When I hear things in the SEO or internet marketing industry I always like to check them out for myself. I am a typical questioner, despite the authority of the source I have to go out there and trial it anyway, this is sometimes a good thing and a bad thing.

I have always been a stronger believer that the only links that can possibly send weight are those that are indexed. If Google doesn’t index a page surely it can’t possibly consider any of the links on it are valuable right? Well my opinion is, WRONG!
Links that Google finds but decides not to index definitely count, in fact I strongly believe you can rank a site based on these type of links.

Take a look at your webmaster tools, are all the links Google is finding indexed?

As you can see I have

Ok Ok, so what if webmaster tools are showing links that aren’t indexed? This proves nothing.

Time to take it to the next level then, I don’t like outing sites for using dodgy techniques, as long as the techniques aren’t outright spam I commend them.

Anyway, without giving the website away I’ll give you some basic info, I am sure if you do a little investigation you’ll find the site, anyway here we go.

On Google.com there is a site ranking on the first page for the keyword ‘lawyer’, the site isn’t much to look at but it wasn’t there 6 months ago and the link profile is limited to say the least.

Let’s take a look at the links doing a search on open site explorer;

Around 80% of the link profile is made of links just like this, profile links, bio links, signature links.

Don’t get me wrong links like this are no secret, I have built a number myself and ranked sites using them, however it makes a total mockery of the statement ‘Google doesn’t count none indexed links’.

Now I am not suggesting for a second that you should build a link profile based on un-indexed links, however if you need to build up anchor text then why not get them from wherever you can? If a webmaster can rank for the keyword ‘lawyer’ using these type of links you can literally use them to rank for anything.

First of all apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of weeks, work has been busy and the World Cup has pretty much dominated my evenings

So now England have been dumped out shamefully I thought it might be a good idea to discuss something pretty positive that has happened to me over this World Cup period, I NOW RANK IN THE TOP 5 FOR ‘search engine optimisation’!!!

Now that I have gained a glory ranking I thought it might be a good idea to discuss how I got there. I work with clients daily that throw massive budgets at SEO and not surprisingly get results very quick, however my blog has had very little in terms of budget thrown at it and it goes to show you can make it to the top working cheap, the results will come a lot slower though.

Altogether it has taken me 18 months to position my website there; I did a lot of the work in the early stages and as my site has grown in trust the anchor text from article directories and blog carnivals have really started to count.

The truth is, in the last 3 months I have done very little link building with most of my links coming socially and none of them anchored with the target keyword (except maybe one site wide a fellow SEO kindly gave me).I genuinely believe working to a tight budget does not exclude you from achieving results as long as you’re consistent and gradually increase your investment.

Anyway enough bragging, what I want to do now is show you my exact approach to ranking SEO wizz where it currently is (4th ‘search engine optimisation’ 13th ‘seo’),

Quarter One

The first 3 months of any blog are painful, you spend 90% of your time writing and 10% reading, however there were a few fundamentals I wanted to achieve in the first Quarter, ones that I knew would see me well in the future;

- I wanted to create a hook, so I developed some tutorials, this would ensure a nice flow of natural links

- I wanted to have at least 20 posts optimised for long tail target keywords

- I made it a must to at least get one link back to each deep page/post

I knew things would be slow at first as I have created many affiliate blogs and they have all started the same way.

Quarter Two

My blog now had enough content and I could really let Google know it existed without risking the sandbox. The idea was to get as many links to the blog as possible with preferential anchor text.

- I decided to write 100 articles

- Submitted them through Article Marketer (Now content crooner)

- Mixed the anchor text between my main target keywords search engine optimisation, seo techniques, google seo, seo consultant, seo (All of which are now on the first page of Google bar ‘SEO’ however watch this space.)

This wasn’t about getting the blog to rank, it was more about building a bulk amount of links so that I could get new content indexed faster and give myself a little bit of an anchor text push.

Quarter Three

Traffic was now picking up; Google was beginning to give me a little authority so it was now time to turn up the heat. To do this I decided to write some posts that would ensure me a way of getting links in the long term, I am talking serious viral content.

There is an important definition to be made here, some people consider viral content as a way of driving masses of traffic, the problem is going viral on stumble (which I have done quite a few times) does not necessarily mean masses of links, in fact very often it doesn’t mean any. I wanted to create content that when people did find it they would link to it.

