Backlinks are extremely important to getting a good ranking in the search engines. Of all the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques that I know, I would rate this as the most important. Many people see this as a difficult task so I thought I’d share a few brief ideas to help you.
Articles
Articles are great for a number of reasons:
- You can submit them to multiple directories
- They continue to work for you over long periods of time
- They can be re-purposed
- You are in control of the link
- They’re easy to produce
I’ll address the last point first: they’re easy to produce. People make too much of article writing. They see it as this big obstacle to overcome so avoid it. In fact, anyone who’s serious about marketing online MUST master article writing at some point if they want to achieve everything that they can. It really doesn’t have to be hard – you only need about 500 words, which is less than one page!
Anyone who maintains a blog is also an article writer; most peoples blog posts are around the 400-800 word mark which would make great articles. In fact, I’ve re-purposed several of my blog posts as articles with only a few tweaks.
This is another great point: once you have the articles, you can use them to create other content, such as audios, videos or even social media sites.
Videos
It’s no secret that the search engines love videos. I’ve had videos rank on the first page of Google for my major search terms within 24 hours, which is next to impossible using any other technique that I know of. The most important things with videos are:
- Keep them short (5 minutes seems to be about right)
- Make sure you link to your site as the first thing in your description
- At the end of your video, tell people to click the link in your description
- Make sure your title is keyword optimized
- Submit to as many video sharing sites as you can find
If you follow these few tips, you’ll find that video can work really well for you, too.
Web 2.0
OK, so technically Web 2.0 encompasses video sites, but I like to separate them out for these purposes due to their ability to get ranked so quickly. In this section I’m talking about other sites such as Squidoo, HubPages, Scribd, etc. All of these (and similar) sites allow you to re-use your articles to build something new that generates additional backlinks to your site. If you make good use of them, they can have a huge impact on your search engine rankings as these sites too are rated pretty well by Google et al.
I would encourage you to take some time to consider your strategy for building backlinks to your primary sites. As I said, it’s still one of the best ways to improve your rankings and hence your organic traffic without the cost of PPC.
Please share your tips for gaining backlinks in the comments.
——————————
Related Posts:
This is my second attempt at writing this post this evening. The first was rudely interrupted by a power cut. I think it’s time to thinking about a UPS and a more robust backup solution…
So it’s time for blogs of the week again! Your weekly fix of what’s hot in the Internet Marketing world and who we should be keeping an eye on. To be honest, I’ve found it harder than normal this week to pick good quality posts out of the many that I’ve read, although I think you’ll enjoy the five that I’ve found.
Where Will You Be In 100 Days? – This is an interesting and very timely post from Connie Ragen Green where she’s challenging people to drive their businesses forward over the next 100 days. It’s interesting to me both because it coincides with a push to deliver better content on my blogs, and also as she mentions mentoring. I’ve been asked in the past to mentor several people and have always said yes. In each case I’ve requested that they perform a few simple tasks so that I can be certain that they’re serious and I usually never hear from them again. That changed this week when I was overwhelmed by the sincerity and commitment shown to me by somebody looking for a mentor. I won’t mention him by name here, but I know that he’ll be making a name for himself in the very near future!
Ebooks And Affiliate Marketing Go Hand In Hand – I’m a big believer that we can all have whatever we want in life as long as we’re willing to put in the work. It doesn’t have to be hard though, as Connie Ragen Green explains in this great post.
How To Write A Killer Blog Post – This is a great guest post on SearchEngineJournal.com. We all like to think that we write great posts, but if we’re honest with ourselves we often could do better. This post breaks everything down into the component parts that are important and I believe we can all learn from this. Check it out!
Remember These 5 Copywriting Formulas – Michel Fortin is an incredible copywriter so when he gives copywriting tips, I listen, and I would recommend that you do too! In this post, he pulls together 5 top techniques for writing great copy, all of which link onto more comprehensive content. I’ve printed it all out and added it to my copywriting file before he realizes what he’s giving us and starts charging for this great content.
SEO being trademarked, AGAIN!?! – Finally, this post caught my eye yesterday. Apparently, someone’s actually trying to trademark the term “SEO”, even though he seems vague about what SEO really means. Have a read – it’s actually quite funny!
Do you find these weekly posts valuable? Please let me know in the comments below.
I’ve been using Submit Your Article now for about 3 months and have been very impressed with their service. They are a service that allows you to upload an article and have many different versions of that article sent to a huge raft of article directories.
I’ve used article spinners in the past as well as article submitters, but I’ve never found anything that works this well at doing both the spinning and the submission.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of article spinning, it’s essentially a means by which the original content is re-written prior to submission so that each directory has a slightly different version of the article so that the search engines don’t see it as duplicate content. This works by providing alternatives to a variety of sentences or phrases throughout the article so that when they’re mixed and matched, no two versions are the same.
By the way, please don’t use the comments for this post to start challenging my views on duplicate content! My view is that we can’t really be sure. I know that some people feel very strongly that duplicate content isn’t an issue, just as some feel equally as strongly that it is. In my view, if there’s a chance that it is, then I’ll take steps to avoid it where practical.
In the past I’ve worked with 2 main types of article spinners – automatic ones and manual ones. The automatic spinners were a disaster in my opinion. They worked at getting different versions of the content out there, but the resulting articles were often hard to read. The manual ones produced good results, but they usually had to be created by embedding all the many versions of a sentence in the content, making proof-reading really difficult.
Submit Your Article gets around this by allowing us to upload the article first, then breaking it down behind the scenes and presenting us with sentences to re-write. This means that the original article is always perfectly readable yet we retain the benefit of manually writing the alternatives. Following their guidelines, I typically end up with an average difference between a sample of spun articles of 40-50%, which is pretty good!
