Everyone with a website wants to be listed on Google. After all, it is the most popular search engine in the world, used by millions of people every day. It's the doorway between you and thousands and thousands of visitors who will flock to your website once they spot you, and isn’t that the main purpose of putting up a website?

Although getting listed isn’t the only thing required for you to get visitors, you also want to achieve a good rating, a high ranking (preferably in the top 10 results for your chosen keyword) which will put you in the spotlight and which will give you the opportunity to get noticed. But perhaps your site is brand new on the block and maybe you think it’s too small to be picked up by Google. Relax - that isn’t even an issue, just sit back and look at all the options you have.

First of all, let us clear out a fundamental point: There are, as you probably know, two ways of doing things, namely the right way and the wrong way. Now, although the wrong way is clearly wrong, it is of some importance that you know it thoroughly so as to avoid it completely.

Following is, to put it mildly, the avoidable way of trying to get listed on Google:

Google provides its users with a way to put their URLs in queue for crawling at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Now the utter failure of this method probably has a little to do with the mechanics of the process. You see, once you have typed your website’s address into the space available there, it is simply put in a queue (behind oodles and oodles of other pages) for the GoogleBot (a software program designed to follow links on websites) to, well, crawl.

Anything can happen after this. For one, your site might not get crawled at all, or suppose it does get crawled (which in itself is about a million in one possibility) it might take weeks and it probably won't even be indexed by Google (!). So ultimately there’s no telling where that URL of yours will end up going. But I am guessing wherever it goes, it won’t go anywhere near the first few pages of search results… So in other words, this way is a complete waste of time! No one has really ever benefited from it and if you ask me, no one ever will.

And now the more likely way to get listed by Google and the other major search engines.

If you want to climb up to that coveted spot on the Google search engine then simply "piggyback" on the popularity of another site. Once you add your URL to some other (popular) site, it might get a chance to be spotted by the GoogleBot and followed upon.

That chance of getting the links followed will be your golden ticket into Google. And the better the site that your link is on (e.g. high Pagerank and/or lots of high quality content), the quicker it will be followed. Nowadays, to get indexed quickly and ranked well, it's all about having backlinks from other sites…

Backlinks from Web 2.0 Sites

So, here’s what you can do, you can either put up your URL in a queue together with something like a million different sites or you can use a little sense and put it up on a few popular sites which will provide you with the sort of traffic even a couple of a dozen others won’t. Pick a few popular sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com or Propeller.com (solid Web 2.0 sites) to plant your flag into, and soon you’ll sink your teeth right in to Google itself…

I know what you are thinking: You are probably wondering just how you will manage to get these larger sites to list you on their sites and in the course grudging me for putting you on the same chase yet again. But don’t worry - I promise it’s not as hard as it sounds. Just write some newsworthy article and submit it to these sites.

Or use a different type of Web 2.0 sites altogether: The social bookmarking sites. You can easily list your URL together with a description on sites like Del.icio.us or Blinklist, Furl, Del.irio.us and dozens more. Just create an account with these sites and you're ready to submit your URL. Most of these sites have a high Google Pagerank and are crawled on a daily basis. This will get you into the search engines quickly. And not just into Google but into all the other popular search engines, too.

Backlinks from popular Forums

A different way to get backlinks is to join a few discussion sites and forums and get involved in discussions about topics related to your website theme. When making a post, you can put up your hyperlink along with your signature line which is a completely legitimate way of getting traffic to your site. That is to say as long as you are contributing something useful to those discussions.

Warning: Don’t try and get prompt results by pulling smart tricks like typing in your hyperlink and adding a spammy GO HERE! caption. That won’t help you earn anything apart from a good whack from the moderators of the sites. Think of a good headline for your site and use that as the description for your signature line along with your URL.

Invest some time in this and really participate in the discussions. Once you're doing that, you will earn the liberty of sharing your URL with others. Try to use your main keywords for your link text as it will improve your search engine positions for these keywords (e.g. like this: Car Repair Guide - do not click it - it's just an example!)

If you have a certain feel for writing and you are proficient with words then you have an advantage over others like yourself. Believe it or not, you can put this talent in line to work on your behalf.

Backlinks from Article Submissions

Write a few well researched, well planned out articles about topics which might appeal to your target market (do some keyword research first to see which keyword phrases have the least competition in the search engines). As in the previous method, there are no shortcuts here and nothing, absolutely nothing, besides quality content will do you any good. Try and act smart, don't simply copy & paste text from elsewhere or simply try to get away with a badly done job and you will be at the receiving end of a royal brush-off from readers and editors.

Writing an article is really not as hard as it sounds. Since it’s about your main interest, a little research wouldn’t really cost you much time or labor. Record your results, go ahead and experiment with a few situations, come up with hypothetical situations to explain particular problems and provide your analysis or solutions for them. Once you have done a good job (and believe me when I say you will know when you have done a good job), proudly provide your own name and hyperlink of your site at the end of the article.