- I posted on Bing SEO vs Google and did a small case study (I rank no.1 for Bing SEO and gain new links every week with no effort)

- I posted about Link/Ranking correlation (Linked to by SEOmoz and has delivered 1000′s of visitors and recognition)

- I also completed a monster post on SEO content writing which ranks very highly and is still my third most visited page!!

This is the back bone of my website, the posts that give a return over the long period and not just an instant traffic boost. Every website should create this type of content/product/resource, something that is going to continually get new recognition.

Quarter Four

I was really beginning to rank well now but still needed more diverse links; I had some high quality links but needed a more diverse profile. To accomplish this I;

- Submitted to blog carnivals taking advantage of preferential anchor text

- Joined new forums adding my links in bio’s and signatures (not spamming, genuine forums)

- Attempted some cross linking with other bloggers (Didn’t particularly work)

The above gave me a better profile and pushed my PageRank to 4; however I was still sitting on the second page for some of my major terms.

Quarter Five

Now I had a diverse profile and some really good quality or high PageRank links, however it was time to bulk up the quantity, to do this I:

- Created some reciprocal link partners with good online buddies

- Commented on do follow blogs with ‘top commenter’ widgets (I stopped this as it didn’t really work)

The increase in the sheer quantity of links lifted me onto the first page of Google for a lot of terms; however I still needed to add something to the mix…

Quarter Six

I knew in order to reach the top five I need those ‘trusted’ links from websites long established on Google and the only way to do this was to grovel!

- I leveraged all my blogging connections and friends

- I offered links from my other sites in return for a link to SEO wizz

I only managed a few however these highly trusted links were very effective, pushing my website to the top of the tree!

You see??? No Magic, no ridiculous techniques just hard work and a smart well thought-out plan and anyone can do the same, given the right skills and commitment.

What’s my plan moving forward???

Well I can’t give everything away; however I will let you know when I’ve done it

Thanks to all who read, link to, promote and support SEO wizz, reaching the top wouldn’t have been possible without you guys.

Cheers

This post is aimed at those in the SEO/Online Marketing Industry, if you have no interest in the industry you might find this a little dull, if you do read on

I have numerous requests now asking for a post along the lines of “a day in the life of an SEO consultant” or “a day in an SEO Agency”, obviously there is an increasing amount of interest in the Search Marketing industry and people want to know more about how it works.

I guess the main issue with writing a post like this is that every agency, every consultant and every in house team will differ in their approach to SEO and Online Marketing in general. The type of clients you service has a massive impact on the techniques you use and the resources available. Some clients literally just want to see a report every month, other clients want to be actively involved in the processes, and neither is wrong, just different.

So in this post I want to give you an honest insight into the processes and departments at Branded3, of course some things I can’t disclose in the interest of the company but I will try and give you the best insight possible into roles, processes and responsibilities.

Link Building

I think the best place to start is link building, the link building team are the back bone of any good SEO outfit, and these aren’t just spammers who get links here, there and everywhere. Our link building team are looking for ‘quality’ links and we have weekly meetings discussing link strategy and creative new ways to get links, if we wanted to just spam everywhere we could outsource it for a few hundred dollars, that’s not our aim and if you’re a serious SEO outfit you need to start producing quality.

When brainstorming link building for a particular client we consider the following sort of questions:-

- What does our client have to attract links?

- Does anything need creating in order to attract links?

- What types of websites are relevant to our clients’ product?

- What other products are relevant to our clients?

- What leverage is needed to acquire the links?

- What is the competition doing?

We try and get the whole SEO department involved in this process in an attempt to be as creative as possible, we have a select time each week to discuss the link building requirements of every client we service and tend to stumble upon new ideas every week.

Just a quick note on leverage……

I know after reading the above points some of you are going to be asking “hmmm, leverage = Paid links???”………. I am not going to turn this into a paid links debate but I will say this, If a link looks like a paid link it is going to be devalued whether money passed hands or not. So if you have a blogroll link that you got from a good friend and they have 20 other blogging friends that pass good anchor text, the chances are these will be classed as paid even though you never spent a dime.

So, with regards to leverage and link acquisition in general, all I will say is ‘be smart’.

