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.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tackled big markets – I used to have clients in some of the biggest niches out there (casino, mobile phones, etc) – but it’s the first year where I’ve really started to take on these industries for myself. Some success is from sites I purchased which were ranking on the first few pages of Google and I built some great links to get them on the first page. Other success is from sites I built towards the end of 2009 which are now doing very well.

The upside of huge industries is that there’s a lot more money to be made with the downside, of course, being that it’s a lot harder to get rankings.

Ranking Fast: A Unique Keyword Research Strategy

The problem with these huge industries is that you could be waiting over a year to see any results for your hard work in terms of search engine rankings. Because you can make so much money in the large niches there’s a lot more people trying to take a slice of that traffic and many of them are focusing on SEO in order to do so. Health, gambling, forex and gaming industries for example, are very competitive online.

If you’re entering an industry with a brand new site, the last thing you want to do is wait that long for some good search engine traffic. Yet, you want to be building links with the anchor text of the big phrase you’re going for so, in time, they will take effect.

A strategy I use, which I’ve never read online before so you may want to keep this to yourself, is to actually pick two keyphrases which are very similar to work on. One of them should be short and competitive, while the other should be slightly longer and much less competitive.

Some example short and long keyphrases I may pick include:

• Short: mobile phones
• Long: mobile phone recycling
• Short: internet marketing
• Long: internet marketing news
• Short: how to lose weight
• Long: how to lose weight fast

Ideally, your ‘long’ keyphrase is simply a word or two extra on the original keyphrase. The reason I do this is very simple.

Ranking for how to lose weight fast is much easier than how to lose weight because less people are optimising for that term and it will take less links to get on the first page of Google. When you build links for how to lose weight fast you’re not only helping yourself get traffic from search engines quicker, your also building links for the phrase how to lose weight, which is your long-term strategy.

In other words, you want to pick a keyphrase which helps you bring short-term traffic but also helps you get long-term traffic later on. You aren’t going to rank for ‘internet marketing’ within a few months from scratch, but you may rank for a variation on the term fairly easily.

It’s also much more natural to try and optimise for other terms rather than the huge keyphrase right from the get-go.

Utilising the Same Strategy for Your Site Structure

Once you have your main phrases that you’re going to build a site around, you can then do what I do and pick 4-5 more which will make up your main site structure. Generally, these get less search volume and are less competitive than your first two phrases, but are still phrases it would be good to optimise for.

Using cell phones as an example once again, here’s a sample structure:

• Short: mobile phones
• Long: mobile phone recycling
• Phrase 1: recycle nokia mobile phones
• Phrase 2: recycle HTC mobile phones
• Phrase 3: recycle samsung mobile phones
• Phrase 4: recycle motorola mobile phones

Note: Mobile phone recycling refers to trading in your old phone for money to companies who will then resell it for a higher price. This is very popular in the UK. I know a few people making thousands of dollars per month in this niche on autopilot with affiliate offers.

For many sites online, long-tail keyword traffic probably makes up the vast majority of search traffic. As an example, ViperChill gets a few thousand hits per month from terms like ‘viral marketing’ and ‘wordpress seo’, but it also gets thousands of hits per month from all of the longer phrases grouped together such as ‘how to become likeable’.

These long-tail phrases don’t get much traffic individually but combined, based on how much content you have, the figures can quickly become substantial. The phrases in the example above are considered to be long-tail phrases as they contain more words and have a much smaller search volume, but they’re also easier to rank for.

Adding Content to Your Site

As I wrote in my post on How to Dominate Google, search engines generally tend to follow people. If your site is very static, uninteresting and plain then you simply aren’t going to rank in the biggest industries online. Not unless you have a huge link-buying budget and know how to get paid links that still count.

Let’s look at ViperChill as another example here. If the homepage of the site was simply an article that covered a lot of things about viral marketing, do you think I would be able to rank as easily?

In a typical scenario I would have no blog subscribers, no ‘popular posts’ and I would be a total nobody in the space. I would probably struggle to rank this site for anything which gets thousands of searches per month unless there was some amazing service attached to it, it was my brand name, or I was running a blog.

Look at all of the top sites ranking for phrases like internet marketing, car insurance, seo and you’ll find that they aren’t just basic information sites. They usually have some great offering that searchers love and webmasters link to. I actually took a look at the results, rather than offering general analysis and from the first page of Google for the phrase SEO, this is what I get:

• Wikipedia – This one speaks for itself
• SEO.com – brand name
• SEOBook.com – blog
• SEOChat.com – forum
• SEOmoz.org – blog

I get at least a dozen effortless links to ViperChill every week because people talk about me and what I’ve built here. Having other people promote you – and not having to do everything yourself – is crucial to dominating a huge industry online.

Long-tail Automation

To really get a site going I like to add a lot of content to it. I usually build these sites on Wordpress (though they look nothing like your typical blog) and pump out around 25 quality articles to start with, then a couple of articles per week from there on out. I outsource this process and while you certainly don’t have to produce that much content, I do find that it helps.

I would then use my site structure phrases from earlier and make those categories of the blog. If I owned www.losingweightonline.com and my main phrase was how to lose weight I might have pages like:

• How to lose weight fast (www.losingweightonline.com/fast/)
• How to lose weight in a week (www.losingweightonline.com/week/)
• How to lose weight quickly (www.losingweightonline/quickly/)

These would become my blog categories. So, at the top of each of these category pages I would have a lot of unique content related to that topic which is both interesting and static. It doesn’t change. What does change is that everytime I publish an article relating to one of these things, I put it under that category and that page instantly has more information. There is no homepage which collects these posts like a normal blog, just categories which display them.

