Black Hat SEO Final Course – Learn how to use and protect 

form black hat SEO

If you have spent any significant amount of time online, you have likely come across the term Black Hat at one time or another. This term is usually associated with many negative comments. This book is here to address those comments and provide some insight into the real life of a Black Hat SEO professional. To give you some background, my name is Brian. I've been involved in internet marketing for  close to 10 years now, the last 7 of which have been dedicated to Black Hat SEO. As we will discuss shortly, you can't be a great Black Hat without first becoming a great White Hat marketer.  With the formalities out of the way, lets get into the meat of things, shall we?

The million dollar question that everyone has an opinion on. What exactly is Black Hat SEO? The answer here depends largely on who you ask. Ask most White Hats and they immediately quote the Google Webmaster Guidelines like a bunch of lemmings. Have you ever really stopped to think about it though? Google publishes those guidelines because they know as well as you and I that they have no way of detecting or preventing what they preach so loudly. They rely on droves of webmasters to blindly repeat everything they say because they are an internet powerhouse and they have everyone brainwashed into believing anything they tell them. This is actually a good thing though. It means that the vast majority of internet marketers and SEO professionals are completely blind to the vast array of tools at their disposal that not only increase traffic to their sites, but also make us all millions in revenue every year.

The second argument you are likely to hear is the age old ,“the search engines will ban your sites if you use Black Hat techniques”. Sure, this is true if you have no understanding of the basic principals or practices. If you jump in with no knowledge you are going to fail. I'll give you the secret though. Ready? Don't use black hat techniques on your White Hat domains. Not directly at least. You aren't going to build doorway or cloaked pages on your money site, that would be idiotic. Instead you buy several throw away domains, build your doorways on those and cloak/redirect the traffic to your money sites. You lose a doorway domain, who cares? Build 10 to replace it. It isn't rocket science, just common sense. A search engine can't possibly penalize you for outside influences that are beyond your control. They can't penalize you for incoming links, nor can they penalize you for sending traffic to your domain from other doorway pages outside of that domain. If they could, I would simply point doorway pages and spam links at my competitors to knock them out of the SERPS. See..... Common sense.

So again, what is Black Hat SEO? In my opinion, Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO are almost no different. White hat web masters spend time carefully finding link partners to increase rankings for their keywords, Black Hats do the same thing, but we write automated scripts to do it while we sleep. White hat SEO's spend months perfecting the on page SEO of their sites for maximum rankings, black hat SEO's use content generators to spit out thousands of generated pages to see which version works best. Are you starting to see a pattern here? You should, Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO are one in the same with one key difference. Black Hats are lazy. We like things automated. Have you ever heard the phrase "Work smarter not harder?" We live by those words. Why spend weeks or months building pages only to have Google slap them down with some obscure penalty. If you have spent any time on web master forums you have heard that story time and time again. A web master plays by the rules, does nothing outwardly wrong or evil, yet their site is completely gone from the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) one morning for no apparent  reason. It's frustrating, we've all been there. Months of work gone and nothing to show for it. I got tired of it as I am sure you are. That's when it came to me. Who elected the search engines  the "internet police"? I certainly didn't, so why play by their rules? In the following pages I'm going to show you why the search engines rules make no sense, and further I'm going to discuss how you can use that information to your advantage.

Search Engine 101

As we discussed earlier, every good Black Hat must be a solid White Hat. So, lets start with the fundamentals. This section is going to get technical as we discuss how search engines work and delve into ways to exploit those inner workings. Lets get started, shall we?

Search engines match queries against an index that they create. The index consists of the words in each document, plus pointers to their locations within the documents. This is called an inverted file. A search engine or IR (Information Retrieval) system comprises four essential modules:

∗A document processor

∗A query processor

∗A search and matching function

∗A ranking capability

While users focus on "search," the search and matching function is only one of the four modules. Each of these four modules may cause the expected or unexpected results that consumers get when they use a search engine.

The document processor prepares, processes, and inputs the documents, pages, or sites that users search against. The document processor performs some or all of the following steps: ∗Normalizes the document stream to a predefined format.

∗Breaks the document stream into desired retrievable units.

∗Isolates and meta tags sub document pieces.

∗Identifies potential indexable elements in documents.

∗Deletes stop words.

∗Stems terms.

∗Extracts index entries.

∗Computes weights.

∗Creates and updates the main inverted file against which the search engine searches in order to match queries to documents.

Step 4: Identify elements to index 

Identifying potential indexable elements in documents dramatically affects the nature and quality of the document representation that the engine will search against. In designing the system, we must define the word "term." Is it the alpha-numeric characters between blank spaces or punctuation? If so, what about non-compositional phrases (phrases in which the separate words do not convey the meaning of the phrase, like "skunk works" or "hot dog"), multi-word proper names, or inter-word symbols such as hyphens or apostrophes that can denote the difference between "small business men" versus small-business men." Each search engine depends on a set of rules that its document processor must execute to determine what action is to be taken by the "tokenizer," i.e. the software used to define a term suitable for indexing.

Step 5: Deleting stop words

 This step helps save system resources by eliminating from further processing, as well as potential matching, those terms that have little value in finding useful documents in response to a customer's query. This step used to matter much more than it does now when memory has become so much cheaper and systems so much faster, but since stop words may comprise up to 40 percent of text words in a document, it still has some significance. A stop word list typically consists of those word classes known to convey little substantive meaning, such as articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, but), interjections (oh, but), prepositions (in, over), pronouns (he, it), and forms of the "to be" verb (is, are). To delete stop words, an algorithm compares index term candidates in the documents against a stop word list and eliminates certain terms from inclusion in the index for searching.

Step 6: Term Stemming

Stemming removes word suffixes, perhaps recursively in layer after layer of processing. The process has two goals. In terms of efficiency, stemming reduces the number of unique words in the index, which in turn reduces the storage space required for the index and speeds up the search process. In terms of effectiveness, stemming improves recall by reducing all forms of the word to a base or stemmed form. For example, if a user asks for analyze, they may also want documents which contain analysis, analyzing, analyzer, analyzes, and analyzed. Therefore, the document processor stems document terms to analy- so that documents which include various forms of analy- will have equal likelihood of being retrieved; this would not occur if the engine only indexed variant forms separately and required the user to enter all. Of course, stemming does have a downside. It may negatively affect precision in that all forms of a stem will match, when, in fact, a successful query for the user would have come from matching only the word form actually used in the query.

Systems may implement either a strong stemming algorithm or a weak stemming algorithm. A strong stemming algorithm will strip off both inflectional suffixes (-s, -es, -ed) and derivational suffixes (-able, aciousness, -ability), while a weak stemming algorithm will strip off only the inflectional suffixes (-s, es, -ed).

Step 7: Extract index entries 

Having completed steps 1 through 6, the document processor extracts the remaining entries from the original document. For example, the following paragraph shows the full text sent to a search engine for processing:

Milosevic's comments, carried by the official news agency Tanjug, cast doubt over the governments at the talks, which the international community has called to try to prevent an all-out war in the Serbian province. "President Milosevic said it was well known that Serbia and Yugoslavia were firmly committed to resolving problems in Kosovo, which is an integral part of Serbia, peacefully in Serbia with the participation of the representatives of all ethnic communities," Tanjug said. Milosevic was speaking during a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who delivered an ultimatum to attend negotiations in a week's time on an autonomy proposal for Kosovo with ethnic Albanian leaders from the province. Cook earlier told a conference that Milosevic had agreed to study the proposal.

Steps 1 to 6 reduce this text for searching to the following:

Milosevic comm carri offic new agen Tanjug cast doubt govern talk interna commun call try prevent all-out war Serb province President Milosevic said well known Serbia Yugoslavia firm commit resolv problem Kosovo integr part Serbia peace Serbia particip representa ethnic commun Tanjug said Milosevic speak meeti British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook deliver ultimat attend negoti week time autonomy propos Kosovo ethnic Alban lead province Cook earl told conference Milosevic agree study propos.

