Beginner’s Guide To SEO and Link Building

This post is going to be for those beginners in online marketing who are having trouble getting a grasp of how to get some traffic to their sites and want to use Google to get some.  So if you are more advanced in SEO and link building then alot of this will be boring for you.  If you are new, hopefully it will help.  Or maybe you’re advanced and this will help anyway.  Either way I don’t give a crap, just read the damn post and curse me out in the comments section if it sucks, don’t worry I’ll still approve it.   I just want to go over an inexpensive and effective way to start building links to your website.

So you have your website up but you don’t know how to get traffic.  Obviously a big part of traffic is getting it organically from searches done on search engines like Google.  And how do you get traffic from Google?  Well, you need to rank well for your searches.  So if you site is about digital cameras you might want to rank on page 1 on Google for “digital cameras” or “best digital cameras”.  Moving on…

At the risk of keeping things simple here I’m not going to go over all the different possible ways you can build links and get links and buy links etc etc.  This is my first post on this blog on SEO and I’m going to break down strategies and techniques into many different posts.  This post is going to discuss using simple “web 2.0″ type of sites, social bookmarks, and blog comments.

The best way to describe this strategy is to do it visually.  So here it is my pretty picture:

This is known as tiered linking, link pushing, link pyramids, and probably a bunch of others I can’t think of right now.  The basic idea is that when you have backlinks to your backlinks, it makes your backlinks stronger.  Was that confusing???    Basically what you are doing in this method is increasing the strength of the backlinks in tier 1, which is the most important tier because it links directly to your website.

Money Page – Your website

Tier 1 – “Web 2.0″ type sites

Tier 2 – “Web 2.0″ type sites and social bookmarks

Tier 3 – Blog comments

First, the money site is a page on your site that you want to rank.  It can be your homepage or it can be an internal page.  Again, the money page refers to any page on your site that you want rank on the first page of Google.  I think that’s pretty clear.  This site should be your own site on your own domain.

Now let’s  get into tier 1 which is web 2.0 sites and explain this step a bit.  Web 2.0 type sites are sites like Weebly, Squidoo, WordPress.com, etc.  These are free “blogging” sites in which you can publish your content for free.  Of course, you are posting on their site so you need to stay within their terms of service in order for your pages to not get deleted.  Many of these sites get spammed alot, so some of them are pretty quick to pull the delete button on your page if they think it’s spammy.

Through various sources I’ve collected 77  free to register web 2.0 sites.  They are all do-follow, and the number you see after the domain is the PR of the homepage.  These are all working as of today.  Unfortunately alot of them go up and down and just stop working sometimes, so you will find alot of lists of these sites out there on the interwebz but most of them are crap.  They are lists of either sites that no longer work, or are no longer free, or are no-follow, etc.  This list I have for you is probably the best you’ll find.  If by the time you use it some of them are not working, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to update it.

Now, what kind of content should you put on them in order for them to be the most effective?  This is a highly debatable subject.  Some people will say you can put the same content on each one.  Some people will say it MUST be all 100% original.  And some say somewhere in between.  I am in the camp of somewhere in between with a strong lean towards as original as possible.  Why?  Well, there are 2 reasons why.  The first is that the more original your content is, the less likely it is to be deleted by the site moderators as spam.  Secondly, I think Google gives higher link power to links coming from content that is not duplicate.

My recommendation is to write one long very good article and spin it to at least 70% uniqueness.  You can use The Best Spinner to do this.  You can use this one article and it’s spun contents as as many of those web 2.0 sites as you can.  I find that it’s fairly easy to take 1 unique article and make 10 spun versions (at least 70% unique) and with those you can submit to 11 of the sites.  Then do another round and you have another 11, etc.

Here are the steps for this:

Step 1:  Write an original article on the topic of your choice that relates to the page you want to rank.  Let’s say for example you have a site about kitchen appliances and one page in particular reviews blenders.  And let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “best blenders”.  You will write an article about blenders, and link the phrase “best blenders” to the page on your site.

Step 2:  Spin that article using The Best Spinner.  Make 10 different versions, each one at least 70% unique.

Step 3:  Pick out 11 web 2.0 sites from the list provided above.  Go and register and create your page with the link to your website.

