The SEO Blog - Traffic Generation Techniques

Okay, so nobody ever said I was good about putting up blog posts on a regular basis, but this is ridiculous. I haven’t posted anything here since February. Sorry ’bout that.

Anyway,

I’ve had a few people email me and how Linksvana is working for me? I have a solid six months worth of data I can share with you about how its worked for me, so I figured I’d share the results with you and let you make up your own mind if its worth it.

You can read my old post about it if you need to catch up about what the heck Linksvana does, but if you don’t know anything about it, it’s a one way link building system.

Now a tool is only useful if you use it. So I’m only posting the traffic data for sites that I added 50 or more links to their network. For the most part we kept doing what we were doing on each site, but this wasn’t a perfect scientific study.

I found that if I only added a few links to a site, then there was no appreciable increase in traffic.

My Results:
Site 1 – 256 links added
January – 2133 visitors
July – 7319 visitors

Site 2 – 113 links added
January – 1502 visitors
July – 1602 visitors
(never saw much of a jump in traffic, but revenue is up about $120/month so I’ll take it)

Site 3 – 68 links added
January – 2063 visitors
July – 3067 visitors

Site 4 – 74 links added
January – 579 visitors
July – 999 visitors

Site 5 – 171 links added
January – 27597 visitors
July – 73947 visitors

Site 6 – 59 links added
January - 0 visitors (launched in May)
July – 445 visitors
With this site, I only used the Linksvana system to get links, nothing else. I did manage to get some top ten rankings in google despite the on page SEO sucking for this site, so as best I can tell, Google is definitely giving some weight to the links from their system.

One last thing I’ll add here is that while you can’t tell from the data, I got much better results from sites where I added links consistently over time instead of just doing one link building push. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing me say that you need to build links over time, so I’ll hop off my soapbox now.

If you want to check it out, it’s Linksvana.com – I’ve found it to be a worthwhile investment for me although it does take some time to actually use it (although it can all be outsourced pretty easily).

If you have any questions or would like to share your own results, post them in the comments below - I’d be interested to hear from you.

If you’re wondering if the Linkvana one way link building system is a worthwhile investment, then this review if for you.

When it comes to link building systems, I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of junk out there. And when it comes to link building a lot of people take the attitude of, “couldn’t hurt.”

In the world of link building, that’s not true at all. If you get links from “bad neighborhoods” or if you get too many at once or if they all use the same anchor text, these links that you thought were going to help you will actually hurt your search engine rankings and could even lead to the eventual banning of your domain name.

I know because I’ve used many of them in the past in an attempt to more easily improve my position in the search engines.

So it’s only natural I guess that I would be skeptical of a one way link building system that allows you to build unlimited links to unlimited domains. My first thought was, “here we go again.”

However, after reading the salesletter at www.linksvana.com (which was surpringly low key and hype free) I started to think that maybe, just maybe this one was different.

It sounded like it had been designed to not only be easy to use, but also to build links the correct way. And by correct I’m saying that you can vary up the anchor text pointing to your site, build links slowly over time instead of all at once, and get links from quality sites that all have Pagerank and a quality backlink structure of their own.

After debating it for about a week, I finally did decide to just bit the bullet and give it a try.

And once I got the hang of the system I found that it was extremely effective in increasing the rankings, and consequently traffic of several of my test sites. In just two weeks, I saw the traffic on two of my test sites double, and now I have to admit that I’m hooked.

What I’ve done is identified the 8 main advantages this system has over many of the others that you’ll see floating around out there promising to help you build one way links to your website.

1) Links are built over time.

The main problem that most link building systems have is that they build too many links too quickly. Linksvana has solved that that problem by throttling how many links it will send to one “project” at a time. I believe the limit is set to 8 links per day, which is about right.

However, through the magic of their queue system you can build several hundred links in a month, and their system will automatically spread them up over the course of the entire month instead of sending them all to your website at once.

If you’ve ever used a system like PayPerPost.com you know just how fast you can typically get links when your campaign is approved – typically it’s too fast.

2) Blogs in the network are all unique content

Unique content is king. However, the content also needs to make sense. Linksvana only accepts unique content in their system (and not junk “spun” content either). That means that their blogs look just like any other blog on the Internet – unique. This feature prevents any potential footprints and keeps the links you get from this system of high value.

That means it’s a little bit more work initially, but the long term benefits of a unique content system completely trump the little bit more effort you need to put in.

3) Blogs all have age and Pagerank

Of course, if all the blogs were brand new and not indexed in Google, they really wouldn’t do much good in helping your search engine rankings.