I believe search engines put more importance on pages which are updated frequently with fresh, original content. If you can write content which you can get links to then even better. The point is that you have a solid structure in place and you can update your main pages very easily from the Wordpress back-end, or whatever CMS solution that you use.

Building Backlinks

Though I have written a guide which covers 15 ways I build backlinks, I only use a few when it comes to conquering big industries so I thought I would cover them here. By default, the homepage of your site is usually the most important in the eyes of search engines, as that is naturally where most of your links will go.

Many people link to individual articles on ViperChill that they like, but far more people talk about the blog as a whole, so they link to the homepage. It’s generally just a way of the web so expect that your homepage is going to have the most link juice and you should use it to target your most competitive phrase (both long and short versions).

You’ll also need to build links to your internal phrase pages, which make up the structure of your site. For the rest of this section I’ll either refer to the links as being good for building home (homepage) or internal (your longer phrase “category” pages).

Guest Blogging

Undoubtedly my favourite way to build backlinks, guest blogging helps you build some of the most valuable links out there. It’s what allowed me to rank top 10 in Google for the phrase ‘personal development’ and it also allows me to rank internal pages very easily. With guest blogging you can write a bio at the end of your posts so you don’t only get to link to your homepage with your desired anchor text, you can link to a chosen internal page with them too.

If you want to learn more about the practice then read my guide on it over here.

Directory Submissions

By nature, directory links are of a very poor quality. If you submit an order of 500 submissions for $10 to some guy on Digitalpoint then the majority of them go to PR0 pages which have tens if not hundreds of other outbound links on them.

Yet, for some reason, they still work quite well for me. They either help me get a site with a very targeted, uncompetitive phrase to rank quickly, or they help me to get links with the anchor text I need for sites that already have a lot of links, but not with the phrase in them that I’m trying to rank the site for.

Sometimes I’ll also pay $100 or so to BOTW.org which is a human-filtered directory which can give me some great link juice. As soon as I’m cached in this directory I find my rankings to increase almost instantly.

Create a Unique Resource (Networking)

As you can see from my examples in the SEO niche, you really need to create something useful for people to build a lot of natural links which are most likely to help you get those big rankings. It could be a script for webmasters, a blog with amazing content, a guide that nobody else has written or something else of that valuable nature.

Thankfully for people like us who want to build quality sites, Google and other search engines can do a fairly good job at keeping out sites that don’t deserve to rank in big industries. This means that you really are going to have to create something useful and valuable if you want thousands of targeted visitors landing on your site from search engines daily.

What you build really depends on whats out there already. Once you have a niche in mind, look at the top search results and see if there’s anything you think is missing. A gap you can fill. If not, then you’ll probably just have to do something better than anyone else. I never said that ranking highly for these big phrases is easy, but it’s definitely possible.

Once you have this unique resource; you have to get it out there. I use networking as a very broad term which chould include creating connections with bloggers, finding companies who can help you to get your offering out there and utilising other areas of social media to get eyeballs on your creation.

Here is the data from this post as a visual representation:

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.

My Results

I’m guessing the first thing you want to know is whether I’m just writing a sensational headline and have nothing of real value to share that you can apply to your own endeavours. Or, maybe you’re thinking I just got lucky and couldn’t replicate the same thing again? Sadly for the people who don’t read this blog, that’s not the case. This can be replicated, and I’m going to show you exactly how.

Before I do that, here’s the screenshot you’re probably looking for:

Sadly, I don’t see how I can prove the site was only 3 months old without revealing the domain. However, when I share how I generated this traffic I think you’ll have no reasons not to believe me, or any reason to doubt that you can do the same thing.

The exact keywords are going to be revealed in a short while, but first let me explain what it is that I’m doing. At its core, my strategy is so simple that you may want to put your head in your hands and wonder how you never thought about it before. That’s exactly what I did.

Thankfully, once I had this idea, I was able to leverage it for a nice monetary gain. I’m not going to hold back anything in this post because the opportunities from this tactic are so large and varied that there are opportunities for thousands of people to take advantage of this method.

How to Dominate Google in a Matter of Hours

Do you know how 1 in 4 Google search queries are unique each day? At first thought, it might not sound very realistic. Yet, the reason is simple: events. Think along the lines of natural disasters, sports results, holidays, reality TV results, new products and so on. Think about all of the news you can read in a newspaper today that is completely unique from anything that has ever happened in the history of the world.

Now you should be getting the idea.

In February, for one of my sites, I leveraged search terms for the sporting events and Valentines Day. Just look at some of the top referring keywords to one of my sites for that month:

• Vancouver 2010: 41,270
• Super bowl 2010: 32,836
• Olympics 2010: 6,216
• Valentines day ideas: 5,688

This is just a small sample of a report which contains thousands of different phrases.

What’s more; I don’t just leverage the tactic on this site, I leverage it on tens of websites and they are either making a lot of money or primed to make a lot of money when the event takes place.

I will go into detail on how I leverage Google to get traffic for these events but you first need to know how to find them.

Firstly, you can just know what events are going on right now or happening in the near future and use the following methods to get traffic for those. Or, you can use a tool like Google trends to look at the past and utilise that for the future. For example, I picked a totally random date from 2009 – August the 8th – and found these to be the most popular searches that day in the United States:

Imagine you could predict what someone was going to search for in the future. Well, you can.

If hundreds of thousands of people searched for UFC 101 results, then people are obviously going to be searching for future fights as well. What if you had websites in place for the next huge UFC match?

If someone wants to know the results for American Idol, what if you could be prepared to write content the minute the results are revealed?

It doesn’t have to be TV or sports, either. There are literally thousands of events every single day that people are searching for that nobody has looked for before. There’s no hidden secret to this method. That’s it.

Using Events to Get Traffic

Once you’ve focused on some events that you want to leverage Google for, there are a number of ways you can start to get traffic for them.

