So you’ve done everything right. You have your site up, you’re constantly putting fresh optimized content on it, you’re registering with the search engines – but not too often! – and you’re even working on a regular newsletter.

But your site still pops up at #124 in the Google rankings. Seriously, who searches through thirteen pages of links to find your business? And since you’re doing everything right, why are all these other sites ranking higher than you?

It could be the lack of linking to your page. Search engines today are getting smarter. They look at keywords, but they also look at who considers a page important. Get yourself cited in the New York Times online? If there’s a link to your site, you will see a huge boost in your ranking.

But without committing some sort of massive SEC fraud or saving sixty-eight babies from a fire, how do you get people to link to you?

Link Exchanges

The easiest way to get linked is to scratch someone else’s back. Say you sell camping gear. You frequent a website that sells orienteering maps, and another that sells MREs. These people aren’t direct competitors, but their products are complementary to yours. You’d love to be associated with them.

So you put together a simple email, introducing yourself, citing a link to your website, and telling the webmasters of these other sites why you think linking to one another would be beneficial to both of you. Most of the time, the webmasters of the other sites will be happy to trade links with you. And now you have another link to your site.

Granted, a link from Land’s End is more valuable than a link from Joe’s Maps. But any link is going to help your ranking in the search engines.

You can find great sites to link to you by going to the search engines. The higher the site ranks on Google, the more attention Google will pay to your site when the other site links to you.

And the best way to link to someone else’s site is not to set up a links page. Instead, write some articles that include a link to their website. Even better, write or buy a group of private label articles that would be of interest to THEIR customers. Perhaps you want to do an article on long-distance hiking, and one of the tips you’re giving is how to carry ample supplies of food with you. MREs are one item you’re citing – and linking to Joe’s MREs gives Joe some traffic from you while also giving your customers an easy way to get the item they need. While you’re at it, offer Joe permission to quote or reprint your articles on his website with an author’s link back to your website. Now those articles you bought are doing double duty – they’re providing content for your website AND generating links that establish you and your site as an ‘authority’ in your field.

Making Money from Link Exchanges and Affiliate Linking

Consider this: when you send your customers to Joe’s for those MREs, he may have just had a sudden influx of traffic. He may even have had the best sales month ever, just because of your referrals.

Well, getting a commission wasn’t part of the deal, and even though Joe is happy for the business, he may not be happy with you if you ask for one after the link’s been exchanged!

If, however, you have a record of doing this, you may be able to make money from a type of link exchange called “affiliate linking.” Amazon.com pioneered this system with people who wanted to sell books relevant to their content. Instead of just sending people to Amazon to purchase these books, they used a special type of link that Amazon was able to track easily. When people clicked these links and purchased the books, Amazon was able to determine who had sent the customer there, and paid a commission to the website for the business.

Affiliate linking is generally not going to be available from Joe, so just make sure he links back to you. But if you look around, you can find affiliate linking systems that will not only raise your rankings in the search engines through reciprocal links, but also generate revenue for your site by paying you commissions for sales. While many websites simply put up a list of ‘our friends and affiliates’ on a separate page, there is a better way to do it – a way that’s proven to generate more sales – affiliate links within articles.

How does that work, you’re wondering? Suppose you’ve set up an affiliate agreement with Anita’s Fishing Gear, a site that sells handmade fishing lures. You could just add Anita to your ‘friends’ page and hope that people click through to her site. Or you could commission several private label articles on fishing and handmade fishing lures, and at the end of each article, drop in a ‘soft-sell’ paragraph saying that you’ve found a great source of handmade fishing lures and linking to Anita’s site. The articles establish you as an expert who is qualified to recommend Anita’s handmade fishing lures, making people far more likely to click through than a banner ad or a plain link.

The Internet is a goldmine of marketing opportunity, and not every profit venture out there is dependent on you making sales from your site. Keep your eyes and ears open, do your research, and be ready to seize new opportunities when they come available, and you’ll maximize your web presence as well as your income.

First of all, what is a blog trackback? A trackback is a type of blog feature that is used to associate blog posts on different blogs – or a way to notify a website or another blog that you have published an entry that references it. The result of this is that two or more different blogs are able to share readers.

The description above is a little hard to fathom so here is an example. Say you just posted an article to your blog about Pit Bull dog training. Now, as you are surfing the internet, you run across a similar or related post on another blog. So, you could use the trackback feature to notify the person who posted the other post about Pit Bulls that there is a similar post on your blog.