The output of step 7 is then inserted and stored in an inverted file that lists the index entries and an indication of their position and frequency of occurrence. The specific nature of the index entries, however, will vary based on the decision in Step 4 concerning what constitutes an "indexable term." More sophisticated document processors will have phrase recognizers, as well as Named Entity recognizers and Categorizers, to insure index entries such as Milosevic are tagged as a Person and entries such as Yugoslavia and Serbia as Countries.

Step 8: Term weight assignment 

Weights are assigned to terms in the index file. The simplest of search engines just assign a binary weight: 1 for presence and 0 for absence. The more sophisticated the search engine, the more complex the weighting scheme. Measuring the frequency of occurrence of a term in the document creates more sophisticated weighting, with length-normalization of frequencies still more sophisticated. Extensive experience in information retrieval research over many years has clearly demonstrated that the optimal weighting comes from use of "tf/idf." This algorithm measures the frequency of occurrence of each term within a document. Then it compares that frequency against the frequency of occurrence in the entire database.

Not all terms are good "discriminators" — that is, all terms do not single out one document from another very well. A simple example would be the word "the." This word appears in too many documents to help distinguish one from another. A less obvious example would be the word

"antibiotic." In a sports database when we compare each document to the database as a whole, the term "antibiotic" would probably be a good discriminator among documents, and therefore would be assigned a high weight. Conversely, in a database devoted to health or medicine, "antibiotic" would probably be a poor discriminator, since it occurs very often. The TF/IDF weighting scheme assigns higher weights to those terms that really distinguish one document from the others.

Query processing has seven possible steps, though a system can cut these steps short and proceed to match the query to the inverted file at any of a number of places during the processing. Document processing shares many steps with query processing. More steps and more documents make the process more expensive for processing in terms of computational resources and responsiveness. However, the longer the wait for results, the higher the quality of results. Thus, search system designers must choose what is most important to their users — time or quality. Publicly available search engines usually choose time over very high quality, having too many documents to search against.

The steps in query processing are as follows (with the option to stop processing and start matching indicated as "Matcher"):

∗Tokenize query terms.

Recognize query terms vs. special operators.

————————> Matcher

∗Delete stop words.

∗Stem words.

∗Create query representation.

————————> Matcher

∗Expand query terms.

∗Compute weights.

 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --> Matcher

Step 1: Tokenizing 

As soon as a user inputs a query, the search engine  -- whether a keyword-based system or a full natural language processing (NLP) system  -- must tokenize the query stream, i.e., break it down into understandable segments. Usually a token is defined as an alpha-numeric string that occurs between white space and/or punctuation.

Step 2: Parsing 

Since users may employ special operators in their query, including Boolean, adjacency, or proximity operators, the system needs to parse the query first into query terms and operators. These operators may occur in the form of reserved punctuation (e.g., quotation marks) or reserved terms in specialized format (e.g., AND, OR). In the case of an NLP system, the query processor will recognize the operators implicitly in the language used no matter how the operators might be expressed (e.g., prepositions, conjunctions, ordering).

At this point, a search engine may take the list of query terms and search them against the inverted file. In fact, this is the point at which the majority of publicly available search engines perform the search.

Steps 3 and 4: Stop list and stemming 

Some search engines will go further and stop-list and stem the query, similar to the processes described above in the Document Processor section. The stop list might also contain words from commonly occurring querying phrases, such as, "I'd like information about." However, since most publicly available search engines encourage very short queries, as evidenced in the size of query window provided, the engines may drop these two steps.

Step 5: Creating the query 

How each particular search engine creates a query representation depends on how the system does its matching. If a statistically based matcher is used, then the query must match the statistical representations of the documents in the system. Good statistical queries should contain many synonyms and other terms in order to create a full representation. If a Boolean matcher is utilized, then the system must create logical sets of the terms connected by AND, OR, or NOT.

An NLP system will recognize single terms, phrases, and Named Entities. If it uses any Boolean logic, it will also recognize the logical operators from Step 2 and create a representation containing logical sets of the terms to be AND'd, OR'd, or NOT'd.

At this point, a search engine may take the query representation and perform the search against the inverted file. More advanced search engines may take two further steps.

Step 6: Query expansion 

Since users of search engines usually include only a single statement of their information needs in a query, it becomes highly probable that the information they need may be expressed using synonyms, rather than the exact query terms, in the documents which the search engine searches against. Therefore, more sophisticated systems may expand the query into all possible synonymous terms and perhaps even broader and narrower terms.

This process approaches what search intermediaries did for end users in the earlier days of commercial search systems. Back then, intermediaries might have used the same controlled vocabulary or thesaurus used by the indexers who assigned subject descriptors to documents. Today, resources such as WordNet are generally available, or specialized expansion facilities may take the initial query and enlarge it by adding associated vocabulary.

Step 7: Query term weighting (assuming more than one query term)

The final step in query processing involves computing weights for the terms in the query. Sometimes the user controls this step by indicating either how much to weight each term or simply which term or concept in the query matters most and must appear in each retrieved document to ensure relevance.

Leaving the weighting up to the user is not common, because research has shown that users are not particularly good at determining the relative importance of terms in their queries. They can't make this determination for several reasons. First, they don't know what else exists in the database, and document terms are weighted by being compared to the database as a whole. Second, most users seek information about an unfamiliar subject, so they may not know the correct terminology.

Few search engines implement system-based query weighting, but some do an implicit weighting by treating the first term(s) in a query as having higher significance. The engines use this information to provide a list of documents/pages to the user.

After this final step, the expanded, weighted query is searched against the inverted file of documents.

Search and Matching Function

How systems carry out their search and matching functions differs according to which theoretical model of information retrieval underlies the system's design philosophy. Since making the distinctions between these models goes far beyond the goals of this article, we will only make some broad generalizations in the following description of the search and matching function.

Searching the inverted file for documents meeting the query requirements, referred to simply as "matching," is typically a standard binary search, no matter whether the search ends after the first two, five, or all seven steps of query processing. While the computational processing required for simple, unweighted, non-Boolean query matching is far simpler than when the model is an NLP-based query within a weighted, Boolean model, it also follows that the simpler the document representation, the query representation, and the matching algorithm, the less relevant the results, except for very simple queries, such as one-word, non-ambiguous queries seeking the most generally known information.

Having determined which subset of documents or pages matches the query requirements to some degree, a similarity score is computed between the query and each document/page based on the scoring algorithm used by the system. Scoring algorithms rankings are based on the presence/absence of query term(s), term frequency, tf/idf, Boolean logic fulfillment, or query term weights. Some search engines use scoring algorithms not based on document contents, but rather, on relations among documents or past retrieval history of documents/pages.

After computing the similarity of each document in the subset of documents, the system presents an ordered list to the user. The sophistication of the ordering of the documents again depends on the model the system uses, as well as the richness of the document and query weighting mechanisms. For example, search engines that only require the presence of any alpha-numeric string from the query occurring anywhere, in any order, in a document would produce a very different ranking than one by a search engine that performed linguistically correct phrasing for both document and query representation and that utilized the proven tf/idf weighting scheme.

However the search engine determines rank, the ranked results list goes to the user, who can then simply click and follow the system's internal pointers to the selected document/page.

More sophisticated systems will go even further at this stage and allow the user to provide some relevance feedback or to modify their query based on the results they have seen. If either of these are available, the system will then adjust its query representation to reflect this value-added feedback and re-run the search with the improved query to produce either a new set of documents or a simple reranking of documents from the initial search.

