What I and probably Google too hope is that you won’t just learn more but also un-learn some of the super duper complicated SEO stuff that you can find on the net.

So what does the Google SEO Guide talk about? I covered most of the on-site SEO in one of my previous articles so here are just a few interesting ideas that I found in this SEO Guide:

1.    Google does not talk about keyword density. This tells me that the title tag and the anchor text (which the SEO Guide mentions quite a few times!) linking to that page are the most important for rankings.

2.    Google hints at the LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing which “could improve your results”:

Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time baseball fan might search for [nlcs], an acronym for the National League Championship Series, while a new fan might use a more general query like [baseball playoffs]. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results.

3.    Update your site and create fresh, unique content. In my opinion you should update your site at least once a week and you’ll be doing very well in Google.

4.    The anchor text of your internal links is very important and I think this is one of the secrets of why SBI sites rank so well. Ken Evoy teaches how to internally link your site in the Action Guide.

Think about anchor text for internal links too - You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better.

5.    Google knows about the social website’s artifical schemes where you may try to bookmark your site in 20 different sites and gain links to your article. Keep it real, people…

Avoid:
• attempting to promote each new, small piece of content you create; go for big, interesting items
• involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services

In my experience this SEO Guide covers 90% of what you need to know about search engine optimization and it helps you keeping things simple. Consider how many webmasters out there don’t know anything about SEO but Google still has to find out whether their content is good and rank it high based on only a few keywords and links describing their articles.

If you add just the ideas from this short SEO Guide to your pages and websites, you’ll do really well in Google. Your thoughts?

My friend told me a few days ago that he was delaying his decision to finally start an online business because he felt that the competition is too tough. He had an idea for a niche and typed a few keywords into Google to see who was his main competition.

The top spots were taken by about.com, consumersearch.com and other massive websites. Not only have these website pagerank 6, 7 or 8 and Alexa rating below 10,000, there are also very skilled writers posting their articles.

“How I am going to beat them? Impossible.”

Here are 3 reasons why this fear is empty:

They dominate only for a few keywords. These sites are optimized for a few keywords and they do rank highly for them. But let me tell you this: my tennis website was found for 7825 different keywords in October of 2008.

I have optimized the site for maybe 100 keywords and the rest just happened. It’s the so called long tail and it brings a LOT of traffic.

Pagerank isn’t everything. I have a website with pagerank 3 that keeps changing the #1 spot with a website with pagerank 5. My site is themed around a certain product and the competing site is not. Google is smart enough to recognize the specialized topic of my site and push it higher in the rankings.

Google cannot tell whether your article is helpful or not. For example this blog has plenty of very good articles (I hope so) but it receives only 50 daily visitors. But one of my other sites has had all articles written by a hired writer who researched the web and created new articles based on already available information on the web.

Those articles mean nothing new and are not written by an expert, but that site still receives over 2500 visitors per day.

You don’t have to write like a Pullitzer prize journalist in order to start an online business that earns good money. Success in any field is based on 5% talent and 95% hard work.

Put in the hard work of writing 200 keyword optimized solid (not perfect) articles and you’ll be rewarded with very nice traffic figures from Google, Yahoo and other sources. Nice traffic will also bring nice earnings.

You’ll also learn tons of stuff about starting an online business and you’ll become more experienced and will make fewer and fewer mistakes. If you wait for that perfect moment to start, there will always be something to distract you and delay your decision.

If you have any other fears or doubts about starting your online business, share them in the comments below and my readers and I will do our best to remove those nagging fears and help you start your journey towards financial and personal freedom.

There are many strategies on building valuable links by finding relevant blogs. In this article I will show you how to build relevant, quality links by using an old but well-proven method. Let’s begin…

The first thing you need to do is find relevant blogs. However, you should remember that you are looking for relevant and quality blogs with high PR. To find these blogs, you need to develop your searching strategy.

The first place to search is popular blog directories. One of the most popular is the BOTW blog directory. Blogs included in BOTW’s (Best Of The Web) listings are of high quality and have been reviewed manually by an actual person. BOTW is also one of the oldest and most respected directories on the net, which tells you that you should be able to find some juicy links for your site here.

I suggest you also install SEO Quake. This handy little tool is great, and will show you how old the blog is, the PR, inbound and outbound links, plus other features that should help you to determine the link’s value.

