In part 1 of this series, I mentioned how important it is to use LSI when writing articles and content for your website.

This basically means that you'll have to use words which are related to the overall theme of your website. So if you're writing about how to improve your tennis game, it would be better to mention words and names like e.g. "raquet (racket)", "slice", "return", "break", "Roger Federer" and "tennis court", too. Moreover, you should be using synonyms rather than repeating your main keywords again and again. You can't simply just stuff your main keywords into your articles and expect to get great search engine rankings.

But it's not all about the keywords themselves. Often, you'll find websites which have a linking structure that is bound to "bleed" a sub-theme into several other sub-themes. This can destroy the effectivity of your overall SEO efforts.

Most Websites Have A Poor Linking Structure

What do I mean by that…?

Well, it means that the majority of sites is using a linking structure in which each page of the website can be accessed from ANY of the subpages on your website. This might be a good thing for your website visitors but with regards to SEO, it can mean the difference between getting found and ranked well and not getting anywhere near the Top 1000 of the search engine results pages for your chosen keywords.

Linking from every page to all the other pages dilutes your organizational theme of your website, thus making it very difficult for your main keywords to rank organically in the major search engines. In this regard, you'll often find that you have great rankings for some general keywords (which are probably not even related to your topic) and that you have bad rankings for your specific keyword terms.

This usually happens when you're utilizing a poor page to page linking strategy…

Theme Density On Single Pages Is Not Enough

Theme density is how many related words appear in connection with the subject of a web page that is determined to be relevant by the search engines. Google's latest LSI algorithm is able to catch spammy content and thus it will lower it in the ranks. The days of Keyword Density Analysis are over. Now it's all about theme density.

Having LSI keywords appear on a single web page is not sufficient, though. Theme density needs to be incorporated into your entire website. This means that your whole site structure needs to reflect your overall theme and not just your individual pages. The best way to ensure that this is being put into practice is by structuring your website into what is called "silo structures".

The Solution: Create Your Websites Using "Silos"

When you're using LSI on your website in combination with a silo structure, you will automatically enhance both the theme of individual pages within the silo and the silo itself. Each silo is a sub-theme of your main niche topic and should be completely separated from your other sub-themes.

It's very important that the silos will never link to an individual sub-page of one of your other silos. But the last article page (or product page) within a silo can link to the index page of the next silo.

The graphic below will make this clearer (see below for a silo structured website on Electronics):

The index page links to several sub-themes, the silos, but it doesn't link to pages within the actual silos. The index page of a silo has one or more links to sub-silos (which are silo index pages again). From the last index page, you have only links related to product pages/article pages which are related to the current sub-theme. And each article is linking to the next one.

The last product page in each silo links to the next silo index page until there are no more silos left. The only other link you could put onto these internal pages would be a link to the homepage itself to make navigation for your visitors a little easier. The second main silo (digital cameras - in blue) would be built in the same way and would not have links to the other main silos.

Using these techniques when structuring your website and by using LSI on your content pages, you are set to beat up to 90% of competitors in your chosen niche (presupposed you're getting at least some backlinks to your site)!

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SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY SUBSCRIBERS:

I'm about to offer a service which will be putting these SEO principles into practice for you so you don't have to….

Before offering something like that, I need to know how many people would be interested in this. Let me tell you that SEO companies who are actually applying these principles charge A LOT of money ($697+) for creating these kind of websites!

My offer would be that I create a website for you with up to 25 pages in total at an unbeatable price of just $197/site incl. 1 year of free hosting (my subscribers only - others will soon have to pay at least $397 for it). You can supply me with your content which you want to have used for the site or you can choose 1 of hundreds of private label article packs (with at least 25 articles to fill the site) that you'll be able to choose from starting tomorrow.

If you're interested in this, then please go to my helpdesk and let me know that you're interested and which topic you'd like to have a site on. ( Use "I am interested in your silo-structured websites" as your subject line for the ticket.)

I will only offer this service if there's enough interest in it - so the more helpdesk tickets there are, the more likely it is that you can get a site. The number of spots will be very limited as this is eating up a lot of my time. There won't be more than 12 sites built!

Please also tell me in your helpdesk ticket if you want me to do the basic promotion as well so I can plan how much outsourcing will be needed! The basic package price will probably be in the $147 region but I have not decided on that, yet…

The sites will be built using XSite Pro 2 which is simply the perfect tool for creating websites based on LSI and Silo principles! Silo structured websites don't need a lot of promotion to get great search engine rankings but the more you are doing, the better the rankings, of course. (I'll also offer a basic package for the promotion of these websites which includes directory submissions and social bookmarking)

Sites will be built on a first come, first serve basis…

Tags: adsense, major search engines, search engines, seo, social bookmarking, websites

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

PART 2

4.) BLOG COMMENTS

Even though blog comments have received quite a lot of negative publicity in the recent past because of all the discussions about blog spamming and automated blog comment posters, it is still a viable way of getting one way backlinks quickly. But only if done correctly and if you adhere to certain posting rules. Then you will be able to use it as a way to attract exactly the kind of targeted visitors who are eager to buy your products.