While I do have some theories as to how this system was put together, I’m still rather amazed that they have so many different blogs that are all at least Pagerank 2 (many are higher) and that they’re all at least a year old with some being up to six years old. The fact that these blogs are in good standing in Google is critical to making it work.

4) Easiest system I’ve ever used to build deep links to a website

Have you read my blog post on deep links? If not, then suffice it to say, deep links are extremely important to helping your website rank well in the search engines, especially for highly competitive terms.

The only problem is that a lot of other link building techniques only help you build links to the home page of your website. The other easy way to do this is through article marketing, but since article marketing just isn’t as effective as it used to be, this system make a great replacement to using articles to build deep links.

5) Centralized Interface

One of the things I’ve really come to appreciate about this system is the centralized user interface. You can manage all of your projects from one control panel, and using the system is actually quite intuitive. And I have nothing against 3waylinks.net (which I also recommend), but this system is so much easier to use.

6) Unlimited Links and Domains

While every system has practical limits somewhere, you’re not limited in the number of links you can build to one website and you’re not limited to the number of domains you can add.

While you can only build 240 links per month to one domain, you could do that every month, and you could do that on 50 domains if you liked every month. That’s 12,000 links per month!

7) Easy to do yourself or cheap to outsource

Part of the reason that they allow you to have unlimited numbers of links and domains is that a little bit of work has to go into creating each link. You don’t just login and automatically queue up 2880 links and forget about building links for the rest of the year.

Instead, you write short little blogs posts (each must be unique, not PLR, copied, or spun content) and then you queue up the post in the system. A couple days later you’ve got a link.

While these posts are easy to write and only take about 3 minutes to do apiece, there is still a time commitment involved.

If you just don’t have that kind of time, then they have a ridiculously cheap outsourcing option where you can have them create the unique blog posts for you for just $2/post. So even if you don’t have time, you can use this system to build a heck of a lot of quality links.

8 - Limited number of members allowed

To protect the integrity of the network and to allow everyone to get the most benefit out of a system like this, it makes sense that this type of network has to be limited in the number of people who can join.

That’s why I’m writing this review right now. Normally, I’d spend several more months testing this system like I did with 3waylinks.net to be absolutely certain it works before I recommended it to you. However, I’m fairly certain it will be full by then, and I don’t want you to miss out.

My initial testing has found that it can very quickly and very effectively boost your rankings, especially for terms of low and medium competition (I haven’t tested high competition keywords yet as it has been less than a month since I started using this system). And keep in mind that if you have a bunch of low traffic keywords that you rank well for that even though each page doesn’t bring in substantial traffic that together they will bring in a ton of traffic.

So what I’m really trying to say is that if you want more traffic to your website, then this is one system that I’d highly recommend trying out.

You can learn all about Linkvana at www.linksvana.com.

Bonus: To encourage you to give this system a try I’m sweetening the pot a little bit. You see, while this system is highly effective at building links you still need to know how to structure them. That’s why I recorded a short video that gives you several advanced use tips that will help you get the most out of this system.

To get this bonus, you must order at www.linksvana.com then use the contact form on this site to forward your purchase receipt. I’ll then send you the video for you to watch.

Have a great day, and happy link building.

Gary

Have you been wondering if Jonathan Leger’s 3 Way Link Building system is actually worth the investment?

3WayLinks.net Homepage

I have to admit that when I first heard about this system I was extremely skeptical. I was visiting one of my favorite Internet Marketing forums when I heard someone touting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

They said that it was “the real deal.” Also, they posted that, “in just 3 weeks I hit #1 on Google for my main keyword.”

Unconvinced – here’s what I said in regard to this 3 way linking “scheme.”

“Have you tested three way links versus regular reciprocal links?

Google can easily detect 3 way link networks, and treats them the same as reciprocal links. I’m not saying that there’s not any benefit to using them, obviously they’re working for you, just keep in mind that by using a 3 way exchange, you’re not doing something Google hasn’t already thought of.”

After a few exchanges back and forth I decided to give it a try. I’m a pragmatic guy. I care about results, not theory, so I thought I’d give it a try on a few sites I didn’t care all that much about.

I was a little concerned that this would be like other massive link exchanges where it’d work great for Yahoo and MSN, but that it would result in my site getting penalized in Google.

The system allows you to put up to 50 domains in their network for your monthly fee. I only added 3 websites. I then promptly forgot about it and went on my life.

Less than a month later, the traffic to one of the sites I had added had tripled!

Still, unconvinced I wasn’t ready to endorse the product. After all, that site was in position to see a massive traffic increase any day in the first place.

So I continued to ignore 3waylinks.net.

