Generally speaking, the more traffic you can get to a website the more money you can make. I like to focus on building search engine traffic to my sites because once you have rankings you can usually sustain them with little effort and the traffic they send is very targeted.

Over the last two years I focused on fairly small industries which I would build minisites for, which received their traffic from search engines, and then monetised them with affiliate offers. These days I’m spending my time focusing on much bigger (and more competitive markets) and having a lot of success.

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I receive a lot of emails from people who ask whether, with all of the competition online, it’s still possible to enter a niche right now and make money. I won’t deny that it’s getting much, much harder in the affiliate marketing space (how I make money) but persistence, determination and creativity can take you anywhere.

Did you know that 20-25% of Google searches every single day are brand new? 1 in 4 search queries have never been typed in the history of the search engine – every single day. I knew of this statistic a few years ago but only recently did I try and leverage it. The result? In the third month after launching a new website, I received almost 1,000,000 unique visitors from Google.

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Without a doubt, the most frequent post request I’ve had on this site is a post about link building. I rarely take requests, simply because people rarely know what they really want until you give it to them, but this time things are a little different.

First of all, I have been studying SEO day and night since I was 16 (almost 5 years ago) and I’ve ranked on the first page of Google for some of the most competitive keyphrases in the world. Therefore, I like to think I know quite a bit about the topic and can provide some insights in this space.

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As many of you will know, I love Wordpress. I use it on most of my affiliate sites which make me thousands of dollars per month and I also use it on my blogs, such as this one. I’m certainly not alone when it comes to utilising this CMS though — tens of millions of sites online are powered by the software.

For all the great things there are to be said about Wordpress, though, out-of-the-box SEO certainly isn’t one of its strong points. As I use the software so much and make a lot of my income thanks to search engine traffic, I have come to learn what works best in terms of optimising your Wordpress setup.

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A few years ago, SEO was far more robotic than it is today. In fact, if you wanted to rank for some of the top keyphrases, you didn’t have to care much about being social in your niche or even standing out as an authority. You could simply buy directory links, sponsor blog posts, and even have Wordpress themes developed which included a link to your site in the footer.

These days however, things are very different. The top results for most keyphrases are either a Wikipedia page, a site that is very focused around community, or a clear leader in an industry. There are exceptions, but links tend to go to social sites (even Wikipedia has social aspects) by the people who use them.

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