Typically our links builders will perform the following tasks;

• Competition Analysis
• Viral Marketing Brainstorming and Implementation
• Create and maintain online relationships
• Source relevant links agreed upon in client meetings
• Report to Head of Search on rankings, link acquisitions and quality details

We have a very strict quality process with regards to acquiring links taking into account:

- Pagerank

- Moz Metrics

- Inbound Links

- Outbound Links

- Indexation

- Trust

- Relevance

These are obviously very broad but it gives you a good idea of what we look for in a typical link.

We tend to avoid using our link building team for acquiring directory links, article links or press releases, not because these types of links are worthless but because we can outsource them relatively easy whilst still having a say over the quality. We differentiate between premium links and ‘content/user generated links’ they all have a place but we prefer to use our internal resources to develop quality link acquisitions.

On Page Optimisation, Keyword Research and Site Auditing

I and Patrick are both firm believers in on page optimisation and the effects it can have on the traffic of any website.

We have an ‘on page team’ who constantly work on enhancing the content and general optimisation of our clients. The tasks we complete are varied but the main aim is to better target page keywords and to fill in any gaps with lucrative terms, what Patrick refers to as ‘gap analysis’.

A typical site audit involves the following;

• Keyword Research
• Page optimisation – completed on every page of a website
• Site Architecture
• URL Structuring
• Internal Linking
• Content Brainstorming

Some of these practices merge and every client has different needs with regards to content and on page issues, however when a new client relationship begins we always start with an audit making sure everything is in place ready for the link building to begin.

Our content team work extremely close with the Pay Per Click side of Branded3 ensuring the keywords we are targeting are the most profitable and that traffic potential is as accurate as possible, often even if we don’t take care of the PPC for a particular client we ask for access to their Adwords campaign.

Pay Per Click

At Branded3 we class ourselves as ‘natural search’ experts, however we also get involved in the search marketing side of things, our intention was clear when we launched ppcagencies.org.

Our aim with Search Engine Marketing is probably the same as every other agency, we are constantly looking to reduce costs and increase conversions producing the best possible ROI. We see PPC as an ongoing management task, much like SEO, removing unprofitable keywords, increasing ad copy and landing page relevancy and ensuring our clients ads are seen at the most profitable times in the most profitable locations.

We report and discuss on PPC activities weekly so we can quickly get on top of any account issues.

Our main platform is obviously Google Adwords, however, we do use Facebook and MSN ads with limited effect if I am honest.

The Many Meetings

Yes here at Branded3 Search we are no different to any other agency and have a diary full of meetings including;

- Client Updates and Reports

- Traffic and Conversion Analysis

- New Business Meetings

- Brainstorming and Planning

- One to One Consultant Meetings

- Team Meetings and Feedback

- Training and HR

It can seem like a lot of time spent discussing instead of doing but if carried out efficiently meetings are essential to the success of the business. They help us prioritise, plan and implement, often you will find that someone has a great idea about how we can improve a particular campaign but unless they have a formal procedure in which to put forward their ideas they will never do it. These meetings allow us to stay on top of the major goals for each client and encourage creativity on all levels.

A Typical Day

A typical day for anyone in the online marketing industry will depend on their position, the clients they work with and the type of work they do (agency/in house/consultants). I head the search team at Branded3 Search and will give you a little insight into what a typical day for consists of;

8.15am – I try and hit the office at this time, however some of my colleagues may beg to differ . I spend the first hour of every morning going through my check list of urgent tasks and emails; this is an attempt to prioritise for the day and to ensure I complete what I’ve set out to do. Often they will be quick fixes such as emailing a client or answering a client query, however sometimes they can be large tasks such as hunting down an indexation issue or dealing with a severe rankings drop, these have to be scheduled in to be completed that day or week depending on urgency.

10.00am – We have a meeting with each member of the team to discuss the clients they are dealing with and how the campaign is doing in general (usually a weekly meeting). We discuss things such as;

• Links
• Traffic
• Viral campaigns
• Brainstorm new ideas
• Set action points for the month

We also discuss any potential issues or requests from the clients that are outside the norm….

12.00am – Lunch time!!!! This is usually spend at my desk with Fish and Chips Thursday being the highlight of the week!!

1.00pm – After lunch I like get my hands dirty with the link building, highlighting those clients that need an extra push that particular month and going out there and trying to create some fruitful relationships. I think it is important for any Head of Search/SEO Manager to get involved in the day to day search work. Not only does this keep them skilled in the practice but also allows them to better understand the issues consultants and analysts may be facing in their roles.