Before I continue with my story, I need to explain the keyword selection process so you understand why I was starting to get excited. When you use 3waylinks.net, you get to choose three keywords that will be used for the anchor text pointing to your site. The primary keyword you select will be used 60% of the time, the secondary keyword will be used 30% of the time, and the tertiary keyword will be used 10% of the time.

Okay, back to the story…

Then about 2 ½ months later I was looking at the traffic stats for the second site I had added to the network. It was a network marketing related website, and I had been targeting the term “mlm training” with my main keyword. I noticed that my traffic had jumped significantly for that term; however, it wasn’t the main way people were finding my website.

No, the top traffic generating keyword to my website was the term “network marketing.” This website wasn’t optimized for the term in any way, shape, or form. I had deemed that word too difficult to get top ten rankings for. However, I had used the keyword “network marketing” as my secondary keyword in the 3waylinks.net system. When I investigated where the traffic was coming from, it was all from Google. I had reached the top 30 of Google for the term “network marketing” without even trying.

A couple months later I broke into the top 10 of Google for the term mlm training, and that term then became my top traffic keyword. The site also achieved top 2 rankings in both Yahoo and MSN for “mlm training”.

At this point I checked out how the third site I had entered into the system. And you can probably guess what I’m going to say – yep – top ten rankings in Google for that site as well.

During this test I hadn’t been doing any other link building to these sites since I wanted to know if 3 Way Links was actually making the difference.

I am comfortable saying that, yes, 3 Way Links works, and it works extremely well. I am extremely comfortable recommending this to my loyal readers as a system that will help you get top ten rankings not just in Yahoo and MSN (as I originally suspected) but in Google as well.

And trust me, a top ten Google ranking is worth a heck of a lot more than a top ten in Yahoo or MSN because it drives so much more traffic to your website.

Now before you got off joining and expecting massive amounts of traffic, there are a few things you should know:

1) This is still a link exchange. Yes, it works substantially better than regular reciprocal link exchanges but at the end of the day, it’s still a link exchange system. However, Google is no longer as strongly against reciprocal link exchanges. According to their own Webmaster guidelines they now state you shouldn’t have “excessive reciprocal links.” What constitutes excessive is not known, but the 250 links that 3 Way Links builds to your site would seem to be under their limit.

2) You still need other links. You shouldn’t use 3 Way Links as the only links to your website. I think it’s dangerous to rely on just one link building method for your search engine rankings. Currently, you can rank well by just using this system, but if you use it in conjunction with other systems, you’ll see even better results.

3) Not useful for increasing Pagerank. If you’re obsessed with Pagerank then don’t bother with this system. I haven’t seen my Pagerank increase on any site by using this system. What I have seen is a dramatic increase in my search engine rankings and the traffic to my website. Google has made Pagerank a fairly irrelevant statistic over the past year so don’t get too hung up on it.

4) Some knowledge of how to build a website required. If you have absolutely no idea how to build a web page, then using this system is going to be difficult for you. There are some tutorials available for you, and a forum, but if you’re not comfortable with html then be prepared for a bit of a learning curve. You’ll need create a new web page for your site and paste in some php code to make this system work. If you can’t do that, you’ll need to hire someone to do that for you.

5) Selecting keywords. There’s a trick to making this system work that really isn’t covered by tutorials on the website. Your websites will appear in a 6-3-1 ratio. That means for every 10 links that are built to your website, 6 will include your primary keyword, 3 will include your secondary keyword, and 1 will include your tertiary keyword. To maximize the effectiveness of this system, your secondary keyword should be related to your website’s content, but it shouldn’t include any of the anchor text of your primary keyword. For example, 1-mlm training, 2-network marketing, 3-multi level marketing tips would be a good use of keywords. However, 1-mlm, 2-mlm training, 3-mlm help would be unwise since all of your keywords include the anchor text “mlm.” That looks highly unnatural to the search engines and it’s unlikely that you’ll rank as well if you do that.

So that’s my review. If you’re looking to get more traffic to your website, then I am willing to say that this is one of the easiest ways I’ve found to do it, and I fully recommend 3WayLinks.net to you.

Click Here To Learn More About 3WayLinks.net

A lot of website owners are content to buy PPC ads, run affiliate programs, and buy banners ads as their sole forms of advertising. They completely shun search engine optimization because they think that it’s too hard to keep up with and that the returns aren’t predictable.

There’s a major flaw in that style of thinking. They’re missing out on large portion of potential customers by not being highly visible in the organic search engine listings.

I have a friend who is very Internet savvy – he uses Google everyday, he buys a lot of items online, but he doesn’t respond well to advertising, especially PPC advertising. He’s never clicked on a pay per click ad in his life. He’s highly skeptical of marketing, and will ignore it.

