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.
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In Internet Marketing, one of the most common tasks that we all perform is Keyword Research. There are a whole host of tools available to help you with this (such as the excellent Keyword Elite) but for those operating on a budget, these tools can appear expensive!
This article will arm you with 7 great keyword research tools that you can access for free to help you to build your online business to a point where the professional tools are within your reach.
1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – This should be your first port of call for keyword research. Think about it, who knows more about search volume on Google than Google themselves? The great thing about this tool is that not only does it suggest synonyms to expand your list of potential keywords, it also lets you download the results into a spreadsheet. I always start out here then update the spreadsheet as I go.
2. Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool – Another great tool that you’ve probably come across already! The full subscription to Wordtracker is worth every penny that they charge, but when starting out, the free version is great for finding related keywords.
3. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – This is one of my favorites – despite owning some professional tools! The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool effectively gives you everything that you’d get from the AdWords tool and from Wordtracker (plus more) all combined in one easy to use page. The only reason to use the other tools is that I find them a little quicker, plus only Google has access to “actual” search data…!
4. KwMap.com – I already wrote a post on this yesterday as I was so impressed with this new tool! It performs in a similar manner to the Wordtracker free keyword tool, but presents the related terms visually along two differing threads. This allows you to see two sets of related terms which slowly converge in their meanings. To be honest, it’s hard to describe – check it out to see what great potential it has!
5. SpyFu – Want to know how your biggest competitors are getting ranked well in the search engines? SpyFu can help you! OK, to be fair, you still need to do the work, but it can give you great insight. And that’s just the free version….! 
6. Quantcast – Using Quantcast is like having Google analytics on your competitors domains! It gives you the ability to dig into not only their traffic, but also their demographics, giving you an indication if the traffic that you’re going after fits the profile that you’re looking for. For example, if you have a product that will sell well to young professionals and your research indicates that for your chosen keywords your main competitors are getting traffic from mainly over 50’s, then I would suggest that you need new keywords!
7. SEO Chat PageRank Search – SEO Chat has a whole goodie bag of free SEO related tools and I’d recommend you spend some time exploring them. For keyword research, you can use their excellent PageRank Search to get an idea of the strength of your competition for your chosen keywords. (Note that SEO Book mentioned above offers a great add-in for Firefox called SEO for Firefox that offers the same, plus much more, but is ONLY for Firefox, which is why it’s not one of my top 7!)
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, just to get you started. If you’re serious about SEO, I would recommend that you read The SEO Mindset by Brad Callen which is one of the best, most comprehensive introductions that I’ve come across.
Enjoy! 
I’ve just come across an interesting new tool for Keyword Research that presents everything in a cool visual display. Hop on over to KwMap and try it out for yourself and I’m sure you’ll agree that it has great potential.
In essence, when you query on a specific keyword, it returns a visual display of the keyword with two strands of related keywords associated with it. You can navigate through these related keywords to follow the relations and identify some interesting phrases that you might otherwise never have thought of.
It’s early days in terms of predicting whether or not this will take off, but I for one will certainly be including it in my keyword research sessions!
Last week, I wrote a post about how I expect the recent changes at Google would turn SEO on its head (see “Google Turns SEO On It’s Head“). I had a mixed reaction from my readers, so I was really pleased to see that Matt Cutts has responded in support of my conclusions!
On his blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) Matt links to a recent video interview that he did at PubCon where he talks about how ranking is having less impact on SEO. Watch the video and see what you think!
(BTW, for my UK readers, Matt does acknowledge on his blog that “Thomas Cook” is NOT a UK bank….!)
I came across a note this morning on Google’s blog about their new SearchWiki. Some short-sighted people are slamming this as glorified bookmarking, but it struck me that this has the potential of turning SEO on it’s head! Read more…