We have discussed how search engines work, but what features of a query make for good matches? Let's look at the key features and consider some pros and cons of their utility in helping to retrieve a good representation of documents/pages.

Term frequency: How frequently a query term appears in a document is one of the most obvious ways of determining a document's relevance to a query. While most often true, several situations can undermine this premise. First, many words have multiple meanings — they are polysemous. Think of words like "pool" or "fire." Many of the non-relevant documents presented to users result from matching the right word, but with the wrong meaning.

Also, in a collection of documents in a particular domain, such as education, common query terms such as "education" or "teaching" are so common and occur so frequently that an engine's ability to distinguish the relevant from the non-relevant in a collection declines sharply. Search engines that don't use a tf/idf weighting algorithm do not appropriately down-weight the overly frequent terms, nor are higher weights assigned to appropriate distinguishing (and less frequently-occurring) terms, e.g., "earlychildhood."

Location of terms: Many search engines give preference to words found in the title or lead paragraph or in the meta data of a document. Some studies show that the location — in which a term occurs in a document or on a page — indicates its significance to the document. Terms occurring in the title of a document or page that match a query term are therefore frequently weighted more heavily than terms occurring in the body of the document. Similarly, query terms occurring in section headings or the first paragraph of a document may be more likely to be relevant.

those referred to by many other pages, or have a high number of "in-links"

Popularity: Google and several other search engines add popularity to link analysis to help determine the relevance or value of pages. Popularity utilizes data on the frequency with which a page is chosen by all users as a means of predicting relevance. While popularity is a good indicator at times, it assumes that the underlying information need remains the same.

Date of Publication: Some search engines assume that the more recent the information is, the more likely that it will be useful or relevant to the user. The engines therefore present results beginning with the most recent to the less current.

Length: While length per se does not necessarily predict relevance, it is a factor when used to compute the relative merit of similar pages. So, in a choice between two documents both containing the same query terms, the document that contains a proportionately higher occurrence of the term relative to the length of the document is assumed more likely to be relevant.

Proximity of query terms: When the terms in a query occur near to each other within a document, it is more likely that the document is relevant to the query than if the terms occur at greater distance. While some search engines do not recognize phrases per se in queries, some search engines clearly rank documents in results higher if the query terms occur adjacent to one another or in closer proximity, as compared to documents in which the terms occur at a distance.

Proper nouns sometimes have higher weights, since so many searches are performed on people, places, or things. While this may be useful, if the search engine assumes that you are searching for a name instead of the same word as a normal everyday term, then the search results may be peculiarly skewed. Imagine getting information on "Madonna," the rock star, when you were looking for pictures of Madonnas for an art history class.

Summary

Now that we have covered how a search engine works, we can discuss methods to take advantage of them. Lets start with content. As you saw in the above pages, search engines are simple test parsers. They take a series of words and try to reduce them to their core meaning. They can't understand text, nor do they have the capability of discerning between grammatically correct text and complete gibberish. This of course will change over time as search engines evolve and the cost of hardware falls, but we black hats will evolve as well always aiming to stay at least one step ahead. Lets discuss the basics of generating content as well as some software used to do so, but first, we need to understand duplicate content. A widely passed around myth on web master forums is that duplicate content is viewed by search engines as a percentage. As long as you stay below the threshold, you pass by penalty free. It's a nice thought, it's just too bad that it is completely wrong.

Duplicate Content

I’ve read seemingly hundreds of forum posts discussing duplicate content, none of which gave the full picture, leaving me with more questions than answers. I decided to spend some time doing research to find out exactly what goes on behind the scenes. Here is what I have discovered.

Most people are under the assumption that duplicate content is looked at on the page level when in fact it is far more complex than that. Simply saying that “by changing 25 percent of the text on a page it is no longer duplicate content” is not a true or accurate statement. Lets examine why that is.

To gain some understanding we need to take a look at the k-shingle algorithm that may or may not be in use by the major search engines (my money is that it is in use). I’ve seen the following used as an example so lets use it here as well.

Let’s suppose that you have a page that contains the following text:

The swift brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Before we get to this point the search engine has already stripped all tags and HTML from the page leaving just this plain text behind for us to take a look at.

The shingling algorithm essentially finds word groups within a body of text in order to determine the uniqueness of the text. The first thing they do is strip out all stop words like and, the, of, to. They also strip out all fill words, leaving us only with action words which are considered the core of the content. Once this is done the following “shingles” are created from the above text. (I'm going to include the stop words for simplicity)

The swift brown fox swift brown fox jumped brown fox jumped over fox jumped over the jumped over the lazy over the lazy dog

These are essentially like unique fingerprints that identify this block of text. The search engine can now compare this “fingerprint” to other pages in an attempt to find duplicate content. As duplicates are found a “duplicate content” score is assigned to the page. If too many “fingerprints” match other documents the score becomes high enough that the search engines flag the page as duplicate content thus sending it to supplemental hell or worse deleting it from their index completely.

 My old lady swears that she saw the lazy dog jump over the swift brown fox.

The above gives us the following shingles:

my old lady swears old lady swears that lady swears that she swears that she saw that she saw the she saw the lazy saw the lazy dog the lazy dog jump lazy dog jump over dog jump over the jump over the swift over the swift brown the swift brown fox

Comparing these two sets of shingles we can see that only one matches (”the swift brown fox“). Thus it is unlikely that these two documents are duplicates of one another. No one but Google knows what the percentage match must be for these two documents to be considered duplicates, but some thorough testing would sure narrow it down ;).

So what can we take away from the above examples? First and foremost we quickly begin to realize that duplicate content is far more difficult than saying “document A and document B are 50 percent similar”. Second we can see that people adding “stop words” and “filler words” to avoid duplicate content are largely wasting their time. It’s the “action” words that should be the focus. Changing action words without altering the meaning of a body of text may very well be enough to get past these algorithms. Then again there may be other mechanisms at work that we can’t yet see rendering that impossible as well. I suggest experimenting and finding what works for you in your situation.

The last paragraph here is the real important part when generating content. You can't simply add generic stop words here and there and expect to fool anyone. Remember, we're dealing with a computer algorithm here, not some supernatural power. Everything you do should be from the standpoint of a scientist. Think through every decision using logic and reasoning. There is no magic involved in SEO, just raw data and numbers. Always split test and perform controlled experiments.

Now we understand how a search engine parses documents on the web,  we also understand the intricacies of duplicate content and what it takes to avoid it. Now it is  time to check out some basic content generation techniques.

One of the more commonly used text spinners is known as Markov. Markov isn't actually intended for content generation, it's actually something called a Markov Chain which was developed by mathematician Andrey Markov. The algorithm takes each word in a body of content and changes the order based on the algorithm. This produces largely unique text, but it's also typically VERY unreadable. The quality of the output really depends on the quality of the input. The other issue with Markov is the fact that it will likely never pass a human review for readability. If you don't shuffle the Markov chains enough you also run into duplicate content issues because of the nature of shingling as discussed earlier.  Some people may be able to get around this by replacing words in the content with synonyms.  I personally stopped using Markov back in 2006 or 2007 after developing my own proprietary content engine. Some popular software that uses Markov chains include  RSSGM and YAGC both of which are pretty old and outdated at this point. They are worth taking a look at just to understand the fundamentals, but there are FAR better packages out there.

So, we've talked about the old methods of doing things, but this isn't 1999, you can't fool the search engines by simply repeating a keyword over and over in the body of your pages (I wish it were still that easy).  So what works today?  Now and in the future, LSI is becoming more and more important. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It sounds complicated, but it really isn't. LSI is basically just a process by which a search engine can infer the meaning of a page based on the content of that page. For example, lets say they index a page and find words like atomic bomb, Manhattan Project, Germany, and Theory of Relativity. The idea is that the search engine can process those words, find relational data and determine that the page is about Albert Einstein. So, ranking for a keyword phrase is no longer as simple as having content that talks about and repeats the target keyword phrase over and over like the good old days. Now we need to make sure we have other key phrases that the search engine thinks are related to the main key phrase.

