How to Get Great Links to Your Website
Dang, Austria is beautiful.
I spent all Monday traveling from Lithuania (which is also pretty) to a small town just outside of Salzburg here in Austria. We landed in Vienna and did a 3-hour drive through what felt like the scenery from “The Sound of Music”.
It’s absolutely gorgeous here.
But with all the travel and the other things to do, I don’t have much time for:
a) responding to emails (so I apologize if you are a Mastermind Member and you haven’t heard from me in a while – I’ll be back to work next Monday)
b) Writing out long InternetIndependence.com emails
Fortunately, I have SEO Rambo, Rick Porter, on speed-dial.
Here are two recent II reader questions Rick has answered for us. This will help you get more traffic to your website – and some great links to your site to help.
My apologies if you’re a beginner…this could be over your head. BUT I will be back with a QnA on Friday.
Question #1: I see www.internetindependence.com is a PR2 all ready. How did you do that?
(NOTE: PR2 = page rank 2, a measure of popularity in the Google search world – the higher the PR of your site, the better)
Answer from Rick Porter: All you need is a handful of good contextual backlinks from some high PR domains and several contextual backlinks from blog networks and article directories
Here is a sampling of a few high PR backlinks on free blogging sites that Internet Independence has. There are hundreds of these free sites to start blogs on to promote your sites.
If you are going to take the time to do it I would suggest finding the highest PR sites available and putting quality content on the sites so that moderators don’t delete the posts.
It doesn’t take a lot of backlinks to get to PR1 or PR2 if you are loading up some links from high PR domains like this.
Blogspot PR8- http://turbulencetraining.blogspot.com/2011/05/books.html
Typepad PR8 –http://rick31.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/3-proven-internet-marketing-tips-made-especially-for-beginners.html
Gather – PR6: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979140474
Ezine PR6: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-One-Internet-Marketing-Tip-You-Must-Know-To-Avoid-Business-Failure&id=6025033
Question: I have noticed as of late it looks as though the only search hits I get are from Google images. In the past this was very rare but now it seems as this is all I get. Any ideas as to what happened?
Answer from Rick Porter: This is a case where you must look at your Google Analytics to see which pages were specifically getting the traffic and for what keywords. There are so many reasons it’s hard to cover in 1 short post but I’ll touch on a couple of them.
1) Check to see if the pages that were getting traffic are easily accessible from your homepage.
If it takes several clicks to find your way to them it may be that Google can no longer get to them quickly either so they have concluded that those posts are no longer important.
Site structure and crawling speed is super important for rankings these days. A good practice is to take your highest converting and highest traffic keywords and make sure they are somewhere on the home page.
For a good example of a very clean and simple site where Google can get to each keyword/page with 1 click take a look at our Shapeshifter site
http://www.shapeshifterworkoutsrock.com/
Notice in the upper right hand sidebar I have placed a widget that has our keywords with a link to the article. This is a much more optimized way to do it instead of having a widget that has the actual titles of the posts.
For example – I have in the widget ‘bodyweight workouts’ – however, the name of the post is: ‘How to get back in shape with shapeshifter bodyweight workouts’
I don’t want to rank for the keyword ‘How to get back in shape with shapeshifter bodyweight workouts’, I want to rank for ‘bodyweight workouts’ and ‘shapeshifter bodyweight workouts’.
Since ‘bodyweight workouts’ is the most competitive of the keywords that is how I optimized it in my widget, so that Google sees a homepage backlink with just the keyword as the anchor text.
If the blog posts you used to rank for are buried deep within your blog it might be too hard for Google to find them. Setup your site structure so that your most important keywords are only 1 click away.
2) Make sure your tags are NOT indexed.
If you are using tags as part of your site structure and you are indexing them you will get duplicate content penalties and rankings will fall off the charts (although not in all cases, Google is very inconsistent with this).
Think of all the tag pages as just duplicate pages on your site that mucks up the search engines, Google doesn’t want to index them so don’t make your tag pages compete with your primary pages.
I never index my tag pages, but recently I ran a test because I like to test things and occasionally tank my own sites into the gutter so I can reverse engineer the problem and bring them back.
During the Shapeshifter launch I left tags indexed on our site so that we would have a flood of extra pages in the search engine, as far as the a launch goes it worked well, BUT, when the next Panda update hit the site got hammered and all those duplicate pages caused the entire site to drop (sorry Craig, it was for SEO science).
After it tanked I went back to the blog and deindexed all the tags and now the rankings have almost all come back. I prefer to have valid proof from my own experiments rather than heresay from the ‘gurus’.
3) if you are ranking for some pictures that is fine, consider it a bonus, but it probably won’t net in traffic that actually converts.
How you get ranked for pictures is actually quite simple. When you create an ‘alt tag’ for a picture on your blog post Google starts puts it into the images index. When you search a keyword you will usually see a sampling of a few pictures, those are the highest ranked relevant pictures related to those keywords.
If you have a post with a picture with an alt tag, and the title of the post also has that keyword, and the backlinks to the post also have that keyword then it will probably rank high in the images text.
Google ‘Rick Porter‘ and look for ridiculous picture of the guy holding a red lightsaber on page 1, that’s me. lol
That’s the plan that would work best.
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NOTE from Craig: Amazing information as always, Rick.
If you are serious about getting traffic to your site, you should start implementing this information ASAP.
You don’t need to do it yourself.
Rick is giving you step by step tips on what to do. Hire a kid to do it.
No one needs to be a rocket surgeon to benefit from this info.
Make it happen – don’t make excuses.
To your success,
Craig Ballantyne
Comment on the blog => http://www.InternetIndependence.com
“Rationalizations are generally convenient evasions of reality and are used as excuses for dishonest behavior, mistakes, and/or laziness.”
– Kekich Credo #20