Then submit your article to the big 3 in article marketing:

EzineArticles.com

GoArticles.com

ArticleDashboard.com

By having a backlink from one of these sites, not only will you get indexed quickly, it will also help you to get ranked better. You can submit the article to more sites, but not always is more better. If you're doing too many submissions too quickly, your site could land in the "Google Sandbox". This means that you won't get listed for at least 6-8 months and then Google will re-evalulate your site and see if it's one of the "good" sites or rather a spam site.

Conclusion:

If you want your site to get listed in the search engines quickly, you need to get backlinks from popular websites. These links can be from Web 2.0 sites (incl. blogs), forums or article directories.

What about reciprocal linking? Well, the times for making use of that kind of 2-way linking strategies are almost over. The backlinks still count to some extent but reciprocal linking is seen as a "scheme" by Google which is used to manipulate the pagerank of the participating websites.

Therefore, if you want to get backlinks from directly related sites, it should be done as a 3-way linking. Meaning, site A links to site B. And site B in turn links to site C which is also owned by A. This way, the search engines can't see this direct relation between the participants. And better than doing this on a separate page would be if the link would come from within the content of an article.

The higher the number of sites you are added to, the better your chance of getting your website link known. But be careful: You need to spread out your submissions over time. Doing too much too quickly can get your site banned aka getting hundreds of backlinks over night are signs of a spam site (especially if these links are all using the same link text for the URL).

As your popularity increases, so will your chances of getting high search engine positions in Google. Good Luck!

Tags: adsense, digg.com, major search engines, search engines, social bookmarking, social bookmarking sites, traffic, web 2.0, websites

Since there are lots of people getting into affiliate marketing every day, it is no wonder that the competition is getting fierce. The challenge is to try and beat the tactics other affiliates are using and think of smart ways on how to achieve this. Affiliate Video Brander is a tool that allows affiliates to act smarter than others. More on that later in this article.

Let's first talk about why using online video presentations work so well with regards to selling products on the Internet…

What better way could there be to wow your prospects and customers than to record and publish top notch, full motion and streaming screen-capture videos? For you as a seller, it's a great feeling to be able to offer a product that gets subscribers and customers excited in great anticipation to buy your product right on the spot.

This is Camtasia in action. It is a proven fact that giving your customers something they can actually see can explode your online sales instantly.

You do not need to have training and a lot of education to be able to know how this system can improve your sales or sales for programs that you're an affiliate of. Anyone can create stunning videos as there are hundreds of multimedia tutorials and step-by-step presentations available online.

The process is like having your customers seated next to you while looking at your desktop, as you show them the things they need to see and hear. All this is done in a step by step manner.

For those of you who don't not know it, yet - what does Camtasia do…?

1. It can record your desktop activity - not only the actions which are taken but also the sound, the explanations which you are speaking into a microphone while recording.

2. In the next step, Camtasia can easily convert your videos into web pages (using flash). Once the videos have been converted from formats like AVI or MPG to Flash, you can have your customers visit the web page which you have produced.

Videos are easier to understand because of the visual aspects. This is unlike reading texts which is not always as comprehensible as seeing and hearing a complete process on your PC.

3. Upload your web pages to your server using FTP. Publish these videos on blogs, within RSS feeds or podcasts. You may want to use your Camtasia videos to reach potential customers. This can be done by uploading your master pieces to video directories like YouTube or Google Video. By doing this, you are actively making use of Web 2.0 techniques.

Video sites and Web 2.0 are all the rage these days and if you are uploading them to places where they can easily be found, you're setting yourself up for free advertising and you can finally get your message across without having to invest thousands of dollars in PPC costs.

There are other things you can do using Camtasia. You can…

- Create stunning multimedia presentations which e.g. show how a certain piece of software works or how certain promotion techniques are being used which are described in the latest ebook you want to promote as an affiliate. This also has the tendency to reduce skepticism among hard-to-please customers.

- Reduce refunds and other customer issues by visually demonstrating how to use your product and how to do it properly. Complaints will be minimized because all the facts can be seen in the visual presentations.

- Promote affiliate products and services using these visual presentations. This is an effective way of pre-selling and redirecting your viewers straight to your affiliate website after they have finished watching the video. Make the most of the presentation by adding your site to the end of the video and make them go there directly if they want more information.

This can easily be put into action using a tool called Affiliate Video Brander. In order to use this tool, you don't even have to create your own videos. All you need to do is use the videos which the merchant has available on his site and you download them to your PC (with the merchant's permission). Videos have proven to increase conversions by a very high percentage.

You simply use Affiliate Video Brander to create a new web page which has a link to the merchant's website included (usually above and below the video). This link is YOUR affiliate link. Moreover, when the video ends, the viewer will be automatically redirected to the merchant's site using your affiliate link. Here's how the interface looks like:

These are just some of the things you can do with Camtasia and Affiliate Video Brander which can be very helpful in promoting your chosen affiliate program. If you're an affiliate and you're not yet using Affiliate Video Brander, you'll be leaving a lot of money on the table since videos can increase your conversions from visitors to buyers by at least 400%!

Tags: adsense, affiliate, affiliate marketing, affiliate program, affiliates, ebook, web 2.0