So if Markov is easy to detect and LSI is starting to become more important, which software works, and which doesn't?

Fantomaster Shadowmaker: This is probably one of the oldest and most commonly known high end cloaking packages being sold. It's also one of the most out of date. For $3,000.00 you basically get a clunky outdated interface for slowly building  HTML pages. I know, I'm being harsh, but I was really let down by this software. The content engine doesn't do anything to address LSI. It simply splices unrelated sentences together from random sources while tossing in your keyword randomly. Unless things change drastically I would avoid this one.

SEC (Search Engine Cloaker): 

Another well known paid script. This one is of good quality and with work does provide results. The content engine is mostly manual making you build sentences which are then mixed together for your content. If you understand SEO and have the time to dedicate to creating the content, the pages built last a long time. I do have two complaints. The software is SLOW. It takes days just to setup a few decent pages. That in itself isn't very black hat. Remember, we're lazy! The other gripe is the ip cloaking. Their ip list is terribly out of date only containing a couple thousand ip's as of this writing.

SSEC or Simplified Search Engine Content: This is one of the best IP delivery systems on the market. Their ip list is updated daily and contains close to 30,000 ip's. The member only forums are the best in the industry. The subscription is worth it just for the information contained there. The content engine is also top notch. It's flexible, so you can chose to use their proprietary scraped content system which automatically scrapes search engines for your content, or you can use custom content similar in fashion to SEC above, but faster. You can also mix and match the content sources giving you the ultimate in control. This is the only software as of this writing that takes LSI into account directly from within the content engine.  This is also the fastest page builder I have come across. You can easily put together several thousand sites each with hundreds of pages of content in just a few hours. Support is top notch, and the knowledgeable staff really knows what they are talking about. This one gets a gold star from me.

BlogSolution: 

Sold as an automated blog builder, BlogSolution falls short in almost every important area. The blogs created are not wordpress blogs, but rather a proprietary blog software specifically written for BlogSolution. This “feature” means your blogs stand out like a sore thumb in the eyes of the search engines. They don't blend in at all leaving footprints all over the place. The licensing limits you to 100 blogs which basically means you can't build enough to make any decent amount of money. The content engine is a joke as well using rss feeds and leaving you with a bunch of easy to detect duplicate content blogs that rank for nothing.

Blog Cloaker: 

Another solid offering from the guys that developed SSEC. This is the natural evolution of that software. This mass site builder is based around wordpress blogs. This software is the best in the industry hands down. The interface has the feel of a system developed by real professionals. You have the same content options seen in SSEC, but with several different redirection types including header redirection, JavaScript, meta refresh, and even iframe. This again is an ip cloaking solution with the same industry leading ip list as SSEC. The monthly subscription may seem daunting at first, but the price of admission is worth every penny if you are serious about making money in this industry. It literally does not get any better than this.

Cloaking

So what is cloaking? Cloaking is simply showing different content to different people based on different criteria. Cloaking automatically gets a bad reputation, but that is based mostly on ignorance of how it works. There are many legitimate reasons to Cloak pages. In fact, even Google cloaks. Have you ever visited a web site with your cell phone and been automatically directed to the mobile version of the site? Guess what, that's cloaking. How about web pages that automatically show you information based on your location? Guess what, that's cloaking. So, based on that, we can break cloaking down into two main categories, user agent cloaking and ip based cloaking.

User Agent cloaking is simply a method of showing different pages or different content to visitors based on the user agent string they visit the site with. A user agent is simply an identifier that every web browser and search engine spider sends to a web server when they connect to a page. Above we used the example of a mobile phone. A Nokia cell phone for example will have a user agent similar to:  UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; [en]; Series60/3.0 NokiaE60/4.06.0) AppleWebKit/413 ( KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/ 413

Knowing this, we can tell the difference between a mobile phone visiting our page and a regular visitor viewing our page with Internet Explorer or Firefox for example. We can then write a script that will show different information to those users based on their user agent.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, it works for basic things like mobile and non mobile versions of pages, but it's also very easy to detect, fool, and circumvent. Firefox for example has a handy plug-in that allows you to change your user agent string to anything you want. Using that plug-in I can make the script think that I am a Google search engine bot, thus rendering your cloaking completely useless. So, what else can we do if user agents are so easy to spoof?

IP Cloaking

Every visitor to your web site must first establish a connection with an ip address. These ip addresses resolve to dns servers which in turn identify the origin of that visitor. Every search engine crawler must identify itself with a unique signature viewable by reverse dns lookup. This means we have a sure fire method for identifying and cloaking based on ip address. This also means that we don't rely on the user agent at all, so there is no way to circumvent ip based cloaking (although some caution must be taken as we will discuss). The most difficult part of ip cloaking is compiling a list of known search engine ip's. Luckily software like Blog Cloaker and SSEC already does this for us. Once we have that information, we can then show different pages to different users based on the ip they visit our page with. For example, I can show a search engine bot a keyword targeted page full of key phrases related to what I want to rank for. When a human visits that same page I can show an ad, or an affiliate product so I can make some money. See the power and potential here?

So how can we detect ip cloaking? Every major search engine maintains a cache of the pages it indexes. This cache is going to contain the page as the search engine bot saw it at indexing time. This means your competition can view your cloaked page by clicking on the cache in the SERPS. That's ok, it's easy to get around that. The use of the meta tag noarchive in your pages forces the search engines to show no cached copy of your page in the search results, so you avoid snooping web masters. The only other method of detection involves ip spoofing, but that is a very difficult and time consuming thing to pull of. Basically you configure a computer to act as if it is using one of Google's ip's when it visits a page. This would allow you to connect as though you were a search engine bot, but the problem here is that the data for the page would be sent to the ip you are spoofing which isn't on your computer, so you are still out of luck.

The lesson here? If you are serious about this, use ip cloaking. It is very difficult to detect and by far the most solid option.

Link Building

As we discussed earlier, Black Hats are Basically White Hats, only lazy! As  we build pages, we also need links to get those pages to rank. Lets discuss some common and not so common methods for doing so.

Blog ping: This one is quite old, but still widely used. Blog indexing services setup a protocol in which a web site can send a ping whenever new pages are added to a blog. They can then send over a bot that grabs the page content for indexing and searching,  or simply to add as a link in their blog directory. Black Hats exploit this by writing scripts that send out massive numbers of pings to various services in order to entice bots to crawl their pages. This method certainly drives the bots, but in the last couple years it has lost most of its power as far as getting pages to rank.

Trackback: Another method of communication used by blogs, trackbacks are basically a method in which one blog can tell another blog that it has posted something related to or in response to an existing blog post. As a black hat, we see that as an opportunity to inject links to thousands of our own pages by automating the process and sending out trackbacks to as many blogs as we can. Most blogs these days have software in place that greatly limits or even eliminates trackback spam, but it's still a viable tool.

EDU links: A couple years ago Black Hats noticed an odd trend. Universities and government agencies with very high ranking web sites often times have very old message boards they have long forgotten about, but that still have public access. We took advantage of that by posting millions of links to our pages on these abandoned sites. This gave a HUGE boost to rankings and made some very lucky Viagra spammers millions of dollars. The effectiveness of this approach has diminished over time.

Forums and Guest books: The internet contains millions of forums and guest books all ripe for the picking. While most forums are heavily moderated (at least the active ones), that still leaves you with thousands in which you can drop links where no one will likely notice or even care. We're talking about abandoned forums, old guest books, etc. Now, you can get links dropped on active forums as well, but it takes some more creativity. Putting up a post related to the topic on the forum and dropping your link In the BB code for a smiley for example. Software packages like Xrumer made this a VERY popular way to gather back links. So much so that most forums have methods in place to detect and reject these types of links. Some people still use them and are still successful.