Build Minisites Around the Phrase

I have a World Cup website that is getting a few hundred visitors per day right now and there’s still another week to go (at the time of writing) until the 2010 Fifa World Cup begins. I actually live in Cape Town, where many of the games will be played, so I decided to build a site as a test based on all of the hype surrounding the event here.

When the competition starts, I’m probably going to get thousands of visitors per day landing on the website, simply because I picked a keyphrase that I knew (thanks to Google Trends) people would be searching for once the event kicked off. I picked up the exact .com for the phrase and rank no.1 in Google after nothing more than $10 directory submissions.

To say the SEO was easy is a massive understatement. The site only has 5 pages right now, but that’s all it takes (and this is just one example, of which I have many).

Get Featured in Google News

I discovered this tactic when working for one of the largest newspapers in the UK as their social media manager. They were in Google News, naturally, and one day received 8,000 visitors from Google for the term ‘Facebook’.

The reason why is simple: Google integrate news results highly on the page for that search query and my client just happened to write an article about Facebook that day. Of course, Facebook is one of the most popular search queries in the world – hence the large flood of traffic – but you can still get thousands of visitors by writing about a vast amount of topics.

For many events that take place, Google News is integrated highly in the search results. There are two ways to be included:

• Use a press release service like PRWeb which guarantees Google News inclusion for $80
• Create a site that is accepted into Google News (submit here)

I will be the first to say that for my personal projects, this is the option that I use the least. However, whenever I do test this tactic I always receive a ton of traffic to my sites because I make sure I’m covering a popular topic for that day.

Write Blog Posts on the Topic

The cost of paying to get into Google News can add up quickly and building a site just to get into Google News is going to take a lot of work. Fortunately for you and me, Google also integrate blog results in their search results for many event and date based queries.

You can start a blog for free, in minutes, so there’s no reason to think that the whole concept of this post is out of your reach. If you can write about topics as they’re happening and Google are already indexing your site frequently, you can receive a ton of traffic from this method.

Three things I’ve found to work well are:

• Putting the date in the post title. Not many people do this but surprisingly a lot of people search with it
• Making sure the date and time of the post going live are visible on your blog post
• Building a few links to the most important posts via bookmarkng sites (5 minutes of work) to give them a little more authority

If you get creative with this then you will likely see some incredible results.

Create Youtube Videos

I don’t really like to cover blackhat tactics on this blog, although I spent over a year doing some very shady things. I never took my tactics to the extreme and profited very little from them because I didn’t feel like my actions aligned with me personally. However, I still know about a lot of things that work and could make me money if I was desperate for cash.

One thing that you’ll find a number of dodgy characters on Youtube doing is creating videos for events before they even happen. You’ll see videos for movies that haven’t been released, clips from UFC fights that haven’t happened, and TV show results that are yet to be announced.

And as you probably guessed, not only are Google News and Google Blogsearch integrated into search results; Youtube videos are as well. If you can create the video in advance, increase the view and ratings count to give it some authority, then by the time the event goes live and people are searching for the video, yours is already ranking highly in the search results.

The version of this method I’ve just mentioned is highly unethical in my opinion (as the videos just tell people to go to a website) but thankfully, also the least effective.

The most effective use of this tactic is to actually upload the best videos you can, as and when an event is happening. When a search query becomes popular, Google also look at the most recent Youtube videos to display in their results, rather than just showing the ones that have been there for a while.

Monetising the Traffic

I’m behind web properties which receive millions of pageviews per month, yet some regularly make the same amount of money as my sites receiving tens of thousands of pageviews. While you need traffic to make money online, there are hundreds of different ways to monetise it. You would make a lot more money if 10,000 people landed on your site looking for a gadget to purchase – which you sold – rather than 50,000 untargeted visitors where your only hope is for them to click on an Adsense ad.

With this strategy, it’s really up to you how you want to use it. The very reason I don’t mind sharing it on the blog is because there are so many routes you can take to benefit from it.

The first option that most people think of is to build up a large amount of traffic and then monetise it via Adsense. Adsense can work well in a lot of cases but you can probably monetise the traffic better, depending on which phrases it is coming from.

Going back to the UFC example, do you think you would make more money through Adsense or:

• Selling fight tickets
• Offering relevant memorabilia
• Owning a UFC blog which people can subscribe to
• “Loaning” the traffic to UFC themed websites
• Selling ads slots to other UFC websites

I’m sure you get the idea. Again, if you can get creative with this, there’s a lot of easy traffic and money to be had. If you have any questions, there’s a guy named Glen who is more than happy to answer them in the comments.

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.

For those of you who don’t know why links are important, let me just say that if you want to get traffic from the major search engines, they’re crucial. Links from other sites to your site are basically a ‘vote’ that tell search engines you are trusted and you are a good resource for whatever your content is about.

A large percentage of my income to affiliate sites is from traffic via Google, and the difference between ranking 2nd and ranking 1st can literally be thousands of dollars extra on my bottom line.

SEO is generally divided into two parts: on-site optimisation and off-site optimisation. On-site is changes you make to the actual code of your website to help with rankings. In my guide on Wordpress SEO I gave a lot of tips on this that you can also apply to sites that aren’t running the CMS.

Today we’re going to look at the off-site side of things, which is building links.

15 Ways to Build Links to Your Site

Instead of just telling you to do this or do that that many link building guides do, I also want to share a few principles that I believe are crucial in building a website that attracts thousands of high quality links. A few years ago you could take a robotic approach to SEO, but the web is now far too social to rely on old tactics to help your website rank higher.

Build a Site for People

I can’t remember who said this phrase but it’s one of my favourites: “search engines follow people.” Not only does following this motto steer you in the direction of build an honest, legitimate website, it’s also a very true way to get links to your site.