How can you find those blogs?

Well, you can go to Google and type in "keyword blog" where keyword gets replaced by the keyword for your market e.g. "dog training blog". If you take this one step further, you could add something like "Powered by Wordpress" to this query and Google would find any Wordpress blog which has been making posts about dog training.

You could do the same query in Technorati.com, a service which most bloggers are pinging to notify them of new content. Meaning, you can find posts related to almost any keyword there. Doing this for many websites and then also checking if these blogs have enough traffic and/or pagerank can be quite time consuming.

If you value your time as much as me then you need to automate this. Personally, I am using a tool called CommentHut to find these blogs and show me the pagerank of each result. There simply is no quicker way. You still have to make comments related to the blog post, though. CommentHut won't do that for you. But its' goal is not to spam blogs but to find the best blogs to post to. Not only on Wordpress but also for 4 other blogging platforms like Typepad and even on Wordpress.com itself. This means, you can get free backlinks from an authority site like Wordpress.com because it also hosts personal blogs…

Not only can you get better search engine placement because of relevant blog comments but you also might get a lot of direct visitors if it's a busy blog. Ask a provocant question there or doubt something the blogger is pointing out and you can see that it can cause quite a stir which also means more direct visitors for you! And your blog links are in the middle of highly relevant, keyword rich content. It cannot get any better.

5.) ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS

Article marketing has been a secret weapon in the arsenal of many super affiliate marketers. Not only for improving their search engine positions but also for direct traffic from their article resource boxes (the small signature file at the end of each article). Imagine getting one of your articles picked up by a newsletter which has a readership in the hundreds of thousands… That could be a marketing breakthrough overnight.

Then why are not more people using it? Every week I see article after article talking about the effectiveness of getting your articles published on other websites and in other people's ezines. Are people too shy? Do they think they can't write? Are they afraid they are making too many mistakes?

If you don't do anything, you are not making mistakes - that's true… But you're also not making any progress. Most top marketers have become so successful because they were not afraid to make mistakes along the way. That is what Internet marketing is about: Learning from your experiences and improving upon them. If you'll keep doing the same things, you keep getting the same (bad) results. I'm sure you've heard this saying more than once and it's so true!

Take action and you'll see results.

Writing your own articles can be so easy. Just do a little bit of research in those all important article directories themselves. Do a search for your keyword and see what others have written about the subject. Combine several of other people's ideas and thoughts and write your own masterpieces in your own words. NEVER EVER COPY SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK!! This could get you in serious trouble. But rewriting ideas and thoughts is always allowed.

Whatever the reason is for not getting engaged in article writing, there is an answer to all of these objections.

Either outsource your article writing or use a piece of software called "Instant Article Wizard" which will let you write articles through a click and point process rather than having to come up with your own words. You'll still need to polish up the sentences and the structure the software produces but about 80-90% of the work is already done by this article writer software.

Outsourcing means that you go to a website like Elance.com or Scriptlance.com ( my favourite) to get these articles written for you - for a small fee (usually something between $5-10 a piece).

With these articles you get to own something unique that you can use

a.) as content on your site

b.) as article for your ezine

c.) as vehicle to get your search engine positions up

d.) to get your name spread and build a reputation for yourself

All you have to do after you've created these articles is to submit them to article directories. It can be done manually if you visit a page where all of these article directories are listed e.g. here:

http://www.arcanaweb.com/resources/article-directories.html

But it can take you days if not weeks to get this done one by one.

Or you can use an article submitter. Personally, I like Jeff Alderson's Instant Article Submitter because with his software, you can also choose the categories your article gets submitted to. This ensures that your article is assigned the correct category rather than submitting a generic format where 50% of the times, you'll get declined by the article directory owner because of not having selected the correct category…

Article marketing is still one of the best and most cost effective ways to get your products sold, get recognized in your market and get better search engine positions - all from the power of articles. With article marketing or "bum marketing" as it has been called in recent times, you can even make sales if you have no website, no list and no JV partners.

With which other method can you achieve this so easily…?

CONCLUSION:

Generally speaking, the search engines seem to favor non-reciprocal links so try to focus on those and don't overdo reciprocal linking. These two way links should not make up more than 25-30% of your total links in order to stay on the safe side.

Set up a schedule to check your ranking in the major search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. Of course, this is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way - make sure you have a great looking, content rich website or you will never persuade anyone to link back to you - not even free directory owners. Try to avoid having your website cluttered with Adsense and ads all over the pages before asking for a link. Once you have got enough links (when you have achieved your desired search engine positions for your main keywords or your pagerank), you can add your ads back and enjoy the profits from your hard work…

Download this complete article as a PDF report - refer to it any time:

5 Amazingly Easy Ways To Get Top 10 Listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN

END OF ARTICLE

Tags: adsense, affiliate, internet marketing, major search engines, search engines, technorati, traffic, websites

PART 1

Search engines are the gateway to the Internet - in most cases they are the first tools that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. Without at least one backlink, you will not get listed in any search engine! This is true even if you've submitted your website on their "Add URL" pages (is not necessary, though… the search engine spiders will find your link automatically if it can be found on at least one popular domain). And the more links you are getting and the more often other websites are using your keywords when they do mention your website, the better you will rank for your keywords.