Link Networks:  Also known as link farms, these have been popular for years. Most are very simplistic in nature. Page A links to page B, page B links to page C, then back to A. These are pretty easy to detect because of the limited range of ip's involved. It doesn't take much processing to figure out that there are only a few people involved with all of the links. So, the key here is to have a very diverse pool of links. Take a look at Link Exchange for example. They have over 300 servers all over the world with thousands of ip's, so it would be almost impossible to detect. A search engine would have to discount links completely in order to filter these links out.

We now have a solid understanding of cloaking, how a search engine works, content generation, software to avoid, software that is pure gold and even link building strategies. So how do you pull all of it together to make some money?

he traffic you send it. You load up your money keyword list, setup a template with your ads or offers, then send all of your doorway/cloaked traffic to the index page. The Landing Page Builder shows the best possible page with ads based on what the incoming user searched for. Couldn't be easier, and it automates the difficult tasks we all hate.

Affiliate Marketing: We all know what an affiliate program is. There are literally tens of thousands of affiliate programs with millions of products to sell. The most difficult part of affiliate marketing is getting well qualified targeted traffic. That again is where good software and cloaking comes into play. Some networks and affiliates allow direct linking. Direct Linking is where you setup your cloaked pages with all of your product keywords, then redirect straight to the merchant or affiliates sales page. This often results in the highest conversion rates, but as I said, some affiliates don't allow Direct Linking. So, again, that's where Landing Pages come in. Either building your own (which we are far too lazy to do), or by using something like Landing Page Builder which automates everything for us. Landing pages give us a place to send and clean our traffic, they also prequalify the buyer and make sure the quality of the traffic sent to the affiliate is as high as possible. After all, we want to make money, but we also want to keep a strong relationship with the affiliate so we can get paid.

I received literally hundreds of emails asking for more information and more insight into how I handle link building for my own websites and blogs. Based on the information you’ve read so far, you understand the importance of slow and steady link building. In fact, link-building cowboys are out there every day trying to get hundreds or thousands of links to their sites through automated services and shortcuts only to find that Google slaps them with a big penalty— setting their SEO back weeks or even months.

I’ve experimented with tons of paid services to support my search engine optimization efforts. Nine times out of ten, they either can’t deliver what they promise or worse yet, have a negative impact on search results (ex: website submission services).  

In this section, I’m going to reveal the exact link-building science I’ve applied to achieve number one rankings for many of my websites and blogs. And, it all begins with a very simple spreadsheet:

From my perspective, link building is a monthly process. Build links too quickly and you’ll be penalized or perhaps achieve top rankings for only a short while (e.g., press releases). Build links too slowly and your competition may always outrank you. Striking the perfect balance takes experience and experimentation. I’ve spent a decade creating a link-building process that can give you the results you’re looking for. The only variable is the competitiveness of your niche. I recently completed an SEO job for a wellknown trucking company who wanted top rankings for a particular keyword phrase. This competitive phrase got nearly thirty thousand searches a month and had some very stiff competition. Although the company knew it would take a long time to achieve results, they understood the value in achieving a top ranking for this term. We applied the necessary SEO techniques and got the result they were looking for—but it took almost nine months. This is because the term was very competitive and other sites that were in the top positions had been there for a very long time. This is why doing the keyword research up-front, to find less competitive terms, is so important.  

Once you have developed a website or blog, identified the keyword phrase you want to rank well for, and implemented on-page optimization, the next step is to have a link-building plan. Start your link building by developing a comprehensive list of sites linking into the top few results for the keyword phrase you’re targeting. Systematically work through all those links and try to acquire links back to your site from each of them. Once your list has been exhausted, it’s time for a disciplined link-building program.

The best way to manage your activity is by creating a spreadsheet that allows you to track your activity. The previous image is a summary level but you should also create tabs on your spreadsheet that capture the sites you use for submission. This allows you to come back to authoritative sites on a monthly basis and reuse them for link submissions. Your plan should be as follows:

Each article should include a link or two back to your site in the author section and possibly in the article itself. Consider using tools to help with this initiative. Use a spinner to create unique versions of your article and distribution resources. I usually have one or two articles per site queued up, spun, and ready to go at the beginning of each month. I distribute these articles at a pace of around fifty per day to potential directories and sites using semi-automated article distribution tools.

 

Directory submissions are another great way to produce one-way links to your websites and blogs. Pace your submission, but don’t worry about being too aggressive. Even if you submit to say twenty-five to fifty directories in a given month, most will take time to post your link, if at all. There is only a small success rate unless paying for a directory listing. Therefore, feel free to submit to a number of directories during the course of a month. Over time it will appear as though you are receiving a good number of directory listing confirmations on a regular basis.

Each month, focus on making quality submissions to “do follow” blogs in your niche. If you are unable to find do follow blogs in your niche, focus on high PR blogs of any kind. By taking the time to read posts and make valueadded comments in the proper way, you can drive quality links to your site. I recommend no more than ten to twenty quality blog posts in a given month. Assuming you have a list of ten quality blogs each month, making a couple of posts on each should be easy. This also keeps things manageable. With most blogs there is moderation. As a result, your comments may take some time to appear live or may be rejected. Stay the course and you’ll find more and more of your comments being accepted.

As discussed previously, forum submissions are a great resource for one-way links. Keep in mind that you may need to make a minimum of ten posts before you are allowed to display your signature including links back to your website.

Begin to register and cultivate a number of forums that you can go back to on a monthly basis to add content and display your signature. I suggest anywhere around twenty forum posts per month. The reason is that forum posting, much like blog posting, takes time. If you’re aggressive you could certainly use forum posting much more. I’d shoot for around fifty posts in a month. This is definitely one of those tasks I’d consider outsourcing once you’ve established yourself on some targeted forums for your niche.

Each month I use a freelancer to post on high-profile websites. Although Angela’s packet offers around thirty potential links each month, invariably the list boils down to around twenty or so sites where you can easily place a one-way link back to your website. I use this list for all of the sites I’m optimizing and have even added my own list of high-profile sites that I revisit monthly. Again, if just starting out, try for about ten high-PR profile submissions for your site each month. If more advanced and you have supplemented the sites provided on Angela’s list, you can post up to fifty over the course of a month. Once you’ve posted your link for a particular site on one of the suggested profile sites, do not post again until the following month. Duplicate links created at the same time won’t help you and in fact may hurt your link-building efforts.  

Each month you should be distributing one press release per website. Much like our article submission process, I like to write a release of around 350 words and put it into my spinner. Then, I make submissions to my list of top five free PR sites (e.g., Pr-inside, Free-Press-Release.com, PRlog.org, etc.). Once you have submitted to a press release distribution site, the news is distributed to hundreds of additional websites, news sites, and blogs.

Social media is an important resource for communicating with others and posting links to your websites and blogs. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the like, are common social media sites that you should be registered for and posting to on a regular basis. Include a link to your site in actual social media posts each month. The links in your profile are what matter most, but additional links on your “Wall” and in your “Tweets” can build link equity.  

I used to have video submissions and social media tied together for link-building purposes, and to a large extent, they are connected. YouTube, a video hosting site, is really one of today’s largest social media sites. My goal is to produce one new video every month and post on video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler. Videos are commonplace and are easy to distribute. Additionally, universal search results are picking up and display videos in search result listings. Always make sure to include a link to your site in the beginning of your video’s description when submitting to video sites.

