose weight fast”. It’s extremely difficult to rank for a keyword like that, and it can take time. It takes patience, and it takes a lot of great content with a very low bounce rate… and again, patience and perseverance. If you do your keyword research properly though, and target keywords that are easy to rank for,my strategies will accelerate your Google rankings and help you keep them long term.

Though many forms of traffic building do work, such as Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, the single most profitable form of traffic is to build links to your site and use those links (when created properly) to boost your rankings in Google.

So be smart about your linking, and keep it as “natural-looking” as you can… and just as important, use great quality content that surrounds your links AND quality content on YOUR website. If you have a weight loss website, make sure that your website has quality content for the visitor to read and not leave your page in 3 seconds because of the garbage they just saw.

You want an easy to follow site structure (i.e. I suggest WordPress ) and you want to give your readers something to actually read on your site. If you want to make money, spend the time on developing quality content. Write it yourself, outsource it at www.iwriter.com (if you don’t like what someone wrote for you there, you don’t have to pay), or hire a writer at another freelance website like Upwork.com.

Here are the key points of the guide…

1. Build links with quality
2. Build links with different placements of your anchor text.
3. Use your common sense and don’t go nuts building links at an insane pace, all from low quality sites.
4. Slowly increase the level of links you build as you are increasing the types of links you receive.
5. Randomize the anchor text so that you rank for your keywords and don’t get slapped by Google for having obvious artificially created links. Make it look natural. Look at this cheat sheet for a rough example of anchor text link density %’s : Click here to download the Linking Cheat Sheet
6. Create the anchor text randomization in such a way that you also rank for long tail keywords that may not have even been in your initial keyword selection process.
7. Set up a general schedule so that you know when to move to the next phase of link building.
8. Once you see some progress, continue forward with the new campaigns for your site. Don’t stop building links – that’s a red flag to the search engines, especially once your site is ranking high. Be consistent.
9. The primary links pointing to your money site should be higher quality, authority

With that said, let’s jump right in to step 1…

Finding the Right Domain:

When starting out with a new site, we either use aged domains with high MozRank (www.moz.com) or Exact Match Domains (EMD) for our niche sites. MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank. It’s a good initial indicator when purchasing an aged domain at an auction.

Obviously, if you’re selling a specific product, you’ll want to use that as your domain name. But if you’re building a niche site for affiliate marketing, Adsense, blogging, etc… I’d suggest doing one of these two options above.

The below formula is by no means a “rule”. I’ve listed several criteria that we look for when buying an aged domain, but if I ever run across a domain that is like 12 years old, I buy it even if it hardly has any links pointing to it. So use these as “guidelines”.

The Aged/High Moz Rank Domain-Finding Formula:

1. Have a minimum of 30 backlinks and at least 10 referring domains (the more, the better)
2. MozRank of approx 3 or higher.
3. Have a minimum of 1 page indexed in Google.
4. Moz Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) is higher than 10.
5. Or look at MajesticSEO’s “Trust Flow” for a value of 10 or higher (if 20 or higher, then it is really good)

Tools Needed:

• FreshDrop.com to search and buy aged domains with MozRank, history, and incoming links)
• ahrefs.com, or MajesticSEO.com (to check backlinks data).

Both strategies work great, but as I write this, we’ve been finding that using EMD’s still get faster results in the really small niches with lower competition. They tend to get faster ranking results that stick. But for tougher, more competitive keyword phrases that can take several months to get ranked for, it’s best practice to start with an aged domain that already has some links, MozRank, and history.

What Keywords Should You Choose for Your Niche?

This is not a detailed tutorial on how to choose a niche market and the keywords you should or want to rank for, there are plenty of tutorials out there on that. This wasn’t written for that purpose. If you don’t know how to find profitable keywords to rank for, I’d suggest doing a little more research on that topic. This guide assumes that you already have a good grasp of that.