Have you noticed how Wikipedia absolutely dominates Google search results? I don’t believe they should be ranking for 50% of the phrases that they do, but Jimmy Wales built a site for people. It is a resource that millions of people naturally want to use, and because of that, people talk about them.

For a lot of competitive keyphrases online you’ll also find popular blogs, forums and niche social networks ranking highly. If you can get enough real people to care about what you’re doing, then you can’t go far wrong.

When people talk about you online, links follow.

Utilise Guest Posting

I talk about guest blogging a lot here but for good reason – it has lots of benefits. Not only does guest posting get you traffic from relevant websites, it’s also a great way to get links with custom anchor text around the keyphrases you want to rank for.

I have written a massive guide to guest blogging that tells you more about the practice, so read that for a detailed guide on how to get links through this process. To explain how this works in the most basic of forms, when you write articles (for free) for another website, they’re happy to give you a backlink in the byline in return for your content.

Be Useful

Pretty much every legitimate site on the Internet serves some useful purpose to it’s users. Facebook lets you keep in touch with friends and family. Google lets you find awesome websites. Digg lets you find news that you know hundreds of other people recommend. Youtube provides educational value, entertainment, product reviews and much more.

These are some high profile examples, but there are literally millions of useful sites online. This blog helps people leave the rat race and make a living online. PluginID helped people be who they want to be and deal with the issues that come up on the path to get there.

Ask yourself whether your site is helping people to fill a need. If it’s not, then why should people care about you? This might not sound great but everyone active online in any space online is generally just thinking about what’s in it for them.

If you can give people what they want, you can receive what you want.

Check Competitors Backlinks

When I talk about competitors, I simply mean people trying to rank for the same keywords / phrases as you in Google. For example, this site is “trying” to rank for the phrase viral marketing. I put trying in quotes as I’m only implementing a small number of these strategies as I’m not too bothered about ranking.

If I wanted to find great sources of links though, I could simply see which sites are ranking well for the phrase and where their links are coming from. As an example, a site ranking 2nd for me right now is a page on Wilson Web. If I take that URL and do a link search in Yahoo (they shows more backlinks than Google) I can find link sources I can also use:

The operator I use in Yahoo is simply “link:pageurl -site:domain.com” (no quotes) obviously changing the parts in bold for the site that is actually ranking for your keyphrase.

Check your competitors to see if there are freely available link sources that you can also get for your own site. After all, if they’re helping that site rank, they’ll probably help you.

Leave Blog Comments

Most blog comments are nofollowed (this means search engines aren’t supposed to give weight to the link, though I believe Yahoo and Bing still do) so they don’t provide much link juice directly. There is a resource for dofollow blogs where you can leave comments that give link weight, but many of them get spammed and there will only be a few that are relevant to your niche.

I like using blog comments as an indirect way to get links back to your site. For example, if I contact a big blogger out of the blue and ask them to link to my latest article, it’s probably not going to happen. Yet, if I’ve spent some time interacting with their community and leaving comments, it’s more likely that they will fulfil the request (as long as your resource is relevant, and awesome).

Blog comments also drive visitors to your site, which goes back to the point of search engines following people.

Check Flippa Auctions

One of my favourite ways to find awesome sources for links is to check the Flippa marketplace. Flippa is a place for people to buy and sell websites and has a very interactive community. Even if you’re not looking to buy or sell sites though, it can be a great way to find links.

If you take the time to look around, you’ll find a number of repeat sellers who are selling websites that have ranked well in Google very quickly. In some cases, these sites are ranking for phrases that bring in thousands of dollars, just in a few short months.

Looking at these sites and finding where their backlinks are coming from has provided me with a lot of easy-to-duplicate tactics and links that Google clearly love.

Write Awesome Content

A few years ago you could write an awesome post and it would receive hundreds of links. Look at the trackbacks on old Copyblogger or Steve Pavlina posts and you’ll see what I’m talking about. With the introduction of Twitter and sites like StumbleUpon, people are more inclined to ’share’ sites, rather than link to them from their own blogs.

The amount of links you can get for awesome content has definitely decreased, but by no means has it stopped. My post on Wordpress SEO picked up a lot of blog links and is getting new ones all the time. My friend Danny also noticed the decrease in bloggers linking out and started a mini-campaign about it.

“Awesome” content means a lot of different things to different people. In terms of this site, it might be a great resource post. For a humor blog, it may be a funny image. For your Gadget blog, it may be announcing a new product before anyone else.

If you know your niche well enough, you should know what people want.

Participate on Social Bookmarking Sites

I really don’t like this tactic if I’m honest, but I can’t deny that social bookmarking links are helping a number of my sites rank. Bookmarking sites like Delicious simply give people a place to store their favourite links an organisable archive, which is generally far more useful than your browsers bookmark bar.

They’re also available from any computer anywhere in the world, so a lot of these sites have popped up due to their usefulness. Many of these sites offer dofollow links and custom anchor text, although they aren’t the best links in the world to pick up.

You can automate the process using something like Bookmarking Demon (not an affiliate link – none of those here) or you can even pay someone on Digitalpoint to submit to hundreds of sites manually.

To utilise this tactic in a more ethical manner, simply sign-up on a few sites you really want to use and bookmark your favourite links from around the web. Just don’t forget to link to your own site as well.

Add Links to Your Forum Signatures

Unlike blogs where you get nofollow links for contributing to the discussion, most forums allow you to have a (followed) link in your signature, every time you make a post. If you’re already active on some communities online, see if you can put a link in your signature.

I really don’t recommend you sign up on lots of sites just to get links, but if there are sites that you’re really interested in and want to participate, then link back to your site. Note that if you have 10,000 posts on a forum already and add a link there, that’s not going to be anywhere near as powerful as 10,000 links where each is from a different site.