The concept of bookmarking is very powerful and one I’ve come to rely on for creating and managing inbound links across public websites. There are so many social bookmarking sites that you can do about twenty-five social bookmarks per month for a year and never hit the same site twice. In the social bookmarking section I mentioned some resources for helping with your social bookmarking. Choose a strategy and post to social bookmarking sites on a monthly basis. I recommend not only bookmarking your home page URL but top level pages too. This is seen as less “spammy” and gives you many more pages to work with, avoiding duplicate bookmarks. Always use your keywords in the bookmarking link.

There you have it. This is the exact schedule, with minor tweaks from time to time, that I use on a monthly basis to optimize my own websites and blogs. I suggest that you spend the first few month of your SEO campaign working through each of the submission types on your own. Once you have a strong understanding and foundation for your link-building efforts, find an outsource partner that can help you with different aspects of the process. Before you know it, you’ll be able to reduce the time you spend with repetitive tasks and focus on your next big search engine optimization project!

 

Increasing your ranking on Google and other search engines isn’t complex, but it does take effort. If you want to increase your website ranking on search engine results pages, begin by implementing the on-page optimization and the off-page optimization techniques you’ve learned in this book.

One question I seem to get quite often is, “How long does it take?” This is a difficult question to answer because it’s relative. If you’re trying to optimize for a keyword phrase like “eating blueberries on a Sunday afternoon,” it will happen quickly, requiring simple on-page optimization and just a few articles with links back to your website.

On the other hand, if you are trying to optimize for a competitive term, and the top-ranked website has hundreds of incoming links, it can take a number of months to reach number one on Google. I can tell you from experience that more often than not, you’ll put in a lot of effort and it will appear as nothing is happening or only small shifts in results are occurring. But stay focused. All of a sudden…wham! Your site will jump up in the search results unexpectedly. Stay the course and I guarantee you’ll see results. Many fail because they give up too soon.

Regardless of where you’re starting from, the key is persistence. These are the same techniques I’ve used to achieve top positions on Google for almost every keyword and keyword phrase that is important to my websites. Visualize your goal and take deliberate steps toward improving your search engine result placements daily and before long you will be exactly where you want to be— dominating the world’s largest search engine.  

To simplify your journey toward the number one position on Google, don’t hesitate to use online effective SEO tools and resources and continue learning. Although search tools, including outsourcing, aren’t required for achieving top search engine placement, they can help you reach your goal more quickly than manually implementing particular SEO techniques. Follow the strategies defined in this book; they’ve been proven effective by many individuals who have already begun using these techniques. I wish you the best of luck on your SEO journey. See you at the top and don’t forget to always keep it simple!

See My Previous Posts

As I mentioned in the introduction, there are essentially two parts to any SEO effort: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. Off-page optimization is even more powerful than on-page optimization when it comes to increasing your search engine results on Google. In my experience, about 85 percent of your results are directly correlated to off-page optimization.

In fact, after years of consulting for large companies, I’ve proven that it’s possible to achieve positive results without actually applying on-page optimization if using off-page techniques properly. However, going down the path of skipping on-page optimization is a difficult one. Achieving the results you want will take much longer and require a lot more work. Always begin your search engine optimization with on-page optimization to expedite results.

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of starting with on-page optimization, it’s time to focus on the next step of any effective SEO campaign—off-page optimization.

In its simplest form, off-page optimization can be referred to as increasing a website’s popularity. This popularity is defined by the number and types of websites that link to a given website or URL. I also like to think of off-page optimization as what you do on the Internet, not directly on your website, to improve search engine result placements.

The best part of off-page optimization is that there are a handful of proven techniques you can start using today to improve your SERPs on the world’s largest search engine.  

Off-page optimization is the most important SEO strategy for those seeking number one placement on Google. The fastest and most effective way to achieve this goal is by developing quality links to your website. When I refer to “quality,” I’m referring to links from sites that:  

•    Have an equivalent or higher Google PR than your site

•    Include similar content to your web page

•    Use related meta tags

•    Come from diverse sources •  Have a large number of quality sites linking to them!

Even more important than the what (quality websites) is the how. Specifically, how these quality websites link to you is an essential key to Google dominance.

Before going any further, let me explain the various link types. There are really only three types of links you need to know about: one-way links, reciprocal links, and three-way links.

•     One-way links. These are links from a website that is not your own. Also referred to as third-party websites, these sites place a link from one or more of their web pages to your website.

Google values one-way links above all else. One-way links are incredibly powerful (if they’re quality links) because you are receiving a vote from an independent third party.

•     Reciprocal links. When you exchange links with another website, commonly referred to as swapping links, you’re providing a link to their site (from your own) in exchange for a link from their website to yours. Reciprocal links are valuable, but not as valuable as one-way links.

•     Three-way links. Three-way linking is when you partner with another website (site B) and provide a link from your site

(site A) to their site. In turn, they provide a link from another site they own (site C) back to your site.

Now that you know the importance of links, the first question you must ask is where you should be getting links from. There are a variety of strategies to apply here.  

The most effective way to identify the “right” sites to get links from should be based on who is linking to your competition, which is defined by who outranks you on Google for your identified search term. This is a very important strategy and one that is frequently overlooked. You should be evaluating who links to the number one search result in Google for the keywords or keyword phrases you’re optimizing for and try to acquire links from the same websites.  

If you get the same sites to link to your site in the right way, and you’ve optimized your site properly, in time you will outrank your competition on Google for the same given keyword phrase.

Many methods help you determine which sites are linking to the number one result in Google for the keyword phrase you’re targeting. Begin by identifying which site is in the first position for your search term. You can do this by visiting Google and typing in your search term. Record the URL of the number one search result. Once you’ve identified this site, do one of the following:  

•           Google search. Go to Google.com and type in the following: Link: www.rsplatform.net and press the return key. Then, replace the phrase, “rsplatform” with the name of the site you’ve identified as having the number one position on Google for your search term. 

The result will be a series of sites linking to your competitor. The only downside to this method is that you won’t know which sites are more important than others (e.g., the number of links linking into those sites, Google PR, keyword content on pages, etc.), but it will certainly identify the sites you need to target for link-building purposes.

•           Alexa. Go to http://www.Alexa.com and type in the name of the site you’re researching. Alexa.com is a tool used to measure the popularity of sites based on the browsing activity of those who have downloaded the Alexa toolbar. Because not everyone uses the Alexa toolbar, the information is only directionally correct but provides a reasonable starting point as well as additional websites you can target with your link-building campaign.

Once you get the resultant websites, you’ll see a number of options listed for each one. To the right of your competitor’s website thumbnail image, click Sites Linking In. This option returns a list of sites that Alexa has identified as linking into the site you’re researching. Use this list to target sites for link building.

•           Online SEO tools. I have found that using online marketing tools to automatically generate a list of sites linking into your competitor’s website, as well as link details such as Google PR, link text, page title, and so on, can be the most effective way to generate a list of targeted sites for your link-development efforts.

I’ve personally bought and used about a dozen different products to help me keep an eye on my competition and, more importantly build an effective linking campaign. I regularly use SEO software because in less than thirty seconds, I know exactly which sites are linking to the number one positioned website for my target phrase and receive information that helps me prioritize my efforts like the Page Rank of each inbound link and domain age. You can learn more about the software packages I use at mySEOmadesimiple.com but keep in mind that using online SEO tools aren’t always necessary. You can often accomplish the same outcome without purchasing SEO software. However, these tools save you a significant amount of effort, reducing the time required for acquiring in-depth link-building information.

You can use whatever SEO or link analysis software you want as long as it provides you a list of sites linking into your competitors and a way to prioritize that list. If you start to develop links from the highest quality sites first, your climb to the number one spot on Google will happen that much faster.  