2.30pm – I will now look back to my task list and begin to work down them, the ones in the afternoon are the more time consuming issues and they can vary from sorting out bad press, problem solving on page issues, brainstorming viral ideas, advising on new page set up, diving into Google Analytics, communicating with PR companies and agreeing new terms with link partners. These are just a few of the many tasks I could deal with, I think that’s why I love the industry so much, it gives you the chance to work with a different problem every week, particularly within an agency environment.

4.30pm – I like to spend the last 30 mins to an hour checking in campaign process and seeing what links we have managed to acquire that particular day. We don’t have link targets as such; however what I will say is that I would prefer to see 2 Quality links at the end of any one day rather than 10 low quality links.

5.00-30pm – At the end of every day I spend time making sure I am ready for the following day with tasks clearly defined and important contacts recorded in the diary.

Of course there are a multitude of other things I do and times when office hours extend beyond the norm, however this should give anyone who is thinking about entering the industry a broad enough overview.

I realise not everyone that reads this SEO wizz is in the industry but hope this has been interesting to those that are.

If there are any posts anyone would like to see on here, just let me know, always happy to look at putting any sort of content together.

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about sitewide links or links in footers. Many experienced SEO’s and internet marketers have openly slammed them as being spammy and carrying little in terms of link juice and authority; however the truth is they are very effective links in terms of both ranking and building up your overall website authority.

Now from what we can see at Branded3 Search there has definitely been an update in terms of sitewide link profiles with many major players losing rankings because of their “sitewide” heavy profile. You only have to look at the SERPS for ‘SEO’ and ‘search engine optimisation’, the top ten are 60% different from what they were 3 months ago, in the UK at least.

Despite what seems to be an obvious attack on sitewide links they still remain effective if used properly and in moderation. SEO wizz has around 600 domains linking in and I can honestly say only 5 or 6 are sitewide links, if I was advising a client I would never want more than 1 in 30 links being a sitewide, this is just my opinion, SEO has never been an exact science, all I would say is use sitewide links intelligently.

So now we have the introduction out of the way, what is the best way to use these types of links for maximum impact?

The Homepage

Your homepage is always going to be the strongest page of your website, however overloading it with sitewide links isn’t going to help your rankings or traffic in the long run. Everyone knows anchor text is key to high rankings but what they don’t realise is the rules that apply to anchor text don’t apply to link profiles.

For example….

Your link profile needs to be diverse with lots of unique domains pointing back to your pages.

Anchor text does not need to be diverse – If you had 400 links pointing to your homepage passing massive juice but with the anchor text as your domain name, the chances are you’re not going to rank, however throw a couple of anchor optimised sitewide links into the mix and you could well see yourself in the top 5.

I demonstrated this a month ago, I haven’t really targeted the keyword ‘SEO consultant’ in my anchor text, my site has good authority so I switched my title tag to include it, this got me to the second page with very little anchor text links, however when I placed just 1 sitewide link optimised for the keyword, this was enough to push me into the top 3.

So…. Concentrate on building a diverse link profile and use sitewide links smartly to boost your anchor text.

Deeper Pages

Many do not realise yet or understand the power of strong links to deep pages. Many of the posts we write or guides we put together are filled with longtail search queries, low hanging fruit that’s just waiting to be plucked.

I have blogged before on how to optimise our posts to target these but a healthy sitewide link can make all the difference.

Now these are very hard to achieve but let me explain a little, if you can get just 1 quality sitewide link to a deep page of your website you will rank in the top 5 for every longtail keyword on the page. I have been fortunate enough to work with clients who have huge amounts of traffic (6 million uniques a month) and something that is key to success is the sheer amount of external links they have pointing to the deep pages of their websites.

I had a client who built 2 sitewide links to all their ‘listing’ pages and in 1 year they were receiving 250,000 unique visitors from Google every month.

So if you can, go for it, hit those deep pages with a sitewide and your traffic will rocket on that particular post.

To round up then, sitewide links are not evil, they aren’t going to get you penalised, however if your link profile is made up of hundreds of them expect Google to devalue some. If you or your company are in the business of adding a footer link in your clients websites, optimised with the anchor text of your choice, expect that to stop working real soon, those days are over.