It’s far better to have links from different domains, rather than lots from the same source.

Utilise Free Content Sites

Another link source that I don’t really love but I see doing well for a lot of sites is utilising free content sites like Squidoo, Gather and Hubpages. These sites basically allow you to sign-up, write about whatever you please, and link to yourself however you want.

Hubpages is very unpoliced and they’ll basically allow anything to stay on their site, but Squidoo (owned by Seth Godin) recently removed thousands of spammy pages from their site and are constantly policing them.

If you are going to use sites like this, at least take the time to to create a good resource for users, rather than just throwing links to all of your sites in there. Not only will that make your link more valuable (more relelvant and on a page with lots of content) but its better for these communities.

Use Article Directories

A much better source of links if you want to receive them in return for your content is using article directories. There are a lot of awful, highly spammed directories out there, but there are definitely a few worth looking for.

My favourites include Ezine articles, Article Dashboard and Go Articles. Ezine and a number of other sites review articles manually first so you’re not going to be able to spam them (which you shouldn’t want to, anyway). However, if you write good content, or pay someone else to, then you can get a great link in return.

Ezine is definitely the most trusted and you’ll actually find the page you write the article on can rank quite well, quite quickly. Once you’ve inserted your article content, you’re given the opportunity to fill in an Author Box and you can put your links in there.

Collaborate with Influencers

Some of the most popular posts on PluginID were the ones where I collaborated with other influences in the personal development niche. Examples include the Face-Off series that I ran and times where I would ask the same question to multiple people.

If your idea is unique and interesting, you’ll find that the people involved are often happy to share the piece via social media sites and even link to it from their own blogs.

Interview Someone Important

Similar to the last idea, interviewing someone in your industry or someone high profile is likely to get you a lot of attention. There are two ways to gain links via this method.

First of all, you can interview people who you hope will link back to the interview from their own sites. Or, you can utilise your connections (or hustle, hard) and interview someone the average person couldn’t get to answer their questions.

I personally tried to interview Eckhart Tolle (an author who has been featured on Oprah and sold millions of books) but didn’t get very far. If I had managed to land the interview though, I know a lot of people would have linked to it naturally.

Design a Unique, Beautiful Site

There are many ways to have a good looking website. I personally like to buy templates from the likes of Theme Forest and customise them heavily (like I did with ViperChill). You could also hire a designer like Reese to create something custom that looks amazing.

Once you have a beautiful site in place, there are literally thousands of link opportunities. “Where?” I hear you ask. “CSS and design directories”, is my answer. There are tons of sites which showcase beautiful designs and offer a link to the site so people can view the real thing, rather than a screenshot or thumbnail.

Many of these have a lot of authority in Google so if you want to find some, here’s a good place to start.

Create a Great Resource

There are a number of personal development bloggers giving sitewide (links from every page) links to PluginID because I created an amazing resource. That resource was a list of top blogs in my industry, but yours doesn’t have to be the same.

Can you create a free eBook that answers a need? What about a resource on 101 ways to do ‘X’? How about a list of other sites which offer great advice on a popular topic? Think about something that you know your readers would want but would take a lot of work for you to put together.

That’s the resource you should be creating.

What Not To Do

Now that we’ve covered some of my favourite ways to get links to a site, I quickly want to run through some things you shouldn’t be doing. While search engines generally reward sites with a lot of links by giving them high rankings, there’s also a few things they don’t like.

Remember: search engines want to show the best results to their users. If you’re manipulating link counts heavily and don’t really deserve to rank for your phrase, then they don’t want you to.

Here are a few things to watch out for:

• Building Links too Fast – Build links very quickly is usually unnatural. There may be times where write a post that gets hundreds of links overnight and that’s not going to penalise you, but just be careful about building too many links for your site as a whole. I’m not a search engine, so I can’t give exact numbers, but if you think you might be going a bit over the top, then you probably are.
• Using Spammy Resources – Not all links are created equal. It would be far more powerful for ViperChill to have a homepage link from Problogger than it would be to have a link from Hubpages or an automated link farm. You can’t control who links to you, but just be careful where you focus your link building time.
• Taking Part in Link Exchanges – If you want to add sites to your blogroll or resources page then add them, but don’t just do it because people are linking to you. Link exchanges worked well about 2 years ago, but are a very dated technique that search engines are well aware of.
• Building Links Around One Phrase – You might have a phrase that you want to rank for and the best way to do that is to get links with that phrase as an anchor text, but only having links with that phrase is very unnatural. Most links help your rankings in general, so don’t be afraid to get links for different phrases or even your domain as a whole, like http://www.viperchill.com

If you have any of your own ways to build links that are working well, I would love to hear them in the comments.

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.

Before I share my tips for getting more search traffic to your blog, I want to state that the following recommendations should be used with a little bit of caution. The majority of recommendations here are very obvious and totally fine, but there are others which some people may disagree with. Everything I share here has worked very well for me and the countless clients I have worked with, but I will mention on specific steps if any of them may be frowned upon by others.

Now that I have the “don’t sue me” disclaimer out of the way, we can get onto the good stuff.

The Basics

I thought it would be a good idea to split the “obvious” suggestions from the not-so-obvious and slightly more advanced tactics that I will share later in the post.

Title Tags

The title tag has long been thought of as the most important on-site factor in telling search engines what your site (or a page) is about. By default on older versions of Wordpress, post titles would display as “Blog Name >> Post Title”. As your homepage is probably already ranking for your site name, you’re not helping yourself by putting your site name at the start of your title. You don’t need to rank for it more than once.

Instead of leaving things this way, I personally like to remove the blog name altogether. This isn’t just because I think it looks better, but because it works. A client I worked with last year received a massive boost in search traffic when we removed their brand name from title tags on their blog posts.