While he’s probably the exception rather than the rule, there are a certain percentage of people who will ignore the ads no matter how good your ad copy is. You may be thinking that these people make bad customers anyway, but if we use my friend as an example, you’d be wrong. He’s always buying himself new gadgets and “toys.”

However, reaching him as a customer is a lot trickier because traditional advertising methods simply don’t work very well.

This is where implementing search engine optimization as a strategy comes in. My friend can easily be reached by showing up on the first page of Google for whatever he typed in as long as you’re found in the regular listings, but if you’re not easy to find in the regular listings, you’re not going to get his business.

So what’s a business to do? While the finer details of search engine optimization could easily exceed 1000 pages, there are two basic things you need to rank well in the search engines…

1) Content and 2) Links.

You need enough content (articles, videos, pics, etc) on your website to thoroughly cover your topic. For example, a site about real estate that only has ten pages is woefully inadequate, but those ten pages would likely able to cover how to care for a golden retriever fairly well.

And once you have the content on your website taken care of, you need to get links to your website. In general, the more links you have, the better rankings you’ll get.

I’m not saying that SEO should be your only strategy for driving traffic to your website, but you should certainly give it a chance, and when you do, you’ll find that it will help you get new customers you weren’t able to get previously.

Want even more strategies for getting high quality traffic to your website? Then sign up for my printed monthly newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly. Every month, I’ll mail you a new issue packed full of strategies to help you get more traffic, and also I’ll talk about how to convert that traffic into customers.

If we were to take a trip back in time to 2003, you’d notice that getting high search
engine rankings was a far simpler and easier task.

If you wanted to rank highly for a term, you’d just get as many reciprocal links as you possibly could and would use the identical anchor text on all the links. The title tag of your site would include only the keyword you’re optimizing for, and you’d make sure that your main keyword appeared at the top of the page, and showed up frequently in the body of your website as well.

This “Brute Force” style of getting high search engine rankings was as effective as it was simple.

The problem is that some people just haven’t caught on to the fact that it’s 2007 (almost 2008). The methods you use to get high search engine rankings have changed – using ancient methods just aren’t going to cut it.

You don’t want your website to appear perfectly optimized. Google has learned that perfectly optimized websites are rarely the best sites to put at the top of their listings.

Instead, the best sites tend to have a lot of related content that supports the main theme of the website, they have a variety of anchor text pointing to their websites, and the content of their website doesn’t scream “optimized”.

For example, I was browsing through the stats of a few of websites I’d forgotten about and hadn’t done anything with in several months. One of them had triple the traffic it had when I last looked, so I was curious and took a closer look.

As it turns out, the site had climbed up in to the top 30 of Google for the term “network marketing.” I was actually a little surprised since I hadn’t even been targeting that term. I had instead been targeting phrase “mlm training” and I’d gotten up to #1 in Yahoo for that phrase.

However, Google apparently thought I was trying too hard to get a high ranking for the term “mlm training” but they felt that I was doing a good job of covering the topic of “network marketing” and gave me a fairly high ranking for the term even though the site was not at all optimized for that particular term. One thing I will point out here is that I did have some links (not the majority) that used the anchor text “network marketing” when referring to the website.

This is just one of many examples where what I like to call Indirect Search Engine Optimization has come into play.

So just keep in mind that getting if you’ve been reading other search engine optimization information where it’s telling you to have a certain keyword density, and that 90% of your links should all use the keyword you’re optimizing for that you’re likely reading out of date information – information that’s going to accomplish the opposite of a high ranking.

Instead, I recommend that you focus on providing high quality content, get a variety of links to a variety of pages, and use the anchor text of the keyword you’re optimizing for 60% or less of the time.

Want to get more information like this delivered straight to your mailbox? If so, be sure to get yourself a subscription to my printed monthly newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly. Each month I examine strategies for generating traffic and converting that traffic into customers. This is one newsletter any webmaster or blogger can’t afford to be without.

Long Tail Search Engine Optimization Strategies

If you haven’t yet read the book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, you’re missing out on a fascinating book about how markets are being more and more niched and fractured. The tagline of the book is “Why the future of business is selling less of more.”

One very real application that the book has is in the world of search engine optimization. Back when search engine were far less mature and the search engine user was far less sophisticated, most people would search for information by typing in a single word or two word phrase. The websites that were at the top of the search engines for those phrases got the bulk of the traffic.

However, today the search engine user is far more sophisticated. They know more about what they’re looking for and they know how to use the search engine to get the most relevant results that they’re looking for. For example, a search that 7 years ago might have simply been “real estate” is now “make money investing in apartment complexes.” While the second term might generate a lot less traffic than the former, it is almost certainly a higher quality visitor who is probably more serious about investing and willing to spend money on your site if you have exactly what they’re looking for.