When your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, appears on the other blog’s post, that blog’s readers find out that you have something to say about Pit Bulls and may even pay your blog a visit to find out more.

In order to create a trackback, you have to get the trackback URL from the post where you want to send your trackback notification. It will be shown on the blog as a Trackback URL or possibly a Permalink. Once you have found it, copy the URL into the correct place in your blog’s post. Your blog software will have some notation like Trackback URL identified for where the Trackback URL would go.

Once you have done this, save and republish your blog. Your blog software will automatically send the Trackback ping to the target blog’s post. So now your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, will be listed on the other blog’s post after that blog owner has approved it.

The trackback feature works by actually sending a ping from your blog to the blog you are trackbacking to notify them of your post. This also causes your post to be listed on the other blog, after it has been approved of course.

Trackbacks should be used to elaborate on or add to a related post. So if your post is on Pit Bulls, your trackback on another blog should also be about that related subject and not one like pet care in general or something like that. Blog comments can be used for posting non specific comments on blogs where trackbacks are topic related specific posts.

You may have noticed that by trackbacking you are essentially placing your link (permalink) on another blog, which creates a backlink to your blog. For this reason, when you set up your blog, modify the permalink structure to be more search engine friendly. This can be done a few different ways, but you want a structure that ends up having keywords in it as opposed to having more dynamic looking links.

By having the backlinks to your blog and by having them relevant to the content of your blog, you now have the ability of improving your blog’s page rank. Those backlinks will strengthen both your link popularity and your link relevancy which will bring your blog more organic search engine traffic.

It should be noted that trackbacks should be used with care and not used as methods for spamming other people’s blogs.

Depending on the kind of person you are, plans for things are going to be either completely familiar to you, somewhat familiar to you, or not at all familiar to you. While it is not necessary to have a completely detailed business plan before you start (especially if your business is online, but also if it happens to be offline), there are some things that you should generally be aware of at the very least before you take towards building up your business.

The first of those things has to do with figuring out the topic that your business is going to be on. This is not a topic in terms of something that a book needs to have, but rather a topic in terms of what your business is going to be about. For example, if a person wanted to open a restaurant, then there would be a culinary topic to their business. If someone wanted to blog, then the topic would be whatever they wanted to blog about. There are a number of different topics available out there today and choosing one for your business is perhaps the most important thing you can plan ahead of time.

Now, when most people are choosing the topic of their business, they tend to use one of two methods. They will either choose a business topic that they are very familiar with, love doing and would really have no problem doing for free, or alternatively they will choose a business topic that they think would generate a lot of interest in the demographics that they can reach. If you are on the internet, then the demographic you can reach is endless, whereas if you are off the internet, then you need to be aware of the people that live near wherever your business happens to be.

While these two methods of business topic choosing both have their ups and their downs, neither one is inherently better than the other. There are certain situations (i.e. blogging for a profit) where one might be obviously indicated as being the better one, but for the most part you can get along choosing either of those two things.

That idea brings us to the big question; how do you know which one of the two methods you should choose? Well, it once again depends on the type of person you are. If you are a free spirit, not really interested in too much planning and willing to take a chance just to see where it takes you, then choosing something that appeals to you and that you would do for free might be the way to go. If you are the meticulous type and are good at keeping things organized, then it would seem that going for the more likely profit would be a better idea. It largely depends on you and while neither of the two choices is wrong, it is very important that you are confident in the choice you make.

To your continual success!

Andy Huang

Keywords are an essential component of producing a web site. These are the words which the search engines use to help categorize and rank your pages. For instance, if your web site is about ‘writing articles’ then your keywords could include ‘writing’, ‘articles’, ‘article writing’ and so on.

The advice from many web designers and search engine optimizers has been to find as many keywords as you can. They advise you to search for keywords using a variety of online tools and software programs which can identify leading keywords. At first sight this seems attractive, but it actually defies logic.

Let’s take a look at the aim of a search engine. It’s job is to track down pages that meet the specific search term that a web surfer has typed in. The more closely the pages it serves up match the search term, the better it is for users. Search engines need to be as accurate as possible in delivering the right material to their users. Otherwise the web surfer goes elsewhere.

Now imagine you are a search engine algorithm – the mathematical program which calculates the probability of any web page matching the search term typed in. If the page has hundreds, or thousands of keywords you’ll be a bit confused. For instance, is this web page about ‘article writing’, or is it about ‘feature writing for journalists’. They are different things. You’ll end up knowing the page is relevant but not that relevant. So you rank it down the bottom.