To change your title tags, I recommend you install this awesome SEO plugin. Once installed, log into your Wordpress admin and go to Settings >> All in One SEO Pack. From there, I have entered the following:

• Home Title: Viral Marketing : ViperChill (This is the phrase I’m trying to get my site to rank for and a brand name)
• Post Title: %post_title%
• Page Title: %page_title% | %blog_title%

Those are the main ones, and I recommend you tweak the rest to your preferred preferences. The post and homepage titles are the most important.

Meta Tags

When you search for a site in Google, you’ll see a snippet of content under the page link. To control this, you can customise your meta description tag for the page. Similarly, you can also add keywords to your tag to tell search engines what your site is about. I should mention that Google announced a few months ago they do not crawl the keywords tag anymore.

A good few years ago the keywords used to be important as search engines had less ways to determine what a site is about. Now that technology is so advanced, search engines have better ways of determining rankings and relevance. I still like to put the keywords in there (for other search engines) and do this by enabling ‘dynamic’ keywords with the All in One SEO pack.

As far as descriptions go, there is no ideal way to automate the process. The best descriptions are hand written, and the plugin Headspace will allow you to configure them for each individual post. Headspace also allows you to auto-fill a posts meta-description based on the description of your category so if you post a lot, that may be useful for you.

Permalinks

Permalinks are simply the URL’s for your posts. By default, post titles tend to look like viperchill.com/?p=38 but if you look at the URL for this post you will see http://www.viperchill.com/wordpress-seo/. I’ll let you decide which one you think looks better. Not only does this new format tell someone what your page is about before clicking on it, the words in the URL will also be highlighted in search engine results if your post is relevant to the search query.

To change your permalinks, simply go to Settings >> Permalinks. I currently use the following format:

Some people like to have categories in there but I like to keep URL’s as short as possible. A friend pointed out that the quickest solution (in terms of querying your database) is to use /%post_id%/%postname%/. I would only really recommend this if you have a massive site built on Wordpress, but it’s interesting to note.

It’s best to do this on a fresh blog, but if you’re making this change on a new blog then make sure you install this redirection plugin. It will move your old URL’s properly and in a search engine friendly manner. Also remember to shorten the post slug when you are writing an article, as by default the URL will use all of the words in your title.

Focus On a Keyphrase

Unless you’re very into branding, it’s a good idea to try to optimise your site around a keyphrase that can send you search traffic. Most blogs end up getting the majority of links to their homepage, so it’s a good idea to try and leverage those links by getting search engine rankings for a relevant phrase.

For ViperChill, I’m aiming to rank for the phrase ‘viral marketing’. Although it is fairly competitive, it has a decent search volume and it’s relevant to what this site is about: helping you build remarkable sites that others naturally want to share. The Google external keyword tool is a good place to start to see which phrases are popular in your audience. Make sure you select ‘All Countries and Territories’ on the left and then ‘Exact match’ on the right hand side to get accurate results.

Once you have this keyphrase, you can use it in:

• The title tag for your homepage
• The heading of your site
• Your logo
• As anchor text in links from other websites

The first and last items on this list are going to be the most crucial to helping you achieve higher search engine rankings.

Turn on Pingbacks

One way to get more links to your site (which increase search engine rankings) is actually to link to other people. If you are regularly supporting a site, it’s very likely that they’re going to return the favour. Especially if they’re in the same industry.  I recommend turning on the option in Wordpress (if it’s not already enabled) which notifies other blogs when you have linked to them.

To do so, head on over to Settings >> Discussion, and choose the following options:

Use Alt Attributes Religiously

I’ve noticed fairly recently how much emphasis Google seem to be putting the alt attribute when it comes to not only ranking images highly, but also ranking your posts highly as well. Consider a search for the term ‘minimalist marketing’ and here is my site result.

The text minimalist-marketing, which I have highlighted, is actually not written anywhere on the page like that. Instead, it is the alt attribute for one of my images. Wordpress applies alt attributes to images automatically, but they are generated based on the file name. Therefore, if you save your images as “minimalist-marketing.jpg” or whatever your content is about, then Wordpress will automatically generate that text.

The alt tag is a way to tell search engines what your images are actually about. Not only will it help you get more search traffic to your images, but I think it helps the overall rankings of a page, as well.

Interlink

Interlinking simply means that you link from your blog posts to other blog posts. For example, I sometimes recommend guest blogging as a great way to build your authority in your niche and will then link to my guide on guest blogging. I also use the anchor text of the search query I’m trying to rank for if it doesn’t making my writing look robotic.

Not only is this useful in terms of SEO, but it also gives your readers more posts to read and thus increases your pageviews.

WWW or Non-WWW

On a lot of sites (and probably yours if this section title makes no sense), there are two ways to access them. For example, if you head on over to test.com, you will see it is both accessible at http://test.com and http://www.test.com. Try this on your own site and see if it is the same.

By default, Wordpress handles this redirect for you, but it uses a 302 redirect. A 302 tells search engines the redirection is only temporary, but you really want to tell them it is permanent so that all of your link weight goes to one place. To do this, you need to implement a 301 redirect.

You can choose which one you want Google to list in Google Webmaster Tools, but it’s still necessary to do this. Whether you want to choose the www version or the non-www version of your site is completely up to you.

You will need to be able to edit your .htaccess file which can be found in the same folder that you installed Wordpress on your server. Here is how the code in mine looks:

# Begin 301
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.viperchill\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.viperchill.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I do have other code in my .htaccess for specific redirects, but that is all you need to redirect your site from the non-www version to the www version. Also, remember to change viperchill.com to whatever your domain name is.

If you want to redirect from the www to the non-www (which I do on a few sites), then swap lines 3 and 4 with this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^viperchill\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://viperchill.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If that gives you any errors or doesn’t seem to do anything, make sure that your host allows you to edit the .htaccess file (most will).