IMPORTANT:  When you create your page on these web 2.0 sites, don’t just add one link in the article to your site and that’s it.  Format the article with bold and italics, using different font sizes, and maybe add a video from Youtube if you can.  Add an image or two.  Also, make sure you link to at least one or two other domains besides yours!  If you just have one link to your domain only it will look spammy and more likely to be deleted.  Link to other high authority domains too!  So if your article is about the best blenders, link out to an article on MSN.com or About.com or Wikipedia, sites like that.  If you make your submissions as quality as possible, it is less likely to be deleted and will be more powerful link.

Check out this Squidoo page which is an example of  a great page.  Lots of good information on this one.  This is actually really well done, and while you don’t have to be as detailed and complete as this page, it certainly wouldn’t hurt.  As you can see he links out to lots of informative websites, has lots of good content, and then if you scroll down to the bottom you will see the author links to his domain londontoddler.com.  This page is so well done it actually has quite a few Facebook ‘likes’ and other sharing.  This is the type of backlink that the author will have for a long time.

You can also hire someone to do this step for you.  You can find someone from Fiverr, just do a search for ‘web 2.0′ and you’ll see some providers.  You can try Odesk or Elance.  Or you can use a service from WickedFire or other internet marketing forums.

So now you have tier 1.  Tier 1 can be 5 sites, it can be 20, it can be 50.  However much you want to do, it’s up to you.

OK so now onto tier 2.  Now, tier 2 can be more web 2.0′s or they can be social bookmark submissions.  If you don’t know what social bookmarks are, you can read more about them here.  Social bookmarking should be done on a large-scale to be effective for building link juice and is very tedious if you do it manually.  Actually, I take that back.  It can’t be done manually really.  It’s too tedious and wouldn’t be worth your time as it would take forever.

To automate large-scale bookmarking submissions you can either purchase software or a service.  For software, you can use Bookmarking Demon or Sick Submitter.  Or if you don’t want to mess with software then you can use services from Wickedfire.  I’ve used the software and I’ve also hired people from Wicked.

Now, when you create social bookmarks or web 2.0′s as you tier 2 links,  you will link to your tier 1 sites.  You can either use web 2.0′s for tier 2, or social bookmarks, or a mix of both.  I think a mix of both is best.

IMPORTANT:  Your web 2.0 sites for tier 2 do not have to be as awesome as your tier 1 web 2.0′s.  I wouldn’t recommend you waste alot of time writing original articles and spinning them very well.  For this tier I would find related content and spin it to at least 50% uniqueness.  Do what you can to make them OK, but don’t spend as much time on these as you do for your tier 1 web 2.0′s.

Two small notes regarding social bookmarks and these tier 2 links.  When I want to bookmark the content on my own websites, I use Onlywire which automates submission to a handful of the largest and best social bookmarking sites out there.  These bookmarks are done for mainly direct traffic though, as I’m hoping others find my content useful and share it as well.  This is actually the true purpose of social bookmarks.  Right now Onlywire is free to use for up to 300 submissions per month.  Again, I use Onlywire to bookmark my own sites and NOT web 2.0′s.

Also – you can also use the large-scale bookmarking submission to point to your money site as well, but for the purposes of simplicity I didn’t set up my diagram that way.

Finally, we have tier 3.  These are comments you can make on blogs and these backlinks can be pointed to both tier 1 and tier 2.  These are the lowest kind of links for the most part, which is why they are the furthest from your website.  This is not to say all links from blog comments are shitty.  If you find a blog in which the actual PAGE you are commenting on (not the homepage) has a high PR and doesn’t have alot of comments, then these kind of links can go to your website.  But for the most part, blog comments are all on low PR pages and they have really been devalued by Google for their link strength. 

Again for these you can do them yourself, and to teach you how to do this would require a whole blog post or two dedicated to it.  You can use Scrapebox to help you find blogs to comment on manually and you can also use it to spam out thousands of blog comments automatically.  You can also hire people on Fiverr and again from Wickedfire as well.

So there is your beginner’s guide to some link building.  Like I said alot of this can be done for free, but you can buy software and services if you want to do it faster.  More blog posts to come later on more link building and SEO stuff.

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