•           Identify authority websites. Authority websites are those sites linking to three or more of your competitors. If you don’t have a SEO tool at your disposal, you can accomplish this manually using the following method:  

1.  Search for competitive sites by visiting Google and searching for your most important search term.  

2.  Create a spreadsheet of the top one hundred sites “linking in” to each of your top five competitors (Microsoft Excel is a good tool for this).

3.  Sort alphabetically.

4.  While looking at the list see if any of the website URLs are duplicated across your list or use the “find” function. If the site appears two or more times, highlight it. 5. Once you’ve developed your list of authoritative sites, visit each one to determine how your competitors are listed and how you can acquire a link to your website.

How to Get Links to Your Website

As I mentioned earlier, building links to your website is the most important aspect of improving your Google search results—bar none! It also provides a significant boost to improving your search engine result placements on other search engines like Yahoo! and BING.  

When I started out, I never realized just how important inbound links were to Google or how to acquire quality links to my website in the right way. As a result I spent thousands of dollars, not to mention years of trial and error, to figure out that the more quality inbound links I developed, including my keywords in the anchor text, the higher I’d get listed on Google.  

When thinking about acquiring inbound links, and those links pointing to your website from other websites, there are two key principles to keep in mind.

   

Principle #1: Quality attracts quality. When it comes to search engine optimization, if you take the time to do things right the first time, you will achieve your goal. An example of this would be the process of asking a related website for a link that includes your keyword phrase(s). If you send a form letter or brief email and ask for a link exchange, you probably won’t get it. However, if you take a few minutes to look at the website you’re targeting and identify an opportunity to deliver something of sufficient quality (content, reciprocal link, etc.) you’ll likely receive what you’re looking for.

Principle #2: Persistence pays off. As I teach you the techniques I’ve used to rank number one on Google for even the most competitive phrases, think back to this principle again and again. Persistence is the key for achieving your desired result. A great example of this is some work I was doing for an online service company. After analyzing their website and suggesting some changes, I quickly realized that my on-page optimization recommendations would never be implemented—largely due to a bureaucratic web development team and their inability to handle multiple projects simultaneously. Over time I have found this situation to be more the norm than the exception.

Despite an inability to implement my on-page suggestions, I moved forward coaching the marketing staff of this company on the off-page optimization techniques for improving Google search engine result placements. They immediately started implementing these techniques on a regular basis to help their site increase rankings for specific search terms.

Truthfully, nothing happened for about eight weeks…and then WHAM! The techniques they used for building links to their website took hold and the results were undeniable. One of the keyword phrases that was most important to them went from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the number six position—even without the benefit of on-page optimization.  

Today, everyone is looking for a quick fix. When it comes to SEO, there are a number of quick fixes out there. These concepts are often referred to as black hat techniques and more often than not, they result in getting your website banned from all the major search engines. Achieving top search engine placements is like losing weight. If you go on a starvation diet, sooner or later you’re going to gain back all the weight you’ve lost and then some.

On the other hand, change you’re eating and exercise habits slowly over time and you can create lasting health. The same principle applies here. Develop your links with a focus on quality, quantity, and diversity. Once you achieve top placements, you’re likely to stay there with little additional effort. Be persistent and you will achieve lasting results!

Let’s jump right into it. All of these off-page optimization techniques will help improve your Google SERPs through link building, the most effective search engine optimization strategy available today. The more you use these link-building techniques, the faster you’ll see results. Don’t hesitate—start using these off-page optimization techniques immediately to build quality links to your website and watch your Google search engine results start the climb to the number one position.

 

Article marketing is the practice of writing informational articles within a given subject area and distributing your articles to information-hungry websites across the web. A number of article distribution sites will distribute your articles to webmasters seeking content. This is done by registering with an article directory, adding your article to the relevant category on their site, and submitting it for review.

Once the article has been reviewed and approved, it is posted on their website for webmasters to copy and paste onto their own websites. You leverage this SEO Made Simple method by including a link back to your website in the About the Author section using the proper link text (which includes your keyword phrase[s]).

Another way to optimize your own content is to post your authored articles on your own website with reprint instructions (I suggest doing this before submitting to article directories). This allows your website browsers to repurpose your content under specific terms and conditions and search engines to recognize you as the original author—a very important step for improving search engine rankings.

Link Exchanges/Link Requests

One of the fastest ways to build links to your website, and therefore link popularity, is through reciprocal linking. As we discussed in an earlier section, there are essentially three types of links: one-way, reciprocal, and three-way. One-way links are the links you acquire that point directly to your site. We are discussing a number of methods for acquiring one-way links, such as article marketing, because they are often the most powerful type of link you can acquire. Reciprocal links are created when two websites agree to link to each other. Reciprocal links are also known as link swaps, link exchanges, and link partners. When I was first starting out in search engine optimization I used reciprocal linking to establish a number of quality links to my website.  

The challenge here is that a reciprocal link is really only valuable if the Google PR of the site that’s linking to you is greater or equal to the Google PR of your own website. That’s not to say that links from sites with a low PR don’t provide value. In fact, when you’re starting out, every inbound link with a Google PR greater than zero helps!

In the last couple of years, basic reciprocal linking has fallen out of favor. Although I don’t necessarily agree that there’s no value in a link exchange, I do believe that you need to use a combination of link-building strategies if you ever wish to achieve top search engine placements for your desired keyword phrases.

If you’re going to own and operate a website, you must take the time to submit your website to well-established website directories. There are tons of websites out there called website directories that list other websites and website details. Directory submission is a great way to generate hundreds of one-way links to your website.

Some directories may charge you to be listed in their directory of sites. This fee is often used to pay an editorial staff to review and post your listing, but it may also serve as the price of getting your link posted on a website that has an established Google PR. In essence, you’re buying page rank. The one thing to keep in mind is that Google reportedly penalizes “paid links.” As a result, you want to limit the number of links you acquire through paid directories.

Blogging provides SEO value from two distinct vantage points. By now you know about blogging and maybe even have a blog of your own. From a search engine optimization perspective, having your own blog provides a significant boost to your SEO efforts over time. I’ll also show you how to leverage other people’s blogs to build inbound links and increase your search engine rankings.

Let’s begin our review of how to use blogs for SEO purposes by talking about setting up your own blog. Although creating your own blog isn’t necessary, it does have a number of benefits that can’t be overlooked. Once you create your own blog and that blog earns a positive Google PR, you can start adding links and passing authority to any site you choose. For example, a number of years ago, I started “The Marketing Blog,” which is now ranked number one on Google for the term “Marketing Blog.” Anytime I launch a new website or want to give a client some extra link juice, I simply make a post to the third-party website. Essentially, by creating your own blog you are developing an authoritative resource you can use to pass authority and value to any site you are optimizing! This is a great long-term strategy that comes in handy when you want to quickly increase the rankings of new websites you are trying to get to the top of search result listings.

A number of years ago, after hearing about the popularity of blogs and learning about the multiple benefits of creating one, I set out to start my own blog. By doing some research, I found a number of popular websites that actually let you create and host your blog for free. What’s even better is that the process of creating your blog is incredibly fast and easy. I suppose that’s why blogging has become so popular. 

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, classify, share, and search Internet bookmarks. A number of years ago, social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, Diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz, and StumbleUpon became popular. Soon thereafter, sites like Reddit, Digg, and Newsvine began applying social bookmarking to news items, and now the concept of bookmarking is pervasive throughout the Internet. Many years later, the process of social bookmarking is alive and well. The concept itself is similar to “social media,” but doesn’t have the same level of flexibility or scope.

In simple terms, social bookmarking is a way of tagging content on the web (news, articles, web pages, etc.) for easy referencing by yourself and others who may be tagging the same content. This is very similar to using a bookmark when reading your favorite novel. The purpose is to make it easy to get back to where you left off or identify content you deem important. Social bookmarking works in much the same way. The only real difference is the social component—others can see your bookmarks and you can see theirs.  