Once you have found the right section of the blog, it is time to start working. I use Mozilla for this task because I like the tab feature (Internet Explorer also now has this feature). I simply right click on every link and open it in a new tab.

When I have opened all the links in separate tabs, I simply start with the first one. Blog owners will generally have a contact form, but you will probably find high PR blogs that are missing contact information. In this case, I recommend that you leave comments to some of the posts and ask the blog owner for a link exchange. Explain the advantages of a link exchange, but don’t write a book!

I recommend that you open notepad or another editor and write a link exchange template. Here is an example (modify it you want):

Dear _____
My name is ______  _______
I am the webmaster of http://_______________________________________
In order to increase the ranking of my site, I am looking for quality and relevant sites to exchange links with.
I was browsing the _________ directory and came across your blog.
I found it very informative and I believe that your blog will benefit my visitors, and I would therefore like to exchange links with your blog.
I recently came across your site through a search and found it beneficial and informative for my site’s visitors. I would like to offer you a link exchange with my site.
I would really appreciate a positive response from you.
My e-mail address is: _____@__________
Thanks for your time.
Best Regards, _____________________

After you are done with BOTW, you can continue with other directories. Another popular blog directory is the Blog catalog community. However, you will be able to find many blog directories by simply searching for “blog directory.”

One thing that is beneficial to this type of link exchange is that many blog owners don’t have a clue as to what page rank is. One of the webmasters of a PR 5 blog e-mailed me and asked what PR actually means. I referred him to a Google page where PR is explained. However, he never responded to me and my link is still on his blog.

Keep in mind that many webmasters are lazy, which gives you a big advantage. If you add some general SEO to your site and ensure some high PR links, it will only be a matter of time before you reach a good SERP (search engine ranking position).

Make sure that blog owners use the <a href= tag when linking to you. I always control my link and ask others to change it if they use JavaScript or some other linking method that can’t be followed by spiders. You should not forget the anchor text, as it is crucial for your SERP. Good Luck.

This is the basis of Ken Evoy’s ‘Site Build It’ program, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of high traffic websites based on this model.

On the other hand, you have the bloggers. They stick to their model of running a blog, which is actually a website from the perspective of both search engines and most visitors. Blogs are typically updated more often than websites and are more time-oriented – meaning they write about something that is happening right now in their industry or field of interest.

I have found that using both, a large content website and a blog, is a great combination and others have also recommended this approach.

Using examples from my main tennis site and tennis blog, we will now look at seven reasons why you need to have a website AND a blog. (I suggest you open both sites in tabs and then come back to check my advice)

1. Links to your main site from your blog. Links are the key to higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting quality, relevant links with the anchor text of your choosing is not easy. Your blog allows you to create a link from any page of your blog to any page of your site using your chosen anchor text.

Examples:

a)    I can link from the homepage of my pagerank 4 blog to the main Tier2 pages of my main site and thus add a lot of link power to these T2 pages. This of course helps immensely with respective T2 page rankings in SERPs. Check the links in the sidebar pointing to Tennis Tips, Tennis Instruction, and other T2 pages.

b)    I can also link from individual posts to other pages of my main site using a variety of anchor texts to boost my sites rankings with keyword variations and more pagerank: Knee bend and racquet drop when serving

2. Quality 3- or 4-way link exchanges. A blog with a good pagerank gives me the power to negotiate very good link exchanges. The visible pagerank is still the main concern for many webmasters when you negotiate a link exchange.

Example:

Check the sidebar of my tennis blog again and you’ll see that I link to the ‘Fuzzy Yellow Balls’ website in my Tennis Blogs section. I am giving them a pagerank 4 homepage link and, in return, the ‘Fuzzy Balls’ site links to my ‘TennisMindGame’ site from their homepage.

I also provide them with a testimonial so that my link is not in the footer or somewhere else where it could be mistaken for a bought link and the Fuzzy Balls site could be penalized for that, which would make the link to my main site worthless.

3. Reciprocal links with other blogs for higher pagerank and traffic. Bloggers are typically very aware of the distinction between a blog and website and don’t want to “mess” with websites. They are much happier to have a “peer”, a fellow blogger, ask them for a link exchange and will be much more willing to agree.

Example:

Head back to the Tennis Blogs section in the sidebar of my blog and check the tennis blogs I link to. Then see if those blogs also link back! This helps me to increase the pagerank of my blog, which I can then direct to my main site to increase its SERPs.