I always worry about posting new found research as some clever dick always pops up to tell you they discovered it in 1999, however I have noticed something in the rankings recently that has made me re think Google rankings.

The Story

OK so I decided a couple of weeks ago to rank for “SEO consultant”, just something I fancied really, not the most competitive term.

Anyway….. I have obviously been keeping an eye on the rankings over the past few weeks on this particular keyword and a few more as well and there has been some pretty dramatic trends in the rankings.

One day I checked and I was 7th for “seo consultant” refreshed and I was 15th, refreshed again and I was 4th!!!

It’s not just that keyword either, I searched “search engine optimisation” I was 11th, refreshed and I was 26th and again and I was 7th.

Now rankings have always been up and down but this was a little crazier than usual.

Webmaster Tools Update

So…. Google announce the webmaster tools up date only a few days ago which explains that they are now tracking click through rates in the keyword sections of webmaster tools.

Now I don’t know how accurate these figures are and they seem to differ quite a bit to Google analytics, however the data it presents is interesting.

Just take a look at the below screen shot;

Now I am only using “bing SEO” as the example but the data establishes a few things across multiple keywords.

The first thing you notice is that out of 320 impressions I only ranked first 260 times (these impressions figures aren’t accurate as I usually receive around 600 visitors on this keyword a month), this means I don’t rank number one, I only rank there around 70% of the time.

The Old Theory

The old SEO theory determines your rank based on page optimisation and the number of links your page/domain has, the only thing affecting rankings would be competition in Google’s algorithm. I now think this is outdated and wrong, over the last 6 months I and other SEO’s have seen massive fluctuations in rankings suggesting a new way of ranking sites and determining traffic.

My Theory

Well, this is what I suspect, Google have confirmed nothing yet or any other SEO authority but the evidence I have seen strongly suggests rotational rankings.

Let me explain…. You do a search in Google on your main key term and you rank 4th, so you rank 4th??? Wrong you may rank 4th in that instance but you could complete the same search 10 seconds later and you rank 10th, a huge difference not only in ranking but the traffic too.

So… Google determines the rank of your site determined on page factors and links and then ranks you in a range of positions could be 5 – 10 or it could be position 2 to 4 pages back, depending on the person searching, there location, personalised search, time of day.

Ultimately how well optimised your site is determines how often you rank in a top position.

So your aim is not to rank in the top 5, which is now impossible, your aim should be to rank their most of the time.

What Does This Mean?

It means quite a lot.

1 – Determining traffic in a certain position is now impossible

2 – Your ranking position can change every second even if you’re searching on the same IP using an incognito window on chrome

3 – You can never say I rank number one, but only I rank number one most of the time

You see there are so many websites competing for the same space that Google has no choice but to use a rotational system like this and for all we know they may use the click through rate to decide whether your ranking gets better or worse, maybe.

I’d love to know everyone’s thoughts on this and if anyone has noticed these changes.

Testing keyword difficulty has never been a straight forward task, what do you test with? Links in? Links to domain? Search Volume? Awords Competition?

The truth is that all of them contribute toward the ‘keyword difficulty’ factor.

This is another post when I am going to sing the praises of the SEOmoz crewe, since they stopped delivering SEO services I have noticed a huge investment in their tools, mostly in making linkscape data more reliable but also tweaking the current tool box.

A tool that was announced this week was the new keyword difficulty tool, it breaks down all the metrics for you, so if your an SEO professional there is no better visualisation tool for client proposals, in my opinion.

Just check out some of the features:-

Adwords Data

Not only does the tool give you a difficulty factor in the form of a percentage (the higher it is the harder it is to rank) but it also gives you the relevant Adwords search including broad and exact match.

This is all the information you really need when trying to determine the potential of target keywords however, it doesn’t stop there.

Page / Domain Authority Metrics

The tool nicely shows the page and domain authority of the top ten sites, letting you see exactly what you’re up against.

Page authority is the SEO metric for the overall authority of any given page on the web based on link juice and authority, domain authority is based on the entire links to the domain as a whole.

Break Down Of Links

As we should know now, all links are not equal and we need to be aware of how many links our competition have, also how much authority those links are passing.

On top of that we now know that the amount of links to a domain is almost as strong a determining factor as the amount of links to a particular page.

As we can see the tool nicely breaks down the link data showing how many unique domains are linking to each of the top ten results.