What that means to you, the website owner, is that you need to focus on providing more specific and detailed information to your visitors to get traffic. You also need to start offering a wider variety of products to meet the demands of today’s more sophisticated customer.

When it comes to optimizing for these “long tail” phrases, there are some challenges involved. First, there are so many long tail terms that will bring in a small amount of traffic versus the few primary terms that will bring in a lot of traffic that most people will just focus on the primary terms and ignore the long tail side of things.

That is a huge mistake because the long tail searcher is likely more likely to be the person who is likely to spend money at our website and also getting ranked well for long tail terms is far easier than it is to get a top 10 ranking for primary terms. If we look at our “real estate” example, the average Pagerank of a site on Google’s first page is a 7. Conversely, for the term “make money investing in apartment complexes” typical Pagerank is about 3 and there was no one who was optimized for the exact term so getting ranked would for that phrase would be extremely easy.

In my own business, long tail search engine optimization is the area I focus on. I’d much rather have a little traffic from a ton of low traffic phrases than I would from one or two primary phrases. Sure, as a search engine optimization expert, getting a top 10 ranking for a difficult term is a nice feather to put in my cap, but I’m much more concerned about actually making money than stroking my ego.

You see, if I have one or two phrases ranked in the top 10 of a search engine like Google that’s bringing in nearly all of my traffic and hence revenue, then if I lose that ranking, my earnings are going to plummet. On the other hand, if I have 500 terms that each bring in just one or two visitors each day, then if I lose one of those rankings, I won’t even notice the difference in traffic.

Let me who you some traffic stats from two websites that I’ve been working on lately. The first is a website devoted to pet snakes. This site has excellent rankings for its primary keywords, including a #1 ranking in Google for the term “pet snakes.” This ranking does bring in a fair amount of traffic to the website, but if I look at the actual stats, I can see that 65% of my visitors are using terms that aren’t listed by this stats program. Each term may only bring me 20 or 30 visitors for the entire month, and some may only bring on one visitors a month, but because there are so many of them, over 1000, that traffic greatly exceeds the traffic I get from being ranked #1 for the term pet snakes, and to be honest, I’d much rather be ranked well for those 1000 or so long tail terms than I would for pet snakes. And to be honest, when my site went from being ranked #3 in google for pet snakes to #1, the jump in traffic was hardly noticeably because I get such a large portion of traffic from my long tail keywords.

On another site I’ve been helping to build on the topic of camping, the long tail traffic is even more pronounced. The site has a top ten ranking for the term “camping tips”, but only a small portion of the overall traffic on the website comes from that ranking. In fact, 85% of the traffic to the website comes from long tail phrases. Why? Well, on this site, we devoted a great deal of time to developing content that I would consider to be expert quality. If you read the articles on the website, you’ll realize that not only were they well researched, but they were written by someone who an expert on the subject matter.

That’s one thing you really need to focus on when building websites now – expert quality content. You may not be an expert on the subject yourself, but you can almost always find someone who is an expert to write the content for you. The reason you want someone who is a subject matter expert is because they will bring up topics that you wouldn’t have though to include, but are related to the subject.

For example, when I was building a site about guitars for a client, I hired a guitar player to write the articles and I actually had her select a lot of the topics because while I’m good at keyword research, a guitar player is more likely to know what topics are relevant to guitar players than a keyword research tool.

Once you’ve got the expert quality content on your website, the other important factor in ranking well is that your website has sufficient authority. What I mean by that is that your website has a lot of quality one way links pointing to it. Try not to focus on getting links to your homepage, but rather focus on getting links to your expert quality content pages. The more links you have to these pages, the more top ten long tail rankings you’ll pick up for that article. It’s not uncommon for a high quality article to have 20 or more top ten rankings for long tail phrases and it doesn’t take long for all those phrases to add up to more traffic than if you were ranking well for the primary keyword of the article.

So to recap quickly, the future of search engine optimization is really going towards long tail optimization since the visitors are of higher quality and you’re less likely to see all your hard work undone by the next algorithm update. Getting ranked well for these terms is relatively easy as long as you focus on having expert quality content on your website and if you focus on getting quality links to your pages.

That’s long tail search engine optimization in a nutshell. It’s the focus of my work as an SEO expert, and if you’re really serious about making money from free search engine traffic, you’ll stop worrying about getting that top ten ranking for “real estate” and you’ll start focusing on the long tail phrases that are where the real money is.

Want to learn the secrets of long tail search engine optimization, then visit my website at LongTailSEOSecrets.com for a complete guide to Long Tail SEO.