4. The blog allows you to answer questions and create more interesting content. Your main website should be based on keyword research in your niche area. That means that most pages on your site are optimized for certain keywords that visitors frequently use on search engines such as Google.

Typical keywords in my tennis niche are tennis tips, how to play tennis, tennis lessons, tennis instruction, mental tennis, and so on.

Once you get some traffic to your main site, you’ll also start receiving questions through your contact form. Answering these questions almost never results in a keyword-focused page, although it is beneficial to the visitor(s), since it solves a problem.

Example:

Check the posts in the Tennis Parents category. Almost all of these posts are questions and answers and are, hopefully, useful to parents of tennis kids.

5. A blog is very quickly indexed by Google and you can get short bursts of traffic when you optimize a post about a current event. Google knows that most blogs write about current events so it indexes accordingly and pushes them higher in SERPs when they are optimized for the right words.

Example:

I wrote a post about Rafael Nadal beating Federer in the Wimbledon final. As a result; I got over 800 visitors in one day. This was because many people were searching for information about Rafael Nadal and Google placed my post in the top 5 SERP for a few days.

6. Blogs can be listed in Blog directories and sites that list top blogs. This again helps to increase the link popularity. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to get those links with a typical static content site.

Example:

My tennis blog is listed in alltop.com or, more specifically, on this pagerank 5 tennis related page: http://tennis.alltop.com/

7. Blogs allows users to post comments. This adds interest and interaction to the users site visit. Of course, they also build additional content related to the main topic of the post. Once a person has commented on a blog, it is very likely that they will return and check other visitor’s opinions and, eventually, become a regular reader and commenter.

Example:

Check the comments on this interesting post about Sampras vs. Federer…

Before you rush off to start your new blog, here are a few additional words of advice.

It will take some time to build good link popularity. Your blog won’t rank anywhere at first, so you’ll be writing many posts and getting about seven visitors per day. Also, ensure that you have enough interesting content to enable you to update your blog at least once a week.

If you feel that you have content that doesn’t really fit into your keyword-focused static site, and you have some extra time to hunt blog links, then consider starting a blog.

The website/ blog combo will give you an edge in your niche market and will help you to become an even greater authority on your chosen topic.

Q: Hi Tomaz,

After 9 months of working at my 4 x niche site. I am reaching about 50 to 100 unique visitors per day (traffic fluctuate daily). All stats are from captured from statcounter. As it has been already close to 1 year since I started my sites, I was wondering if you can be kind enough to share any comments and whether I and heading in the right direction:

Site A (Non Site Build It) - Started in 29 Dec ‘07

Traffic : About 8 to 10 uniques per day.

Content : Add 2 articles per week.

Links building: Submit to 5 free directories daily.
Has not done any other links building activities at all.

Monetization: Nil

Site B (Non Site Build It) - Started in 6 Jan ‘08

Traffic : About 49 to 98 uniques per day.

Content : Add 2 articles per week.

Links building: Submit to 5 free directories daily.
Subscribe to a few paid 2nd tier directories only.

Monetization: Nil

Site C (Non Site Build It) - Started in 29 Dec ‘07

Traffic : About 85 to 120 uniques per day.

Content : Add 2 articles per week.

Links building: Upload 20 to 30 articles to ezine articles thus far.
Contributed another 20 to 30 articles to Article Marketer to distribute to articles directories.
Subscribe to a few paid 2nd tier directories and also managed to get into Dmoz directory.
Submit to 5 free directories daily.

Monetization: Nil

Site D (Site Build It Site) - Started in 24 April ‘08

Traffic : About 49-82 uniques per day

Content : Add 2 articles per week.

Links building: Uploaded 20 to 30 articles to ezine articles thus far.
Submitted another 20 to 30 articles to Article Marketer to distribute to articles directories.
Have subscribe to a few paid 2nd tier directories like Joeant.
Submit to Yahoo Answers weekly once.
Submit to 5 free directories daily.

Monetization: Nil

As of now, I really read your blog many times and try to implement what you have share… so I have not monetized yet as I am trying to aim for 500 uniques visitors before I monetize with Adsense, Chitika and Amazon or Kontera or Infolinks. My content is mainly outsourced through getafreelancer.com at $5 to $6 per article. The articles are not the best but it will do for me…

What surprised me was Site A’s progress. It was quite shocking that despite 9 months and consistently adding 2 articles per week, the visitors rate is so low. It seems to me the hardest thing is to get links in. Hence, I am really amazed how you managed to get 2500 to 3000 uniques to your vacuum cleaner sites. I brainstorm all my keywords using SBI brainstormer.