Now if you’re not an SEO or internet marketer your probably not going to pay for the tool, however if you are an SEO professional, in my opinion the tools are the best on the market.

This particular tool can be used for more than just helping clients visualise their competition within their niche, it can also be used for mass research on the SERPS for multiple keywords.

Before you begin any SEO campaign there are a few things you really need to think about, one of them is “who are my competition?”.

If you intend to compete in a certain market you need to firstly be clear about your keywords and secondly clear about your competition, or more importantly what your competition are doing right.

There are many different aspects to look at both on and off page however, I would like to show you a really simple way of collecting your competitor’s links so that you can have a full spreadsheet of all the links that are helping those topping Google rank where they rank.

Now before I go into this I’d like to come clean, the tool you need to use is a paid tool, I am not promoting it but just to let you know at this point you may need to invest a little.

SEOmoz

I really do hate sounding like a fan boy but the truth is when it comes to SEO tools SEOmoz have it licked, yes there are plenty of decent analysis tools out there but the sheer amount of the web SEOmoz are able to crawl makes their service unbeatable in my opinion.

Open Site Explorer

One of the tools that makes up part of their package is Open Site Explorer, it is like Yahoo’s site explorer on steroids!

Anyway enough of the promotion, how do we use this tool to really strip down our competitors link profile?

Well here is what I would do…..

Get Those Links!!

First you want to head over to the tool, then simply input the page you want to investigate.

Yes I am using SEOmoz as the tester but they won’t mind

Once you have input your details this will bring you up a nice list of links, your competitors links, but it is not quite the finished product yet and we need to play around with it.

OK….

Just under the main nav you have various drop down menus, this allows you to filter out certain links…

At this point I would suggest filtering out no follow links and filtering out any internal links.

You can use internal links to see how your competition link to their high ranking pages, can be insightful, but that’s for another post.

So….

Now you have your list of links it is time to export them into an excel spreadsheet using the option below the drop downs.

(If you are downloading a particularly large link profile then this may take a few minutes depending on your connection speed.)

OK so we have all the details in a lovely excel spreadsheet, but were not done…..

Let’s neaten it up a little

So you have a spreadsheet looking something like this?

OK…

Firstly get rid of the nonsense at the top, check.

Now there are plenty of things in this spreadsheet we don’t need.

• Highlight the ‘URL’ column and filter out all duplicate cells using the ‘Data’ and Advanced filter options in excel.
• Secondly delete the title, followable, 301, origin and target url columns.

Now sort the columns in order of page authority and you have a list of your competitors links in the order of the most powerful.

Neaten up the spreadsheet a little and go ahead and download more of your competitor’s links!!

You are never going to beat those at the top unless you can get the same links, no you don’t have to and shouldn’t mimic the entire profile just pick out the best ones.

Recently at Branded3 we have been experimenting with exact match domains and exploring opportunities to increase relevant and hopefully profitable traffic.

I don’t know how much experience you have had in trying to register these types of domains or attempting to rank them but it is really really easy and you will be surprised how many keyword rich domains there are still left to register.

Now don’t get me wrong you are going to be hard pressed to land high traffic exact match domains, as most have been snapped up on all extensions, however with some good keyword research you should be able to register some longer tail “relevant” keywords that can help bring instant traffic to your site.

So here is a quick image to demonstrate a little:-

Ok let’s map this out a little better then.

How do I find the keywords?

I would do this using the google keyword tool, switching the results to exact match. You only really want to be registering a keyword as a domain if it has 300 searches per month or more.

Do I redirect the domain?

No….

You need this domain to rank in its own right, only 301 a domain if you want to pass on its link juice or if it has a lot of brand search. This method is for quick rankings and quick traffic.

Use a similar template to your site and fill it with some unique content optimised and linking back to your main site.

How long will this take to rank? Is it really worth it?

First of all if you didn’t know already, exact domains are so easy to rank for the keyword they are targeted to;

Let me share with you a classic example:-

ppcagencies.org is a domain Branded3 registered about 2 weeks ago, where do you think the domain is ranked now with 2 links??

Take a look:-

That is 3rd position by the way :p

Now don’t get me wrong this keyword is not a huge traffic keyword but if we get it to No.1 we will see 500-750 visits per month for $10 and 2 links!!

Will it not take too long to set up multiple domains??