With that in mind though, I will give some quick tips, using a formula that has been working well for me when choosing my keywords for my niche sites. These are for my “affiliate niche sites” or “Adsense” type sites.

The Niche Competition Formula:

1. The MozRank of the top 3 Google search results should be 3 or
2. The top 3 competitor sites should have less than 2,000 backlinks
3. None of those top 3 competitor site domains should be large authority news sites (CNN, BBC, Wikipedia, etc)

SEO Niche Keyword Research Formula:

1. Global Exact Monthly Search for your target keyword is more than 3,000 (5,000 or more is preferable)
2. EPC (earnings per click) is more than $1 (if you want to monetize using AdSense)
3. The keyword is making people money (by looking at the Adwords ads). This is just a quick check that I do. Go to Google, type in the keyword that you’re thinking of using. If you see a bunch of Adwords ads in the search results, then it means PPC marketers are aggressively advertising for that target keyword. And most likely, it’s making them money if they’re willing to continually spend money on

Creating Your Website with Proper On- Page SEO:

Since this guide is more geared towards off-page SEO, I’m not going to go into crazy amounts of detail about on-page SEO. I would suggest doing some research on recent topics about on-page seo.

Also, check out this SEO tool that we created: http://www.seosnapshot.net

Things have changed a bit the past year in terms of the importance of on-page factors. In recent years, on-page SEO took a nose dive in terms of how important it was. For the past few years, off-page SEO completely dominated how search engines ranked sites. But more recently, On Page SEO is making a comeback and holds an important role.

So if I were you, I’d start by concentrating on the biggest, and most important on-page SEO factors, optimize your website to include those,

 

and then after that, get started on your off-page SEO (linking campaigns), since the off-page factors and linking profiles are the most influential.

You can always go back and tweak minor things later, and improve on your site’s on-page factors. The sooner you start your linking campaigns, the better. Plus, it’s easier and much quicker to edit your site.

Here are some of the most important and basic on-page factors (yes, this is a very brief summary):

Inter-link within your site.

This is becoming more and more important with on-page SEO. Let’s compare two sites real quick…

1. org (was NOT hit hard from Google’s updates. In fact, the updates helped their rankings)
2. com (was hit extremely hard from Google’s updates) These two sites are both full of content. The two sites have tons of backlinks pointing TO them. But the one key difference is that EzineArticles has very bad on-page SEO. If you look at their content, they rarely link from one article to another within the site. That is, their inter-linking within their own site is really bad. Most of the links in the content of their site points to external websites only.

This is not good.

Now, compare that to Wikipedia. If you look at ANY of their pages, you’ll quickly see that they have an insane inter-linking strategy going on. Now, obviously you don’t need to do go that in-depth with your website, and you’re most likely not creating an online encyclopedia either… BUT… the point here is that from Wikipedia is linking from article to article to their own internal pages. This passes link juice, shows Google that your site is a real functional site, and it is a user- friendly site with easy navigational flow.

• Use H1 tags in your
• Use image with alt text = your keyword, or a variation of your target
• Make sure the image name is your-keyword.jpg
• Make sure to include your keyword in the Meta Description and tags, without stuffing it. *make it look natural*
• Your URL structure of each post/page on your site should only have your title of your post/page (with hyphen) behind the main domain.

Example: www.yourdomain.com/title-of-page-with-hyphen

WordPress  is a great site framework to use because of the ease to changing the inner linking structures (e.g. permalinks) of your pages’ URLs. To set this up with WordPress , it’s really easy. Go to Settings > Permalinks. Then change the structure to: /%postname%

If you’re using WordPress , I’d also recommend installing an on-page SEO Plugin. There are tons of great on-page plugins that really help with optimizing your content before you post it.

A few suggestions are:

Sitewide On-Page SEO plugin: All-In-One SEO Pack

Choosing the Proper Anchor Text for Your Links:

First, download this cheat sheet if you haven’t already: Click here to download the Linking Cheat Sheet

The below info goes into more detail, but the guide above is a great reference point to go back to.