The other huge advantage that Submit Your Article has over other submission engines that I’ve used is the possibility to set a distribution timeframe. The opinion in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) circles is that if a huge amount of content all linking back to one site appears too quickly, then it could be that the site owner is trying to manipulate their rankings (which is entirely the point of SEO!). By spreading the distribution over a longer timeframe, this is less likely to become an issue.
It’s not all roses though. The one thing that really frustrates me is how Submit Your Article handles sub-titles. I like to break up my articles with sub-titles as I believe it makes them easier to read, as well as easier to write. However, unless you put a full-stop (period) at the end of them, they’ll be included in the subsequent paragraph when being presented for re-writing. To deal with this you have two options:
- Use full stops at the end of sub-titles (which looks messy, but works)
- Keep a copy of your article to hand whilst editing the alternatives so that you can easily identify these titles.
I’ve tried both and they both seem to work so at least we have a solution – although I’d prefer it if this wasn’t an issue in the first place!
I’ve noticed a huge benefit since we started using Submit Your Article in a brand new niche. After uploading just 6 articles, we were seeing our content appearing multiple times on each of the first 3 pages in Google. This started bringing us organic traffic much quicker than I’ve ever seen it before and is something that I’ll be exploring further.
In my opinion, Submit Your Article is the best article submission service currently available and I would encourage you to have a look at what they can offer your business. Go there now and take a look:
As bloggers, we’re constantly looking for inspiration and new ideas to write about. Sometimes we’ll find things present themselves to us naturally and other times we have to go searching. To be honest, writing to a calendar is great as the regularity and organization associated with it make it easier to come up with ideas. In fact, I have some great ideas for several series that I want to write, but I’m struggling to fit them in now over the next few months as I’ve got so many other posts planned!
For my own writing, like I said, a calendar is probably my most valuable tool as it helps me to see what’s going on and what’s planned. These events often lead to great inspiration for what to write about when applicable, but often we’re still left staring at a blank screen.
Another idea that I got from Copyblogger is to look to quotations and see how we can work our posts around them (see the full article here).
However, my favorite approach is to be more scientific. I start by thinking about keywords that I want to write about. I have a list of keywords and themes that I’m working on getting my blog known for and these can often inspire posts all by themselves. Other times, I’ll go into EzineArticles and search using my keywords. This invariably leads me to more content that I’ll ever need – all with great titles that I can use for inspiration.
Just to be clear, I don’t use the articles from EzineArticles (although I may read a few if I’m having a really bad case of writer’s lock) I simply use them for ideas. That way, my articles should always be fresh and in my own voice.
Other ways that you could apply this idea would be to use other sites such as YouTube or even something more obscure like Twitter. The trick is to get creative about how you find your inspiration, and your writing will reflect that creativity.
I’d love to read about how you come up with ideas for your own blog. Please share in the comments and let’s see how many other creative techniques we can come up with!
There were a lot of great blog posts out there this week on the subject of Internet Marketing so rather than share a whole list, I’ve been selective and brought you just my top five.
Is Your Blog Really Sick? 8 Health Check Points – I’ve mentioned Patsi’s blog in the past and it says something about the quality (and abundance) of her writing that I’m continually including her posts in my blogs of the week. In this post, she’s taking a quirky look at how we can measure the ‘health’ of our blogs. I can certainly relate to some of the sicknesses that she’s alluding to with my own blog and I’m sure that you’ll relate to it too!
One Foolproof Trick to Blast Writer’s Block – As bloggers, we all know what it’s like to sit in front of the computer screen and have nothing to write about. I’ve partly overcome this by scheduling my blog posts in advance (see ‘Organize Your Blogging‘) but even this strategy leaves us vulnerable to the dreaded writer’s block.
Another of my strategies is to regularly read blogs related to copywriting such as the excellent Copyblogger. In this guest post, James Chartrand (who’s actually a woman) shares a great strategy for beating writer’s block that I’ll be putting to good use in future posts.
Create A Blogging Strategy & Avoid Burnout – It’s taken me some time (about 3 years to be precise) to realize that a blogging strategy is key to successfully growing your blog. Don’t you love it when you think you’ve got something figured out then you read something that blows your preconceptions out of the water? Well, that’s what Lynn Terry’s blog post did for me!
I consider myself well read in terms of what makes up a successful blog. I know that consistent, regular quality content is all that you need.
Wrong!
Want to know why this is just the tip of the iceberg? Read Lynn’s post…! 
18 Blog Tips to Help You Succeed in 2010 – In this guest post on DailyBlogTips, Tony Hue share with us the basics for having a successful blog. In my opinion, if you take everything in this post and combine it with the content in Lynn Terry’s post (above) you can’t fail to make it as a professional blogger!
Use it or lose it! 5 Tips on How to Keep Your Blogging Regular – Darren Rowse knows a thing or two about blogging. In fact, he was co-author on THE book on blogging professionally! One of the things that I really like about him is that he’s just s quick to share his failures and his successes. When he does this though, he always does it in a way where we learn the lesson with him and come to the end of his post with new knowledge to apply to our blogging. This post is a case in point – check it out to see what I mean.
That’s it for this week. As ever, I’d love to get your thoughts about the posts that I’ve shared as well as any that you think I’ve overlooked. If you have a blog of your own and you’d like me to consider including your posts in the future, please let me know. The best way to get in touch regarding this post is via the comments below. I personally read and reply to every comment.
Have a great week!