Again, No…

I personally would head over to hostgator, open up an account to host multiple domains and point my new registered domains there.

Then all you need to do is add wordpress (or whatever CMS you use) upload the template and create one page of content.

Then repeat..!

If you have a brand new site this is one of the easiest ways to generate very quick traffic and so easy to do. One word of warning is not to do too many of these if your site is a new born, you don’t want to make it look like you’re developing a link network, however still register some of your main keyword domains to add over time. 3 domains should be ok to start with and then build it up over time.

One question I am always asked is “does the domain extension matter? ie .co.uk , .com , .org , .net????

Absolutely not, if you have the exact domain and know how to build a handful of quality links then a top 3 ranking is almost guaranteed.

When you deal with link building day in day out you really begin to notice even the smallest changes in Google’s algorithm.

Just before Christmas site wide links seemed to be giving some real pull, then there were the in content gems that seemed to instantly increase ranking.

However, in my opinion Google has switched its emphasis again and is now putting more weight on ‘fresh’ links, links found on pages never crawled before.

Fresh links have always been precious; however the impact of them has been blurred due to large amounts of site wide link buying.

Now Google has really got its act together and not only is the impact noticeable in terms of the links we build for clients but it has also been felt in the SERPS.

Recent SERP Changes

On the UK domain Google has really shaken up the top results, penalising sites with a lot of site wide links and giving more power to exact match domains and a more diverse link profile.

Some sites that ranked on the first page for “search engine optimisation” have now dropped back on to the second page which basically makes them invisible.

Changes In Approach

So how does this change what we do on a daily basis, well here are my thoughts;

• We need to all become writers and get involved in guest blogging, reporting and writing for news sites within our niche
• Press releases really begin to make a mark, a press release can flood you with fresh in content links. You will have to pay for the best services but it is definitely worth it.
• Viral content becomes even more important, make sure everything you write can be easily shared and write news worthy content. I am not going to go over viral content again but if you’re unsure about how to write good SEO content read my article on SEO content writing.
• I have always been a fan and the new importance of fresh links makes blog carnivals priceless links

These are just a few ideas and I am sure you can think of many more, don’t give up other link building methods, but if you’re looking for a real ranking boost, get yourself some fresh links.

Onething that I haven’t discussed that often is building links to links, I think I may have mentioned it in the comments every now and again but never really explained it.

The Problem

You need links with anchor text – Thats fairly straight forward

You need links from relevant pages – That is just about doable

You need links that flow PageRank – Ah thats not so easy or is it??

Now I am a firm believer in the fact that a link is a link regardless of PageRank, however if you really want to compete for a key term you are going to need some healthy PR flowing links.

But How Do we Get Them??

You may be able to control what anchor text a particular link sends you but you are never going to control the pagerank, or are you??

The Solution

Getting PageRank or toolbar Pagerank to a deep page is not as hard as you think, especially if the overall domain is a decent quality.

Look over your link profile, do you have any links sitting on authority domains but without any pagerank? If so 10-20 links could bump that page from 0 to 3 quite easily. Then what are you left with?

A link, anchored on a PR3 page on a domain with a homepage PR of 6 or above.

How many articles have you written on strong domains? Guest posts? do follow blogs?

Just a little bit of extra work can make all the difference.

So How Do We Do It?

Well this is what I would advise and I have used this technique many times over and it works well.

I would pick only links I had on the very best domains, if the homepage PR was 5 or over and I had a link on a deep page I would target it. I have done this with countless articles on ezine articles.

First you need to have the unique article wizard or your favourite article service, this tool allows you to merge three seperate articles to create unique versions. These versions will get a lot of exposure and a large amount will be indexed.

On each of the seperate/similar articles you are going to use one link to point at a deep page of your site and one link to point to the link you want to boost. This will make sure a) the link on the authority domain is indexed and b) it will get a minimum PR of 1.

Not bad but we can improve this.

Search for dofollow social bookmarking sites, Mixx is one I prefer. Submit the page to your favourite sites (be careful though some won’t accept pages on article directories) pick maybe 4-5.

This will give the pages you have links on an additional boost and make the link up to 10 times more effective than a regular PR0 link.

This is a technique many SEO’s use and it is what SEO is all about really, taking those things that are common knowledge and making them a little better. Everybody knows you can get links from article directories but not everyone knows how to supercharge them!

Try it out and let me know if you have any issues.