The Next Level

I’ve just shared some of the most common tips you’ll find online about optimising Wordpress, but now we’re going to go a bit deeper and share some slightly more advanced tactics. If you only do the above, then that’s a great start, but there are still areas you can improve upon.

Noindex Archive, Category, Pagination or Tag Pages

On ViperChill, I only use categories and I manually create my own sitemap, but I know that a lot of people have date based archives, categories, and tag pages. These might be great for usability, but for search engines, they’re really just lots of pages with links to your other pages.

In other words, the search engines don’t need to crawl through all of them to find your blog posts. For that reason, I apply the Noindex option to my Archives and Tag pages, and do this by installed the All In One SEO Pack I mentioned earlier. There are settings in the admin panel to help you decide what you want to block.

I recommend that you allow one of them to be followed (e.g. normal pagination, or categories) and then block the rest to “preserve” link juice.

NoFollow Certain Pages

I did say there may be some tactics that people frown upon in this post, and this is the first. The Nofollow attribute was first introduced by search engines to help stop spam on the web from ranking in search results. That’s why, by default, all links to commenters on your blog are automatically nofollowed.

Nofollowing scuplting, as it is commonly referred, is simply about keeping and diverting link juice (link weight) to the pages where you want it to go. For example, on every page on my site there is a link to the contact form. Does it really need to be a powerful page?

Just linking to the page once is enough to have it indexed in Google, and that’s all that matters for a number of my pages. Similarly, I nofollow links to my about page, my category links and my RSS feed. This means that the ‘weight’ from backlinks I’m getting to my own post won’t be spread to those pages.

A typical text link looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.viperchill.com”>ViperChill</a>

To make it nofollow, you would change the link like so:

<a href=”http://www.viperchill.com” rel=”nofollow”>ViperChill</a>

Again, Google have recently mentioned that they frown upon this (in some circumstances — not most) so use it at your own risk.

Nofollow Your Read More Link

If you show full posts on your homepage then you don’t need to worry about this. If, however, you just show a snippet of content, then it’s likely you also have a “read more” or “continue..” link in there somewhere. As your post title already links to the page with perfect anchor text, there’s no need to give juice to the read more link which simply takes people to the same page.

In your Theme Editor (Appearance >> Editor) open the relevant file (usually index.php), find the following text:

<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”

Then simply add

<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”nofollow”

That’s it. You must make sure you are changing the read more permalink, and not the permalink to your post titles. If you’re unsure which is which, then make sure you contact your theme author. There are too many examples for me to go through them all here.

Turn Off Comment Pages

Unless you receive hundreds of comments per post (or you’re really, really picky about page speed), there really is no need to have paginated comments on your site. Older versions of Wordpress never had this, but if you recently installed Wordpress 2.7 from scratch, you’ll find that paginated comments is the default option.

These can be turned off in Settings >> Discussion and will ensure that your site doesn’t have tons of duplicate pages that are all showing very little unique content.

Sign-Up to Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a must-use service for anyone who cares about search engine traffic to their sites. Not only will it tell you which keyphrases you are ranking highly for in Google, but it will also notify you when your site has been hacked, or if you have any broken links.

Sometimes you may find that another blogger has linked to you incorrectly and that a lot of visitors are landing on a 404 page. Because GWT makes you aware of this, you can redirect that page somewhere relevant to keep the link value and keep the visitors who are landing on your site.

Building Links

If you implement even just half of the suggestions I’ve presented here then you will probably have better on-site optimisation than 95% of the blogs in your industry. It’s essential to focus on content creation and engaging in your audience when building a blog, but it’s silly to neglect a huge traffic source when you can make all necessary changes in just an hour.

It’s also silly to write a guide on SEO without mentioning the most important factor in getting traffic from search engines (besides relevance): backlinks. Backlinks are simply links from other sites, to yours. Generally, the site ranking 1st for a search query in Google is going to have a lot more links than the site ranking 10th, or even 5th. It’s important that you spend time building links to your site so that the on-site optimisation that you’ve put in place can actually have an effect.

I won’t go into all of the ways that you can build links to your site as there are some great articles out there on the web, but I will list some of my favourite:

• Guest Posts – I really like links from guest posts as they send traffic, they’re relevant, and you can usually customise the anchor text of the link to be anything you want. If you want to learn more about this method, I have a written a detailed guide here.
• Write Awesome Content – There’s nothing better than writing an article that gets tons of links from relevant bloggers. If you put enough work into your content and regularly engage with other bloggers in the niche, they’re going to link to your posts.
• Link Out – When you link out, people link back. I don’t recommend link exchanges or filling up your blog roll, but if you find something on another site that your audience might enjoy, don’t be afraid to share it. You never know, that big blog might just send their 5-figure audience your way.
• Collaborate – Collaborating with other influencers in your niche is not only a great way to connect with more people, but it’s also a good way to get people talking about you. Oftentimes when I have interviewed people, they will link back to the interview from their own site. I also see people doing group projects which involve over 20 people and then end up having them all promote the one resource. If you can get other people involved, they’re going to help you spread the word.

If you enjoy learning about SEO and want to take your knowledge to the next level, then Sebastian and David are two people I recommend you follow.

Finally, don’t make the same mistake I did and scratch your head for two weeks wondering why your blog isn’t indexed. It turns out that a lot of one-click Wordpress install solutions block search engines by default. You need to turn this off by going to Settings > Privacy.

Alternatively, you can ignore everything I’ve just written and still do quite well by remembering one thing: search engines follow people.

Note: As with everything SEO related, people have their disagreements on what works and what doesn’t. As stated at the start, these are things that work for myself and have when I had clients. Feel free to only implement certain things or try your own methods. I have updated parts of this post with information from people way smarter than I am.