Natural Link Structure - It’s a term you hear search engine optimization gurus through around a lot. They speak of the importance of having a natural link structure, but just what the heck is a natural link structure?

That’s an excellent question, and it’s one you need to know the answer to if you want your website to achieve its full potential in the search engines (i.e. you want to get top rankings). If your link structure looks “artificial” to search engines like Google, then you’re always going to be playing catch-up instead of getting ahead in the search engine ranking game.

Having a natural link structure means that you have a large variety of links pointing to your site, your links use a variety of anchor text, and those links point to a variety of different pages.

Examples of sites that have natural link structures would be websites like WebMD.com, Wikipedia.org, and Youtube.com. These sites don’t need to go out asking for people to link to them.

If you want to have a perfectly natural link structure, then you need to “attract” links just like those sites do. To get people to link to you, it’s important to understand what makes other websites owners link to you. Webmasters and Bloggers will link to your website for a variety of reasons – perhaps you have an article that is really informative; maybe you offer a free tool for download on your site; or maybe you have a hilarious video that people need to see. And there are a whole lot more reasons why someone will link to someone else’s site. Heck, sometimes people who hate you will link to you. (It’s happened to me more than once.)

Websites that have a natural link structure tend to rank highly in the search engines. For example, Wikipedia tends to rank in the top ten for just about every general term these days – a lot of this is due to the sheer number of quality links coming into that site.

Making a site’s links look natural should be the goal of anyone optimizing their website. That means that you should focus on getting links from a wide variety of places. Get links from articles, directories, social media sites, blogs (very important), press releases, and just about any other place you can think of.

If you have control over the anchor text, make sure you use a variety of it. For example, if you have a site about coins, a good variety of anchor text would be “coins,” “coin collectors,” “numismatics”, “gold coins”, and so on. The point is to mix it up.

Also, don’t have all your links point to you homepage. That doesn’t look natural. Sites with a natural link structure have links pointing to a huge variety of internal pages on their website. (See my post on deep linking) For example, if you had coins.com, you’d want links pointing to coins.com/silverdollars/ coins.com/gold/ and so on.

Of course, the best way to get a natural link structure is to get it naturally. By that, I mean that your website is just so interesting and offers such great content that people can’t help but tell others about it. If you have a website like that, you’ll have new links pouring in all the time and your website natural search engine rankings will skyrocket.

For more ideas on how to write content people will link to, just take a look around this blog - I write about it frequently (check out my post on linkbait for more specifics), and try to be an example of it myself.

Want to learn a whole lot more strategies for building links? Then be sure to check out my link building guide at MissionUnlinkable.com.

Ask some people to write an article for their website and they’ll look at you like you just asked them to get a tooth pulled with anesthesia.

Most people understand that unique content like articles (or blog posts) are very important for getting good search engine rankings and free traffic from the search engines.

But for some people, it is an incredibly time consuming and difficult task despite being knowledgeable on the subject.

However, writing articles doesn’t need to be difficult – even if you hate writing.

Writing articles, even a lot of them, is actually really easy especially once I explain my system to you.

I call it the OTTR system. (pronounced “otter” - like the animal)

You simply Outline, Talk, Transcribe, and Revise.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Let me explain it in a little more detail.

Step 1 - Outline

First, start with a topic that you’re knowledgeable about – hobbies usually make great choices. Just about everyone could talk for hours about their hobbies. If it’s cars, then choose a car topic. If it’s golf, then choose a golf topic.

Next, jot down a few ideas that you’d like to cover in your article. This is the outline phase.

For example, when I did the outline for this article, here’s what I started with:
• 4 Step System To Writing Articles
• Writing Articles is Easy
• OTTR
• Pick Subject You Know
• Outline
• Talk
• Transcribe
• Revise

Piece of cake, right? At that point I’ve written a grand total of 18 words. Even if you can’t type to save your life, you can probably handle 18 words.

Step 2 – Talk

On to step two – Talk. This is where the magic happens. Instead of taking that outline and writing an article from it (which you could do if you prefer), you get out a microphone and load up a program like Audacity (a free piece of software) on your computer and you start talking.

Just talk about all of the subjects in your outline until you feel you’ve gotten your point across. When you’re done, stop the recording and save the file.

Step 3 - Transcribe

Now onto step 3 – Transcribe. Now if you really hate to type or just don’t have the time for this step, give this job to someone else. This is a very easy task to delegate or outsource. In this step, you simply play back the recording and type out everything you said in the recording. Don’t try to edit it at this point – just get it all down.