But what if the page only has the keyword ‘article writing’ several times? You’re absolutely clear the page is about article writing and so you rank it highly.

Admittedly, it’s not quite as simple as this. But this is the principle of search engine technology. It is trying to find the most relevant pages that match the search term.

What this means for Internet marketers is that you need separate pages for each keyword. Focus each page on each individual keyword. Use the keyword in headings, sub-headings, the page text, the page title tag and in the meta tags. Avoid having pages which contain several keywords as that simply confuses the search engines and lowers your rankings.

So forget the advice to have hundreds or thousands of keywords. Go for single pages that match single keywords and you will find your page traffic increase.

This trick also works for Google AdWords. Each advert should apply to just a handful of keywords – you get much greater click through rates and therefore cheaper advertising when you only have a couple of keywords per advert. If you have hundreds of keywords you’ll find you’ll get greater results by having keyword specific ads, rather than one advert with hundreds of keywords.

So go against the advice of filling your pages and adverts with keywords. Go specific.

As Google is known to be the search engine that is receiving the largest search market share, the majority of webmasters tend to optimize their websites according to the Google algorithm. Due to the fierce competition on Google, some webmasters do feel that they can only maximize the profits out of their websites by improving rankings on Yahoo!. To improve the website rankings, however, you will first need to understand Yahoo!’s search algorithm. Here are the 6 SEO factors that you must know before optimizing your websites for Yahoo!.

Factor #1: Relevant Content

Content is always one of the key factors in SEO. When optimizing your website for Yahoo!, the more content you provide the better. This may mean adding content to your website on a regular basis. A good example of content addition is to have a blog. Blogs are a very good way to add relevant content to your website on a regular basis.

Factor #2: Keyword Density

Yahoo! is believed to be very heavily language based. You should include synonyms and plurals of a keyword when considering the keyword density of your web pages. Keyword density preference on the major search engines keep changing, though some webmasters have experimented that in general Yahoo! does allow a keyword density of up to 8%.

This is certainly one of the areas that Google does not weigh as heavily in terms of web page optimization. Some webmasters argue that Google seems to prefer a keyword density of about 2%. This means you need to make a plan and compromise between the preferences of the different search engines.

Factor #3: Website Structure

A good website structure is vital for two reasons. Firstly, the site structure determines the order in which your page content gets seen by the search engine spiders. Content that occurs higher up in the code of your web pages is often given a higher priority and therefore a higher weight than content lower down in the code.

Secondly, a properly structured website will make use of CSS to reduce or even totally eliminate the use of tables. The reduction in code will push the content higher up the page, so that the content will be given higher weight.

Factor #4: Inbound Links

Although Yahoo! places great emphasis on content, inbound links are also important. With Yahoo!, textual relevance is one of the most important factors. Being able to control the web pages where the inbound links appear and the anchor text of each is essential.

If an anchor text is in the middle of the content, it will hold greater weight than an anchor text which is in a directory-style format above a description. A link near the top of the web page is more valuable than a link nearer to the bottom. If your link is on a page with other links, the effect that link will have on your rankings decreases respective to the number of links on the linking page. Having reciprocal links is fine, but it is always better to also have one-way links.

The quantity of the links will not get you high rankings on Yahoo!, while the quality of those links is more important. Yahoo! considers a link is of high quality if it is from a site that is ranking well on Yahoo!.

Factor #5: Sitemap

Still with Yahoo!, you want its spider (Yahoo! Slurp) to crawl all or the majority of your web pages. Also, you want it to crawl as often as possible. This means you should pay extra attention to creating a legible sitemap and keeping it updated as regularly as possible. Yahoo! has a sitemap feature (Site Explorer) which is the equivalent of the Google Webmaster Tools.

Factor #6: Aging

If you think aging and sandbox only apply to Google, then you are wrong. Due to the sandbox effect, new websites can find difficult to rank for competitive keywords within the first couple of months on Yahoo!. On top of the difficulty, there is a delay on the value of inbound links. When a new website launches it should not have any inbound links. These inbound links are subject to a delay of up to 3 or 4 months before they hold their full weight.

The only fortunate fact is that Yahoo!’s sandbox has a slightly shorter effect than the one that is applied by Google. This is one of the reasons that webmasters often see their websites being ranked well on Yahoo! before Google.