Work at Home Based Business

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

Back in my last post here that I entitled Link to Your Success, I talked about some extra ways of obtaining good, strong keyword anchored backlinks for your sites. Well in this instalment, I’m going to follow that on with another useful way of obtaining links directly for your blogs as well as helping their SERPs ranking at the same time.

Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as “pligg” sites. I’ll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?

Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!

But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?

Build your own social pligg site!

Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don’t like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.

The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious - you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.

A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.

As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse’s mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.

TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB

TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?

And much to gain!

Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum

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There are thousands of people who call themselves “internet marketers” sitting at their computers right now with the intentions of making money online. However, most of them will not make any money, or if they do make some money, it’s won’t be nearly as much as they were hoping to earn.

So, why is it that so many internet marketers are not making money?

It’s because most of them are simply wasting their time when they are “working” online! There are countless ways this can happen. Often times when internet marketers think they are working, they really aren’t. One example is checking your email 20 times per day. I could go on and on giving you examples of how you are wasting your time each day but instead I challenge you to sit back and think about that for yourself.

I will, however, tell you that one of the biggest things internet marketers do to waste their time is blogging. I bet that got your attention! You have been conditioned to think that blogging is vital for online business so you are probably wondering why the heck I would say that it’s a waste of time and will not make you any money.

Here’s why…

In order to make money online, you need traffic to your website or blog. There is no way to get around this fact. However, when you spend all day writing blog posts, you forget to do one very important thing… Market your blog! As an “internet marketer” the most important part of your job is to market.

You can have the best blog in the world with more original content than all ten of the top blogs in your niche, but that means nothing if you don’t get any visitors. Your site might contain the secret to life, but if nobody knows about your site they will never read it. Do you see what I mean? Unless you get visitors, you won’t make money!

But you can’t just get any kind of traffic either. You don’t want untargeted traffic. You don’t want Web 2.0 traffic. You don’t want other internet marketers and bloggers as your main source of traffic. Why? Because those are the people that won’t click your ads, buy from your affiliate links, or even notice any of the things you have on your site that will make you money.

You need to get traffic from the search engines! The visitors you get to your website/blog from search engines are targeted, they are actively searching for your topic, and they don’t have a clue what Adsense is or what affiliate links are. Plus, if you have done your research and are in the right niche, they are ready to spend money. These are the visitors you make money from.

So, what’s the lesson here?

Simple… Stop wasting your time posting to your blog just hoping someone will come read it. Or wasting even more of your time on digg, myspace, delicious, or any of the other social bookmarking and social networking sites that will bring you traffic but not the kind that will make you any money.

Instead, spend more time each day getting inbound links and working on other search engine optimization techniques. Use as much time as you can each day getting your website/blog ranked at the top of the search engines so you can bring in more of the type of visitors that will make you money.

Doing this one simple thing will greatly increase your chances of making money online so you can quit your job to become a full-time internet marketer and live the life you’ve always dreamed of. Now, stop wasting your time and start making money!

About the author:

Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer, blogger, and online business mentor. His passion is helping people start their own home business and make money online. He will also teach you all you need to know about working at home.

You have permission to republish this article on your website or blog as long as you keep it fully intact, with the about the author box, and live links.

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I just wanted to let you all know that, at the time of writing this post, this blog now ranks #2 on Google for “work at home based business” with quotes and #14 on Google for work at home based business without quotes.

That’s not too bad for a blog that is only a few months old and has had very little promotion.

I give all the credit to my wonderful guest authors who keep this blog going with their very useful posts filled with great information!

I also want to thank all the people who come here to read this blog on a regular basis. Keep coming back, this blog will be growing much more this year and will be a resource you can’t do without.

Let’s keep this growth up and soon we will be ranked highly for many more top keyword phrases other than work at home based business.

This year I will do much more promoting of this work at home based business site and I hope you will too.

Thanks again everyone!

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg

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When talking about search engine rankings many people ask themselves questions like; how many keywords should I put in my anchor text? What is the keyword density that I should have on the page? Should I use short copy or should I use long copy? Can I use flash or not? How many keywords should I put in my “alt” text? Etc…

A general statement to answer the above questions is that “magic numbers do not exist.” The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimization expert is that algorithms change. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a keyphrase in a search engine, something could easily change, and you might have to spend months or even years trying to figure the new algorithm.

It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm, do something much easier instead… observe your top competitors. All you need to do is to understand what elements your competitors are using to make them rank in the top positions.

The main elements to getting top search engines rankings are:

- Number, quality, and relevance of inbound links pointing to your site
- Fresh, relevant, quality content (needs to be added frequently)
- Keyword density of your home page or any page you want to rank highly

LINKS, LINKS, LINKS

The first thing to observe from your competitor’s sites is their inbound links. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and typing: “link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com”. However do not only do this on Google because they don’t show all actual links pointing to a site. Yahoo and MSN tend to show a lot more of the back links to any given website.

Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about what the category is that those links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.

Some marketers use special software for robotic content creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be very dangerous, as Google will penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. And what happens is that those links do not look natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following day have 2000 links, which all say the same thing and come from the same IP address.

If you understand how to observe, this will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to. Then, just do what they do.

FRESH QUALITY CONTENT

The second thing to observe is how much fresh content the top sites have. Search engines love quality relevant content that is added and updated frequently. You will probably notice that the top sites in your niche have many articles and other quality content, and are continuously adding new content to their sites.

People that surf the web are usually searching for information, so content is the “fuel” of internet traffic. If you want to attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Updating it frequently with more quality content will keep visitors coming back to your website over and over again.

KEYWORD DENSITY

The third thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should you repeat your main keywords? In which part of the web page should your main keywords be mentioned? Again, there is no magic number, it’s all about observing and measuring against the top websites in your market. But what should you measure?

- Meta tags
- Alt tags
- Titles
- Names of the images on the page
- Heading tags: h1, h2, h3…
- Frequency and position of the keywords in the body text

Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings.

Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in overall optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too little. If you look unnatural, your rankings will suffer as a result.

So, what did we learn here? Basically that the key to ranking highly in the search engines is to understand what the top 5 websites in your niche are doing and to apply this to your own website optimization.

What do you do now? Get out there and start getting inbound links for your site. Add quality content to your site daily. And be sure that your on-site optimization, such as keyword density, is similar to that of your top competitors. Continue to do this every day and you will be ranking a the top of the search engines before you know it.

About the author:

Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer and home business mentor. Learn more about all aspects of online business by reading his free home business tips, discovering online home business information and visiting his home based business opportunities website.

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