Hence, just curious, can you share how your own sites traffic growth is like? Is my traffic growth consider normal? Can I speed things up a little? What else can I do to get more links besides article marketing and daily submission to directories? Links seems to be the most challenging…

If my eventual target is to make USD $5,000 per month with these 4 sites through adsense, chitika, kontera, infolinks or even amazon contextual, roughly in your opinion, how many unique visitors do I require to make it for each sites. say $1250 per month per site? Guess I need to make at least $40 bucks per site each day. Can I make it in a year’s time if I continue what I am doing now?

A: Rankings especially in Google are ALL about links and anchor text in those links.

As you can see directories are worthless. STOP submitting links today!

Except DMOZ, Yahoo, Joeant, BOTW and maybe one or two more…

Articles are fine but you won’t get much benefit except from ezinearticles, buzzle and possibly hubpages and squidoo. Check my link experiment series of articles…

The rest is up to link exchanges and trading - 3 way and 4 way link exchanges. You need to get links from a page with a least pagerank 2 to have some effect on your rankings.

Here’s how my traffic increased on two of my fairly new SBI sites which started approx. 1 year ago: (I don’t work half as much on links as I did with the vacuum site.)

Traffic Increase Over 1 Year On A Site Build It Site 1

Traffic Increase At SBI Site #2

To find links do backlink analysis of your competitors and see where they get links. Also, look for related sites with good PR and suggest a trade.

Since this is so tedious there aren’t many people who succeed online. This is the whole catch of making it big!

Can you find 10 sites with nice PR, send them an email, get 0 emails back and keep doing it? If yes, then you can achieve something. If not, …

You also need to make sure that you target the right keywords on your homepage and for T2 and T3 so that you have a chance of ranking well. You also need to internally link as shown in AG.

Traffic is all about keywords - the one you chose. Yes, there is some long tail for the ones you didn’t optimize but I’d say that’s 20%.

You need roughly 1000 visitors per day to make $1000 per month. That’s the low part of it. If your niche pays well, you can even multiply with 2 or 3. So 1000 visitors can bring you $3000 per month.

Actually before I continue, let me show you a picture:

I saw quite a few times that people actually typed the “Site Build It sucks” phrase in a search engine and somehow found my site.

So I’ve decided to optimize a blog post on this keyword to hopefully get more people here and help them make the right decision.

I’ll try to be objective and approach the “SBI sucks” topic from 2 angles:

1. Why Site Build It Doesn’t Suck

- it’s not a normal web hosting thingy. The SBI Action Guide will teach you how to create a content site relying on free search engine traffic bringing visitors and money day after day without much work

- if you ever get stuck at any part, you can access help for every topic, you can ask a question on the forums and you can even hire an experienced SBI-er to help you out

- I’ve achieved financial freedom with SBI and am earning over $10,000 per month with just a few sites. I did work very hard to get here but thanks to free search engine traffic I don’t have to work so hard any more. I even have time to write posts about whether “Site Build It sucks” or not…

- there are hundreds of Site Build It sites built by ordinary people with no prior knowledge of HTML and SEO. If they can do it, so can you.

2. Why Site Build It Does Suck

Key Evoy (The CEO of Sitesell.com) said this:

The “bad” news? SBI! does not eliminate the common-sense, universal laws of business and economics…

It takes time and work to build a genuine, profitable, long-term business with equity.

It takes a persistent, slow-steady-sure approach, fueled by passion, steadied by patience and reassured by faith in a system that both makes sense and is proven to work.

Bottom line:

If you are looking for a magic pill that will create a site which will earn $100 per day in just a month or two, then yes, Site Build It sucks. It’s not that good.

If on the other hand you want to learn how to build a successful website and want to have all the tools in one place for only 0.82 cents per day, then no, SBI does not suck at all.

In fact, feel free to explore my blog and see how I used SBI to free myself from slavery of a 9-5 job.

And if there’s an SBI-er reading this post I’d appreciate if you share your thoughts on whether Site Build It really sucks or not. Thanks!

While I kept the main Chitika ads on my site, I saw that the Chitika Linx was not earning well.

So I tested the Amazon Context Links affiliate program. Since I use SBI Includes on my site I can change the javascript code for all pages of my site with only one upload so I simply replaced the Linx code with the Amazon Context Links javascript code.