You can use social bookmarks in a variety of ways to build inbound links to your website and, therefore, improve your overall site popularity and Google SERPs. What I personally like about social bookmarking is it’s easy to do and very similar to other optimization methods I use.  

Syndicating your own website content is a great way to provide information to your readers with little or no effort. Using an RSS feed, your updated content is delivered to individuals who have subscribed to your feed automatically and can include links back to your website and reprint instructions (remember, it’s all about the links!).  

RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standard format that can be viewed and organized through RSS software or automatically conveyed as new content on another website.

The Internet is an amazing place. If you have a question, about anything, you can usually find the answer online. This is especially true when it comes to search engine optimization, pay-per-click, and other forms of online marketing. In fact, when searching for an answer to a question via Google or any search engine, you’re bound to find a listing for a blog post or forum post. Forums are essentially large communities where similar minded people share ideas, ask questions, and answer them too.

Forums have been around a long time. In fact, if you visit www.big-boards.com, you’ll find thousands of forums listed. Many of these forums have tens of thousands of members. These communities are large and provide the type of interaction you need to answer any question on a particular topic. Forums have become so popular that I launched my own forum (Internet Marketing Forum) on my MarketingScoop.com website. You can find a link to the forum on my secret page or just Google “Internet marketing forum.”  

I actually learned about high authority profile sites by accident. In fact, if it weren’t for my need to experiment, I’d likely have overlooked this effective SEO technique and never had the opportunity to share it with you in this book.

For a time I focused a lot of my energy on affiliate marketing. Even today I make a nice residual income with niche websites where I earn a commission each time a product or service is sold. A couple of years ago I started searching for new ways to sell my own products and generate traffic to my niche websites. In short order, I stumbled upon a forum that included “special offers” from other Internet marketers. I liked the idea so much that I even added this feature to my marketing forum! One of the special offers had to do with a list of high PR websites where you could leave a link back to your website.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, it’s hard to ignore social media. It seems that every day existing social media sites are getting larger and new ones are cropping up all over the place. This popularity is driven by the viral nature of social media. You invite your friends, they invite their friends, and before you know it, the whole world is connected.

I’ve been participating in social media for a long time. A number of social media sites have come and gone over the years, but some continue to dominate the social media space. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the leading contenders. Google and other search engines are putting their social media spin on things too and it’s just a matter of time before their social networks are a large part of the mix.

Begin by creating an account. Once you register, you’ll have a number of options available to you. Click on your username and select “Account.” If you click on “Profile Setup” in the left margin, you’ll see a place to enter your URL. In addition, each time you upload a video, you can enter a description. When writing your descriptions, always start with your URL in the beginning. Doing so makes the link visible and active.  

One of the best ways to promote your video and, therefore, your link, is to tell others about it. YouTube has a subscribe option so once you learn more about YouTube and create a “channel,” you can drive your visitors directly to your videos. Once there, visitors can take advantage of a number of rating options. You can also customize your channel with various features including comments, subscribers, and so on.

YouTube videos are ranked by the number of subscribers, “Likes,” and comments. Whenever you produce a video, send a link to your list, post a link to the video on your site, and encourage users to comment. This can help your ranking in Youtube and may encourage third-party websites to embed the video directly into their content. Sharing and embedding videos means more links to the video itself, which in turn creates more link juice. Over time the number and quality of links pointing to your site, through your Youtube link, gain authority which helps your rankings.

If you’ve never created a YouTube video, don’t despair. There is a great deal of quality video on YouTube and Vimeo that show you simple ways of creating professional looking videos. Spend some time learning the art of video making or just use your webcam. Publishing videos is relatively easy and video production doesn’t need to be complicated. Once you know how to produce a simple video, you can fuel your link-building efforts in a powerful way.

Social media can be a great way to build quality third-party links that add value to your own website or blog by passing link authority to your digital assets. If you aren’t actively engaged with social media, get started today. The sooner you become active with social media the faster you build authority and the more value you create for SEO.

 

Any SEO guide would be remiss if not mentioning Google Local. Google’s localization strategy is in full force and seems to be integrated into more and more search results. Most people don’t fully understand Google Places or realize how they can use “Local” to achieve first place listings and top placements.

The first step is to register for a Google Places account. Start by going to places.google.com and registering. When you do, complete as much information in your profile as possible. The key to showing at the top of a local search results isn’t necessarily distance or an alphabetical listing. Google is searching for relevance.

Relevance is created with a comprehensive description of the services you offer. Even if you’re an online business, you should be developing a Google Places profile and providing as much information as possible. Additionally, you’ll want to take advantage of all the features provided by Google Places. This includes the ability to add photos, reviews, and videos. Google also allows you, using the Google Tags option, to provide special offers or coupons to those who visit your profile.

To optimize your Google Places profile, add as much content as possible. Repurpose videos you’ve created—no matter how basic. Add photos of your business. If your business is simply online, then add photos of your products, screenshots of your website, or any other pictures that are relevant to your business. The final step is soliciting reviews.  

Online reviews are driving the Internet. Look

One of the best ways to attract one-way links to your website is to promote free content, such as news or articles, white papers, free tools, and so on, via your own website or blog. This is the inverse of the link-building strategy we’ve been discussing where you actually push content to other websites or blogs. Using this strategy, you are creating valuable content and subscribing to that old adage, “If you build it, they will come.” It might sound cliché, but thanks to social media and the web, you can attract users to your website (and links) by having something of value to offer. If you provide something of value, other websites will start linking to you, giving one-way links that can dramatically improve your search engine results.  

After many years of creating content, optimizing websites, and spending countless hours building links to my many websites and blogs, a good friend and Internet guru turned me on the concept of outsourcing. Personally, I never really trusted anyone with my web properties or SEO and still tread lightly. However, over the past couple of years I have found a couple of good outsourcing partners that I use to support the search engine optimization of my own websites and blogs – and so can you.

The concept of outsourcing is simple. Find resources to do repetitive or time-consuming tasks at a low cost. While they are focusing on “getting it done,” you can focus on new projects, revenue-generating activities, and other work.

I used to think that outsourcing was only for large companies. To be honest I had many false perceptions about outsourcing and the types of individuals that support outsourcing-related jobs. The reality is that you can find a number of highly qualified, intelligent individuals who are willing to complete work at a much lower cost than it would be in your own country. I’ve used freelancers in India, Sweden, and the Philippines for programming, link building, and administrative tasks.

Whether you are working on a single website or twenty, I recommend learning more about the opportunity to outsource specific tasks. There are a variety of resources that allow you to find just the right person to support your SEO. My personal favorites are oDesk, eLance, and UpwardSEO.com. There are many others available such as Getafreelancer.com and Guru.com but I’m partial to the first few because of their size and my personal experience with them.

Now that I’ve shared the link-building methods I’ve used to successfully achieve top search engine rankings, and build a number of online businesses, I thought I’d cover some of the do’s and do not’s you should consider when implementing any search engine optimization campaign.

For starters, let me remind you that this is a marathon not a sprint. This is something I’ve shared with all of my consulting clients who either expect instant results or don’t have a full grasp on how search engine optimization works.

If you want page one listings in twenty-four hours, I can do that for you. All I would need to do is find a keyword phrase that isn’t all that competitive and shows listings for press releases, articles, or social media on page one of Google. Then I’d put a link on my high authority blog with the keyword in the title or send out a press release from a site that already displays a result on page one. But what’s the point? Once indexed, the corresponding listing will be there for three to five hours and then vanish as quickly as it arrived. SEO is not about creating a flash in the pan but rather applying search engine optimization best practices that result in top rankings that last with little or no maintenance. If you can accomplish that goal, everyone wins.  

My Previous Posts -

1.On Page SEO ( Advanced ) – Rank 1 On GOOGLE