Once you decide on the target niche keywords that you want to rank for, use the below methods for deciding “what percentage” of anchor texts of any of those keywords you should be using.

! Big Mistake !

I am still seeing a lot of my customers making the mistake of linking too often with the exact match keywords they wish to rank for. Big mistake in my opinion but everyone has a right to do their own SEO.

Definition: Exact Match Keyword

An exact match keyword is the keyword or keyword phrase you wish to rank for, so if I wanted to rank BacklinkBeast.com for “SEO Tips” and put that into the anchor/link text, then THAT would be an “exact match” keyword/keyword phrase.

If I put this into my anchor text, “Matt Callen Rocks the Internet with great SEO Tips” then that would be considered a “partial match” which I will discuss later.

Partial matches are Ok, but use a LOT of different ones. Do NOT link to the same partial phrase over and over again. Randomization is really important with only a sprinkle or dash of an exact match. This is natural in the eyes of the search engines.

Safer Anchor Text

I like to see a lot of URL or brand anchor text links pointing to the site that you’re trying to rank. As you watch and monitor your link density profile then you can make the decision to add partials and of exact match.

Examples of URL anchor text

URL as anchor text: http://www.seosnapshot.net www.seosnapshot.net SEOSnapshot.net

And then all of those with a / at the end is very common too.

Our brand is the domain name, or SEOSnapshot and it could be seen in many iterations as well. For example: SEOSnapshot, SEO Snapshot, SEO SNAPSHOT or SEO-Snapshot.

I consider a domain’s “brand” as the domain name text “without” the extension. (.com, .net, .org, etc.)

Examples of BRAND anchor text

Domain Brand as anchor text:

SEOSnapshot SEO Snapshot SEOSNAPSHOT seo-snapshot

Random and Misc Anchor Text

My thought on all the “click here,” “visit” or “more info” links are good, but they are WAY over used.

Since we have looked over hundreds of linking profile’s and directly looked at the link density, we have really gotten to be able to tell from looking at the anchor text if the site has been SEO’d or not.

The goal is to NOT look SEO’d.

The normal garbage keywords of the past have become really redundant and it is now obvious that they are a part of a SEO link campaign. (I am not saying to totally stop that, but you really need to use a larger brush and variety)

Instead, choose really random stuff and only do 1 or 2 links with each keyword or phrase. A good trick is to go to a competitor’s site and look at all the keywords that would be in the “other” category that have less then 1 percent of that site’s link density. You can pull hundreds of these from them and know that they are more then likely market-related keywords that probably should be appearing in YOUR link profile!

It is THESE “other, random” keywords that you will be safer using in an automated linking system.

Another strategy is to use LSI keywords, synonyms and phrases. Related searches (you know, the ones you see at the bottom of Google’s search) are another way to pick out market specific keyword phrases that would be appropriate to your market.

Long Partials and Bits of Sentences

I also see ALOT of sentences, or long URLs in quality link profiles of high-ranking websites.

So, imagine if you were writing about your website, what would be a “natural” link? In my experience, it is a URL, or a branded link, so concentrate on THOSE!!

And when your link density is high enough using only URL and BRAND, then throw in an exact match keyword. Just do NOT over due it. And speaking of not over doing it, many times, it seems like: less is  more these days.

It is really important for you to look at your competitor’s link profile so you see what is the standard “amount” of links in that industry! Some industries have thousands of links pointing to them. Some have hundreds. Do the research in your industry and emulate that.

How to “Link” Properly?

This is another pretty obvious question, but in reality, SEO’d sites typically have 1 linking structure or two (at best) that get put into play. In this section, I’m NOT talking about the anchor text. Rather, I’m talking about the actual link URL.

In a campaign, the person doing the SEO will decide what URL they’re trying to rank for.