This is why link popularity is so imperative. If customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales…

You're probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word - plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. Google uses the term "Pagerank" for this - the more backlinks you have for your site, the higher the "Google Pagerank" (between 1-10 with 10 being the most valuable PR).

So how do you make your link "popular"?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It's a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don't get discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords even though it will take you longer than if you just take a step back and go for the less competetive phrases.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not give your site link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than "link farms" - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have
reservations about your visitors seeing (e.g. spammy websites with no real content). The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. This is what is called linking to a "bad neighbourhood". Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it (lose your pagerank).

So let's get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and get top 10 rankings on all the major search engines:

1.) DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS

One of the first things you should always do is to get listings in as many of the free web directories as possible. Personally, I think that a listing in Yahoo is too expensive with almost $300 per year for a business related site (which is the case when you want to make a profit off your site and who doesn't want that?). There are a lot of other websites where you can get listed for a smaller fee or for free so I don't bother getting listed there. Dmoz.org, the most important free web directory you can get into, gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed. It can take months…

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of an appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships "Alpaca wool" from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to "Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State." BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper - and submit your listing to the "Fine Alpaca Wool" category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

When adding your link text into the form, make sure that you are using the keywords that you want to get your high search engine rankings for!

2.) RECIPROCAL LINKS

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site's visitors. Let's look at the Alpaca Wool site example.

Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website's traffic, you are increasing both of your site's business prospects - and both of your sites' link popularity. Look which sites WANT to exchange links. Obviously, sites with no link partner page are not interested in exchanging links.

Contact sites where you can find a links page and tell them that you've added their link to your site (you need to add their link first if you want them to consider linking back to you!) and if they want to reciprocate. Do not go over the top with this by sending out thousands of generic link requests. Only send requests to website owners of sites you have visited and considered great partners.

The best way to do this reciprocal linking is to go to Google and do a search for e.g. intitle:"add url" +inurl:"your keyword here". What this does is that it checks for the title of the page and looks if it has the "Add URL" phrase there and the second part checks if your keyword appears in their URL. To stay with the above example, you would look for "wool" or "knitting". Most sites which have "Add URL" in their title will gladly exchange links with you and probably have a reciprocal links manager script in place. This way, you'll get listed on their links page automatically as soon as a backlink on your site is found.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find (spread over days and weeks, not hours…), bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. Too many backlinks in too little time will trigger a spam filter with most search engines. For example, it would not be normal for a site to start with 0 backlinks when it is spidered by the search engines and have 3500 backlinks 3 days later. Do not focus on reciprocal links alone but try to get more one way backlinks through the other methods mentioned in this article.

3.) SOCIAL BOOKMARKING AKA „TAGGING“

Social bookmarking websites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. In a similar way like you save your bookmarks in your web browser, you are able to save bookmarks on these special websites. You can "tag" your links meaning you can assign keywords to your posts and content in general.
Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. - can be found. Social bookmarking is also part of Social News Sites like Reddit.

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

These sites are also meant when people are talking about this Web 2.0 thing.

Web 2.0 means websites for a community of people, social networks, and these people rate and tag content rather than a search engine or some automated solution ( Sites like Flickr.com and YouTube.com belong into that category as well). This way, the relevance of content gets determined by real people as opposed to having some search engine apply algorithms and get results which are not always suitable.

That’s why Digg.com claims:

“Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!”

Popular social bookmarking sites are e.g.:

http://www.technorati.com/ (it’s also a blog directory)
http://www.digg.com/
http://de.licio.us/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.furl.net/

and dozens of others. More and more sites like these come up on a daily basis and only the future will show which ones will get as popular as the ones mentioned above.

END OF PART 1

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

Now here's something interesting. There are so many people obsessed with getting their sites ready for the search engines that they forget one fundamental thing: You 've got to have a site which offers quality content in order to get your visitors to come back…

After all, it's human nature to look for solutions to our problems. And where else can it be done in an easier way than online - maybe on your site?

The majority of webmasters spend so much time hunting down reciprocal link partners or just any kind of links that their sites actually could suffer. Especially these days when the rules with the major search engines seem to be changing on an almost weekly basis.

The crazy thing is, if we spent more time providing quality content instead, the end result would be that we the are making the Search Engines extremely happy…

I wouldn't say that SEO is not important. In fact, I practice it daily. But I want you to be aware that there is more to what we do than optimizing… We can not get so caught up in some of the strategies that our website suffers.

You can have all the traffic on the internet, but if you don't have a good, solid content site, the traffic will mean little.

Write for your visitor, not for the search engines!

Tags: adsense, major search engines, search engines, seo, traffic