Step 4 - Revise

Once you’ve got that done, you’re ready for step 4 – Revise. Now all you need to do is take out any phrases that don’t’ belong, for instance, “umm”, “like”, “you know”, etc – basically all of those filler words you use when your mind is coming up with what to say next. If you hire a transcriber, you can have them take care of this step for you.

And that’s it. You’ve got you entire article written.

And if you’re feeling more ambitious, you can use this method to write an entire book. Just use the same process, and you could write an entire book just by outlining the key ideas and talking about them.

Also, for those of you who do teleseminars or live training, be sure to record those sessions, and you’ll have a ton of valuable content right at your fingertips.

Want to learn more strategies for using article marketing? Get my entire link building course at MissionUnlinkable.com and you’ll never run out of strategies for getting more links and traffic to your website.

When it comes to getting your site to rank well in the search engines, a lot of advice you’re likely to read is the latest flavor of the week or loophole that someone’s uncovered that will help you get great search engine rankings for about a week.

It’s also true that the world of search engine optimization moves at warp speed. What worked last month may not work well this month. What worked last year may work against you now, and keeping up with all these little changes requires you to constantly be immersed in the world of search engine optimization.

So does that mean that you can’t get great search engine rankings if you don’t become an SEO expert or hire one?

No. But it does mean you’ll need to stop focusing on the little things, like tweaking your keyword density, or changing your meta tags, and focus your efforts on the factors that are going to matter long term.

Fortunately, there are some basic principles that you can apply that can help you weather the storm of constantly fluctuating search engine algorithms. These are methods that have worked for years, and will work for the foreseeable future so if you want to take this video and store it on your hard drive for a few years and play it back to see if the advice still works, I’m confident you’ll still find these methods work.

So here goes, let’s cover long term four long term seo strategies.

1) Write Great Content

Make the focus of your site on having really good content. I know that if you’ve watched any of my previous videos you already know that I continually harp on the importance of having great content. Well, the reason is that the search engines want to rank the sites that have the best content the highest. Also, people will naturally link to great content. Give the search engines and people what they want - quality content. Avoid quickly thrown together crap, and if you hire writers, make sure they know the subject matter they’re writing about.

2) Update Frequently

Your website should be updated frequently. A website that just sits and stagnates for years isn’t likely to rank well in the search engines. Make sure there’s something new for the search engines spiders to see - I have a friend who calls this feeding the spiders.

3) Make sure your site grows.

This goes along with frequently updating your site. You should be consistently putting a steady stream of new content onto your site. I like to use blogs for this purpose since they’re really easy to use and maintain, but use whatever method works best for you and your site. Forums can also be a great source of new content as long as they’re properly moderated.

4) Get Links

Build up your links. You should always be seeking out quality one way links.

The best links are frequently the ones you didn’t ask for and got simply because someone noticed your site and felt it was worthy of a link so when building your website, try to keep in mind that the quality of your content will affect the quality of the links you get.

While the methods for effectively getting links will continue to change, the fact that you need links to rank well isn’t likely to change anytime soon so make sure you’re always working to get quality links to your site even if that means you’re simply focusing on providing great content people will want to link to.

Once you start focusing on long term optimization methods, you’ll find that your rankings will improve without you having to go in and make little changes every time you read about what the search engines are favoring that month. Your content will rise to the top over time without you needing to constantly mess with it.

If you’d like help with building links and getting traffic to your site, you might be interested in my link building packages and if you need help building a website, take a look at my premium content site building service.

Today I want to provide you with a guide to linkbaiting, and how you can use it to drive more traffic to your site and achieve better search engine rankings.

Just to warn ya - today’s video is almost 10 minutes long so make sure you’ve got a nice comfy chair to watch from:

Linkbaiting isn’t really a new concept - people have been using it for years, it’s really just the term describe the use of website or blog content to generate one way links to that website.

And other than well crafted press releases, there really isn’t a more powerful or effective way to drive massive amounts of traffic and get tremendous boosts to your search engine rankings quickly. So if you’re serious about getting more eyeballs to your website, then you’ll add linkbaiting techniques to your link building war chest.
While any page can be linkbait, these days it’s most frequently associated with blog posts since a blog posts tends to allow a little more interactivity with your audience. So just keep that in mind when I’m talking about some of these techniques.

Linkbaiting, just like press releases, is all about getting attention. So let’s talk about some ways that you can get attention.

1) Great Content

This is the classic way of building links. All you need to do is provide great content. But what is great content? Well, it’s not the type of content you get by buying private label articles or by hiring some cheap writer in India. Just take a look at some of the top sites for very competitive terms in Google and notice the amount of content these sites provide not just on that page but ho many related pages they link to. For example, I was recently doing research on the term chapter 7 bankruptcy for a website I was considering developing, and found that I had to temporarily shelve the project simply because the content on the top sites was well beyond anything I could simply hire a cheap writer to create. Many of these pages had several thousand word descriptions of how it worked - I think one even exceeded 10,000 words - and all would be considered genuinely helpful to anyone who stopped by to read it.