For example, will it have the www on it or not? That’s normally what people think is the only factor into consideration. Many people think that it’s either/or … and not both. But in reality, to make your site look natural, you really need to be building links to both of them. Don’t make it a straight up 50/50 between the two options, but link more to the one that you prefer, and then about 5-25% the other one.

VERY IMPORTANT: Remember to create a canonical change in your htaccess file so you get the juice you send to both www and without www. If you’re not sure what that is, search for more info on Google.

I mentioned earlier to put the “back slash” at the end of your url as well. For example: .com/ . Many programs end up putting that there in the link and also when people copy and paste, that / makes it in there from the browser, so THAT is normal to be in the mix.

Other odd linking patterns are putting /index.html or /index.php after your domain name depending on what your homepage is.

Examples depending on your sites structure: www.seosnapshot.net/

Another hugely missed linking pattern is the use of the NOFOLLOW link.

I know you may be thinking that you don’t want nofollow links. But you shouldn’t be thinking like that. If all you have is regular, dofollow links, that’s not “natural”.

On a side note… As an experiment after one of Google’s recent updates, we wanted to test some things. And we actually ranked sites using ONLY NoFollow links. Then, we tested this same strategy on de-indexed sites… and we were able to rank doing that as well. Granted, the keywords being ranked for when building links only from deindexed sites were low competition keywords, but still.

So that tells you something about how powerful BOTH NoFollow and DoFollow are, as BOTH are normal.

I am not going to go into why a “deindex site” can still work here as it is outside the scope of this guide, but when you are doing your linking, DO get NOFOLLOW links!! You can create your own with by adding the rel=nofollow code to the links in your article content.

Test this out yourself, but I personally think a slightly larger % (20-40%) of these is better. This is based off of testing, but here’s our initial reasoning behind this…

Google knows that people are going to have to advertise, and they want them to be able to!

THAT is against Google’s terms and conditions. So they expect the site who is putting the links up, to put a NOFOLLOW link on the advertised link.

So don’t you think that with a NOFOLLOW link, Google is going to trust that link just a little bit more? I do! And, we have proven it. They may not pass PageRank, but they DO pass juice!

This is another reason that passing PageRank is not very important anymore. It’s all about passing the link juice, not PR.

With all of that said… mix in some nofollow links. The amount is up to you.

What Content To Use When Link Building

What content should you submit?

ARTICLES: Ideally, use original content written just for you . This is the best choice, if you can afford it.

Original Content

If you don’t have it already and want it, you can go to www.iwriter.com to get a low-cost, quality and custom article written for just a couple bucks. Or you can write it yourself and put the links in.

Duplicate Content

Yes it is duplicate content, but I would choose duplicate over BAD spun content any day of the week. Duplicate content is a part of the Internet. Take a press release for example, it is published over and over again, and they are proven to help with rankings.

No BADLY Spun Content

I do recommend you have GREAT content. If you can generate great content from spin-ready formats, then go for it! I do this myself, but I make sure that it’s quality and doesn’t appear to be spun. By doing this, you can take one article and post hundreds of unique variations.

Remember, we are not necessarily trying to rank the created “article post” urls that you are building, so a ranking penalty for duplicate content on those newly built posts is acceptable. If you’re manually creating the spins yourself and then checking most all variations of the spins, then by all means… go for it! That’s great, original content.

Right here, I’m talking more about auto-spun junk content that has not been manually edited by you, and then ends up being jumbled garbage that is obviously not written by a “person”. And again, when I say spun content, I mean obviously “spun” content.

Link Building and Site Promotion

As mentioned earlier, choosing the right anchor text, and in the right densities and diversities, is essential to ranking in Google. There isn’t an exact % for every single niche and keyword. This varies, and this is where you should be looking at what your competition is doing.

There are some guidelines that I suggested above. Go take another look at the cheat sheet again, if you just skimmed through it previously. Here: Our Linking Cheat Sheet

Important Note #1: each site online is different, in a different market, and trying to rank for different keywords, so results will vary.