I selected the option where Amazon automatically links to their products if it detects the name of the product in the text and I chose 3 links per page.

After a few days I saw that the orders started to come in. I used to earn from Amazon around $200 to $300 per month with a few links that I manually included in my pages.

But now I would get days like this:

So last month (July 2008) was the first month that I left Amazon Context links appear on my site and here’s the result:

As you can see I got 8915 clicks, 194 orders (2,18% conversion) and I earned more than $800. My total from Amazon in July was $1010.

A very cool thing about Amazon affiliate program is that when people land on Amazon, they know where they are. They have probably ordered something in the past, they trust the system and they often order many other items besides what you are promoting.

There are more than 50% of orders in my case, when people ordered other items than I linked to from my site. This is also very useful since the more items people order the higher overall commission you get.

Here’s the Amazon referral-fee rates chart:

The Amazon Context Links program works really well for me and it’s very easy to install if you use Includes files. All you need is one upload and the Amazon affiliate program takes care of the rest.

Q: Hi Tomaz,

In other words, I have no brain nor motivation in developing an ……-niched site, but to think of I can outsource the content to third party, while it seems simple enough with less work in writing my own content, developing this site may cost substantially higher than budgeted.

A: My vacuum site was first an experiment to make a little bit more money. That was my motivation.

But it turned out to be a great earner. Eventually I saw the light at the end of the tunnel - I could see that I can become free from a job if I make the vacuum site dominate the niche.

So my motivation is freedom and there’s nothing stronger than that for me. Money is just the tool…

Yes, the price for outsourcing is quite high and I did it when I earned enough money with my tennis site. And that’s also my suggestion; stay in the + (positive).

Earn money and invest part of that money in content writing or something else. Don’t go into - (negative) because then you become anxious and impatient and make mistakes or look for shortcuts where there aren’t any.

If you upload 3 articles per week, that’s 12 per month and each costs $8 your cost will be $100 per month. If your first site makes that much, then you can outsource 12 articles per month…

Remember; all those pages also got another link from my previous post so that should have helped them somewhat to rank better.

So here are the final ranking results based on googlerankings.com for the keyword best central vacuum:

1. Ezinearticles
Google – 13

2. Buzzle
Google – 12

3. Hubpages
Google - 82

4. Squidoo
No rankings in top 200 sites in Google

It’s interesting to see that buzzle has now overtaken the ezinearticles article. I assume that they change rankings every now and then. Buzzle doesn’t show many internal links so it must be the authority of the site that shifts the rankings higher.

One reason why I chose the vacuum related keyword for this experiment was also to get links to my central vacuum systems page on my vacuum site.

Well, so far there have been no changes in the rankings despite 5 new links pointing to that page. 4 from the articles and 1 from my previous post…

According to google rankings it still ranks at 57.

I do get quite some traffic for keyword central vacuum reviews for which it ranks at #5 in Google. I am not sure why it doesn’t rank higher for the keyword that’s optimized for…

I will try to get a link from a PR3+ blog related to vacuums or cleaning or home improvement and get a sitewide link to that page. That should boost it’s credibility in Google’s eyes…

So the final conclusion?

The most powerful links are from ezinearticles.com and buzzle.com. The article on ezinearticles.com actually ranks #2 in Yahoo for the chosen keyword so it’s getting some traffic too.

Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com may rank well if you have many pages interlinked and if you send some external links to those pages. Their authority combined with external links could give you some good rankings.

But for just one article posted on hubpages or squidoo I haven’t seen good rankings in this experiment. What are your findings?

It’s been a great experience from the holiday perspective and from the online business perspective - or maybe I could say enjoying freedom while doing almost nothing for my websites.

I took my laptop and found some nice places on Koh Samui where there was free wi-fi in the restaurant. So I had my pad thai, checked my emails, updated a few Content 2.0 pages and went swimming again.

Free wi-fi on Koh Samui

The power of internet allows you to earn money while doing minimal maintenance work on your authority content sites. I’ve had my best month so far and I’ve done the least work in this month in the last 3 years of my journey into the internet marketing arena…

Here are a few more pics from my travels…

Having breakfast on a ferry to Koh Samui

Beautiful temples on the island

Thai food is great!

I hope you also take some time ocassionally from your work and enjoy life. Otherwise you may happen to die with thousands of dollars in your bank account. What a waste…