When you’re creating your content, especially if you want it to be linkbait, you need to make sure that instead of just writing to get some words on a page that a person will really learn something on that page, even if they don’t buy anything or opt-in to your newsletter. Essentially, you need to create expert quality information that’s easy and interesting to read. It takes more time - a lot more time - than just quickly throwing up a blog post, but you’ll find that almost all the best sites in every niche take the time to do this.

2) The case study

This can be another great way to attract links. Take the time to do some research on a product or service and see if it lives up to its hype. For example, you could compare spam services and test how accurate each is, then publish your results. Heck, there’s one guy who taste tests energy drinks, and publishes the results. Do some research, find something in your niche that you could do a case study on, publish the results, oh and include pretty charts and graphs – people loves charts and graphs.

3) Controversy

Say something to stir up some controversy. For example, if you’re in the search engine optimization niche, and you call all SEO specialists snake oil salesmen, you’re going to get some attention.

I have some personal experience with this topic. In 2006 I recorded a video promoting a social bookmarking service, put it on video sharing sites, and went about my day. Imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning about two months after recording the video to an inbox full of hatemail. Apparently an influential blogger found my video offensive, used it as an example of what not to do, posted it on Digg.com and got a huge response for referring people to my video. Most people would consider being insulted in your niche an awful thing to happen to their business or reputation, but for me, I got a lot out of it. I got a lot of traffic to my site, a bunch of new links, several new subscribers, a new customer, and an interview request.

Saying something controversial on your site or making a video about it can be an extremely effective to generate discussion, and hence get you links.

Some people say that if you try to do this too often it can damage your credibility, but then again, there’s people like Howard Stern who’ve made a pretty good living being controversial 100% of the time.

4) Current Events

One way to get traffic is to tie your website into current events or to offer your own take on current event within your industry. The trick with using current events is to make sure they’re current. In this day of 24 hour news stations, constantly updated news websites like CNN.com, news that happened last week is already old news. Also, remember that it’s not enough to just cover the news, there are plenty of other sites that do that already. Give your own take on things and don’t be afraid to ruffle some feathers with your views.

5) Competitions

Start a contest on your site. I run an American Idol fan site just for fun, and one thing that we did to boost traffic to the site was run a competition to predict who the top three finalists were going to be, and we gave away CDs to everyone who got it right. This promotion got my site featured on several giveaway sites and was linked to in several other American Idol themed blogs. It resulted in a lot of traffic while the competition was open and we ended up getting a low more loyal readers to the site as a result. And with a fan site, you need as many readers as possible.

However, just having a competition or having great content isn’t always going to be enough, especially if you don’t already get a lot of traffic to your website.

You’re likely going to need to take matters into your own hands and do a little bit of self promotion. Also, keep in mind that not every type of linkbait you try is going to work. While I don’t like to use the term luck, since it implies you have no control, luck does play into things a little. Wildly successful linkbaiting campaigns require the right person or people seeing it at the right time.

Some estimates that I’ve seen are that for every four attempts at linkbait, not just regular blog posts, but actual attempts to create linkbait, one of them will get some links. Maybe one in twenty will be homeruns. So this is kind of like baseball you’re going to strike out more than you get a hit, and only once in a while hit one out of the park, but when you do, be ready for massive traffic and links.

One thing that you should do when creating linkbait is to think like a copywriter. For example, the most important element of a salesletter is the headline. If you write a compelling headline that attracts attention, you’re halfway there. Linkbaiting is the same way you need to write great headlines that will attract attention. Fortunately, it’s really easy to see what type of headlines are working, just head over to digg.com or netscape.com and read the headlines of the items that have made the popular pages.

Also, you don’t want to write like you’re trying to get in a scientific journal. Again, write like a copywriter. Use short paragraphs, informal grammar (i.e. write like you talk), use slang when appropriate, feel free to insert pictures and videos.

Also, don’t be afraid to do a little self promotion. Don’t wait for someone else to submit your post to digg or netscape do it yourself. Post in related forums and ask what people think or even email other bloggers and ask them for a critique.

And that’s linkbaiting in a nutshell.

While it’s not quite as simple as article marketing or directory submissions, it has tremendous upside, and is well worth learning how to do.

If you’d like a detailed lesson on linkbait with numerous examples and plenty of specific advice, then you’ll want to get my link buidling course - Mission Unlinkable - and watch video 9.