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.

SEO now is far less robotic, and far more social. Based on this, I knew it was going to be a challenge to rank for two competitive keyphrases in my industry when I was a total nobody. Yet, I still managed to do it, and I’m going to show you exactly how.

Analyse the Search Volume

The first step you need to do before trying to rank for any keyphrase in Google, is to find out how many people are searching for it. It’s completely pointless being number one in Google for “dog umbrellas” if nobody is typing it into the search box and looking to keep their dogs dry in the rain.

To save you a lost of wasted time, head over to the Google Keywords tool. This tells you how many people are searching for keywords or keyphrases each month. I recommend you change the settings to All Countries and Territories, and from Broad to Exact on the top right hand side of the page.

I knew that the main theme for my niche was ‘personal development’ so that’s exactly what I typed in first. The tool showed me how many people searched for that phrase, and lots of other relevant terms I might want to try and rank for as you can see in the screenshot below:

Ideally, because I knew I was going to give myself at least 6 months to try and rank for a phrase, I wanted to pick a phrase that received a high number of searches. This meant I would probably end up picking a more competitive phrase, but it would be worth it in the end.

I then searched for other relevant words like ’self help’ and ’self improvement’ and while self help received far more searches, I later found it to be way too competitive for my liking. I liked the look of the first two keyphrases:

• Personal Development (33,100)
• Personality Development (33,100)

Once I had found two keyphrases that I think would bring regular, relevant traffic to my site, I decided to check how competitive they were.

Check the Competition

This step is to simply find out how difficult it is to rank in Google for the terms I want to rank for. I’m only going to get a good portion of those thousands of searchers if I’m somewhere in the top 5 results. If my site is back on page 2, I would only get a trickle of search traffic each day. If you don’t know already, the major factor which defines where a page ranks on Google is the number of backlinks that the site / page has. Backlinks are simply hyperlinks from one page to another, like me linking to my about page in this sentence.

My next step was to find out how many backlinks the top searches for this page had. Here are the steps involved:

1. Search for your desired keyphrase in Google
2. Take the URL of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd results
3. Head on over to Yahoo as it is far better at showing links than Google
4. Type (without quotes): “link:oneofyourURL’sgohere -site:thedomain.com“
5. Write down the number of results that Yahoo shows

Note for step 4 that after -site: you type the domain name. So, if a result for personal development was johndoe.com/personal-development, that would be my URL, but “johndoe.com” would be after -site:

Run this 5 step process for all of your keyphrases and you should have a good idea of how many backlinks it will take to rank for them.

Decide on Your Final Keyphrase

If the top three sites all have tens of thousands of backlinks, it’s unlikely I’m going to try and outrank them as that could take me years. If they have a few thousand, on the other hand, I still might give things a try. I don’t believe that I can get thousands of links to my site (although, saying that, PluginID has 11,000) but I do believe I can get far better quality links than my competition.

Google not only ranks sites based on the number of links they have, but the quality and relevance. For example, it’s far better to have links to your site with ‘Personal Development‘ as the anchor text, rather than something like ‘Glen’s web site’. I knew I could get a lot of links with my desired anchor text so decided to go for it.

Personality Development looked like it would be far easier to rank for than Personal Development, so instead of just choosing one keyphrase, I decided to go for two. That is how I ended up trying to rank for 66,000 visitors worth of keywords.

On-Site SEO

There are two aspects to Search Engine Optimisation: on site and off. The first step is to make your site relevant to the keyphrase you are trying to rank for. Therefore, I put the keyphrase, Personal Development, in my:

• Website title
• Logo alt tag
• Navigation bar
• Footer (which linked back to my homepage)

Some people like to go a bit over the top with on-site SEO, but I personally don’t waste my time. On-site SEO probably makes up about 10% of rankings whereas backlinks make up the majority so that is where I wanted to spend my time. As long as I have the basics in place, I often find that it is enough.

I don’t think it’s wise to try and optimise your entire site for multiple keyphrases, so instead I created a blog post on the topic of personality development. This was an in-depth guide covering the subject which I believed would attract a lot of backlinks. It did attract some naturally, but not enough.

Building Backlinks

Whatever it is that you’re trying to rank for, this is where the hard work will come in. I’m someone who is willing to put the work into whatever I do, but I also like to kill two birds with one stone, where possible. Based on that, my plan was simple: I would grow my blog by writing guest posts for other blogs, and link back to my website with my desired anchor text links.

That was it.

I didn’t focus on directory submissions, forum links, paid links, article directories, or anything of the sort. I decided I would keep my strategy simple and try to write on as many websites as I could. It was going to take a lot of work to write enough articles for other blogs to make this work but once again: I’m someone who is willing to put the work in.

Below I have screenshotted some examples of the ‘footers’ of my guest posts:

I have written over 30 of these things so I won’t keep posting the screenshots, but I’m sure you get the idea. Even if this was not going to help me rank for the keyphrases, my guest posts allowed thousands of new readers to find my websites. There’s certainly nothing unethical about this either, unlike many SEO tactics, as I’m giving the authors free quality content for their website which took me hours to write.

Because of the work I did here, I rank in the top 10 of Google.com for both of these keyphrases. Note that the results fluctuate a lot (depending on datacentres, etc), but you should see me there.

In Summary

In reality, I ranked for far more visitors worth of keyphrases from the thousands of keywords I rank for, but I wanted to show you two examples that I purposefully focused on and how I did it. Thanks to my good friend Ali for being the inspiration for the blog post who will soon be ranking for millions of dollars worth of keywords.

If this sees like a lot of work, then ask: how much is thousands of highly targeted visitors to your website worth to your business?

My guess, is quite a lot.