We do highly recommend Daily Drip Feeding links. By this, I mean that you should be setting up a schedule to build links on a daily, or every other day basis.

And once you start building links, don’t immediately quit your linking campaigns, cold turkey. This raises a big red flag if you do.

Plus, use a lot of platforms to build your links so that your linking profile will be diverse and look natural to search engines.

For Tier-1 Links… I highly recommend you use authority sites that are aged domains, average to high MozRank, and related content. This is important because the Tier-1 links are what is pointing to your money site (i.e. the site you’re trying to rank).

Important Note #2: If at all possible, be in control of your Tier-1 links. By this, I mean that it’s best to own the sites that you’re linking from. Or at the very least, if you don’t own them, make sure that if you need to, you can adjust your links/content on them in case you want to update the keywords you’re optimizing, or if Google ever makes changes to their algorithm. This will keep you safer!

Important Note #3: Build Tier-2 sites that link to your Tier 1 sites. These can be slightly lower quality links (i.e. wiki links, web 2.0 links, pdf sharing site links, blog commenting links, etc). You should be building a large tier of links pointing to your Tier 1 links, building up the quality and juice for those sites.

Build roughly 10 tier-2 backlinks for every tier-1 link you’ve built. So if you build 10 tier-1 links today, then build 100 (roughly) tier-2 and point these to all of your tier-1 backlinks.

Again, randomize things. Make everything look as natural as you can. Don’t repeat “exact numbers” of links all the time. Just use these examples as basic guidelines, and adjust accordingly.

Important Note #4:  DO NOT Build Too Many Links Too Fast, on a Daily Basis for New Sites.

For New sites, approximately 10 tier-1 backlinks daily is plenty! You may not even need to do that many.

For Aged sites that already have incoming links and history, or if you are into more competitive niches, then 40+ tier-1 backlinks daily (or more) is fine. Again, it will depend on the niche that you are in and what Google is already ranking for your keywords. Look at your competitors’ linking profiles and see what they’re doing. Then try to mirror them.

In some competitive niches, I’m building 75+ tier-1 backlinks every few days to sites and getting great results too.

It’s important to stay consistent and continue to build links. When you stop your linking campaigns, it can sometimes raise a big red flag to Google… especially if you were previously building a ton of daily links.

Increase the Speed and Power of Your Newly Built Links:

Each day, you should submit all of the links that you built, over to http://www.linkpipeline.com including tier-1 and tier-2 links. If you don’t get to them each day, that’s Ok. But definitely try to stick to a consistent schedule of submitting the links to Linkpipeline.

This step isn’t required, but it’s highly recommended.

The reason is simple. Google needs to know that your newly built links exist. Though many of them will get indexed naturally without any intervention, it can take a while. Plus, some of the lower quality links may not ever get indexed at all. And if Google doesn’t index those newly built links, then you aren’t going to get any link juice from them at all. And your time building links will all go to waste.

So we recommend using a service like Linkpipeline to help get your links indexed quickly. It does this by building just the right amount of additional links to your links that you just submitted to it, without over optimizing.

Closing Thoughts:

As you get your feet wet and start analyzing your competition’s linking profiles, you’ll quickly see how and why Google is ranking sites where they do in their search results. From that unique “spying” on your competition, you’ll then know exactly where to start your linking campaigns… and then adjust from there.

Once you start building out multiple linking campaigns, you’ll start to develop some of your own tactics. Apply them, and continue moving forward. To get the best results, you really just need to dive in get started with the first step of analyzing your competition.

If you have realistic expectations for the ranking results, you won’t be let down. Remember what I said earlier about using the “Common Sense” strategy. First go after the keywords that you know you can rank for. Use the steps above for those keywords, learn what works best for you, and then press forward, accelerating your rankings.

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, own a business that sells your own products, or a marketing director for a company, you can rank for your keywords if you use these tips.

Source: You may download this guide as PDF (including images) here…