Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[oscarkool]

Hey James,

I am curious how many backlinks we need to be aiming for if we wish to see our sites on the top position.  I've heard over and over that you need a lot for more competitive terms, but I am looking for a rough number.  I have never had any success in anything SEO, whereas I've had a lot of success in PPC.  I have yet to see any reason to do SEO since I havent had any personal success.  I want to be successful in SEO because I want to move beyond PPC.  But, I am finding it hard to be motivated to do SEO when I am seeing no results from it.  What's the point of spending months on a keyword just to get on to page 5 if I can make instant money from PPC? 

Can you help me out please?  I am just not getting the SEO process at all.  I can't even seem to rank in the top 20 pages for non competitive keywords.  I don't even want to think about ranking for a competitive keyword at this point.  I am just lost at this point.

-Jeff

[Tags:]

Tags: google marketing building backlinks 

[James Stein]

 Hi Jeff,
  Well there is no real answer to this because it does depend upon the competition and their backlink building.

  With that said though, I mainly do target very high competitive keywords but that is only because I love the challenge and plus the products I normally create are in a high demand category.

  I get top listings because I build many links as possible, not all of mine are in the #1 spot but mostly I hit the front page with the keywords I target. I have one very highly competitive that I jump between spot #5 - spot #8 but the sites I am fighting against have been there a few years longer than my site and plus the #1 listing has the keyword domain name, so as you can imaging very tough competition there..lol

 What I do is post an article to Article Marketer run a bookmarking of about 300 - 400 or so bookmarks. Then post the article to one of my blogs and bookmark it also with about 300 or so bookmarks. Then take that article to places like articlesbase.com, amazines.com, goarticles.com, and a few others. I may run a few bookmarks on them also.

 Next is to take my article (I have not done this in a month or so) http://www.scribd.com and upload it as a pdf and then tweet it and post it on facebook.

 If you use places like http://www.digg.com and http://www.clipmarks.com to bookmark the article on "your" site / blog it will help also.

 In no time at all I have top listings, it is a little time consuming but well worth it..

 One thing you need to remember building profiles at web 2.0 properties like facebook, myspace, and etc matter also - especially when you can include a link to your website.

 If you post to blogs you may also want to consider setting up a http://www.backtype.com account and setting up your profile and bookmark it also.

 Now one thing many people do not do is add basic SEO to their sites, meaning meta tags.. Self Proclaimed Experts will argue with this but that is their problem because fact is it works.

Code: [Select]

<title>Article Productions :: articles, article directory, marketing, sales pages, article marketing, article marketer</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="articles, article, directory, marketing, sales pages, article marketing, submission, spinning, spun articles, article marketer" />
<meta name="description" content="article marketing at a new level with article sales pages, article spinning, ebook and short reports creation, output creations as pdf or submit to article directories. Article Marketer" />
<meta name="revisit" content="5 days" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

 Also make sure your keywords are mentioned within the first 25% of your page. Repeat them but do not do over-kill. Mention the keyword 2 more times on the page itself. Write a paragraph (welcome message) and include those keywords.

 Your images on your site should also be named with your keywords.. If you have a dog training site and show a picture of a dog then the image should be named dog_training.jpg

 Hope that helps ....

 James

Hey James,

I am curious how many backlinks we need to be aiming for if we wish to see our sites on the top position.  I've heard over and over that you need a lot for more competitive terms, but I am looking for a rough number.  I have never had any success in anything SEO, whereas I've had a lot of success in PPC.  I have yet to see any reason to do SEO since I havent had any personal success.  I want to be successful in SEO because I want to move beyond PPC.  But, I am finding it hard to be motivated to do SEO when I am seeing no results from it.  What's the point of spending months on a keyword just to get on to page 5 if I can make instant money from PPC? 

Can you help me out please?  I am just not getting the SEO process at all.  I can't even seem to rank in the top 20 pages for non competitive keywords.  I don't even want to think about ranking for a competitive keyword at this point.  I am just lost at this point.

-Jeff

[Cassie]

Wow - I haven't been here for a couple of weeks but this is a gem.

Going out to rake some leaves and bring in the hoses as it is snowing where my son is in Minneapolis and could hit Wisconsin tomorrow.

I will definitely come back and spend some time on your post, James.

Thanks as usual 

Cassie

[oscarkool]

Hey James, thanks for the great response!  Definitely taking some notes   I did a ton of backlinking today from various websites and blogs with anchor texts so that should definitely help my site.  Will start applying everything else you mentioned soon.

Cassie, I live in north dakota and it is snowing hard....makes me sad   TOO EARLY!!

EDIT: A question for you James,

When you are bookmarking your articles on your blog and such, are you bookmarking with the keyword you are trying to rank for, or bookmarking with the title of your articles?

Thanks!

[James Stein]

 Jeff,
  Your title should have keywords in it ...  This is why you also rotate your tile ...

 Example:
 Title1: What to Look For In a Php Members Script
 Title2: Crucial Tips to Make Your Php Membership Site Go Viral
 Title3: Php Membership Script

 Notice the difference in keywords "php members script" "php membership site" "php membership script"

 Thus allowing me to target 3 different keywords randomly as the titles are rotated..

 James

When you are bookmarking your articles on your blog and such, are you bookmarking with the keyword you are trying to rank for, or bookmarking with the title of your articles?

Thanks!

[James Stein]

 Hey Cassie,
  What up ... Long time no see..

 South Carolina still hot (rain now though) with no snow .. lol

 James

Wow - I haven't been here for a couple of weeks but this is a gem.

Going out to rake some leaves and bring in the hoses as it is snowing where my son is in Minneapolis and could hit Wisconsin tomorrow.

I will definitely come back and spend some time on your post, James.

Thanks as usual 

Cassie

[Cassie]

I know, James, busy with the kids and trying to get another site up. I could try and send you some of that snow if you want  . Actually I love winter BUT it does last a little too long here in Wisconsin. Still hoping for an indian summer.

[Cassie]

Hi Jeff -

We had the good fortune to travel to South Dakota on the harley last June. Weather was terrible with lots of rain. I loved seeing Mt. Rushmore for the first time. Rode into Wyoming and visited Devils Tower too. Everyone says that the weather was not the norm. Never have been on a bike with so much rain in my life  . Oh well, still a great trip.

So how much snow is forecasted for ND?

Cassie

[James Stein]

 Ha, no thanks .. Lived in that stuff up north for 18 years. That is when we did not have school buses, you had to walk a mile to the school in 3 foot of snow 

 James

I know, James, busy with the kids and trying to get another site up. I could try and send you some of that snow if you want  . Actually I love winter BUT it does last a little too long here in Wisconsin. Still hoping for an indian summer.

[oscarkool]

Hey James,

I asked one of my pro SEO friends about backlinks from blogs and this is what he had to say.  I wanted to get your take on it.

"Good question, Jeff.

Actually, one thing you're going to learn in Month 2 (new video on it's way) is that Blogs that have high PR are good to get links from, but the flow of PR isn't as good as getting a link on a high PR page that has just a few links, tops...

Most high PR blogs may not be that great for getting link juice, since the PR is being evaporated by so many other links. If a page had a PR2, but had 10 outbound links, the outbound links would each get 1/10th of that PR.

But, like I've stated before, if you can get a lot of decent backlinks, it's still worth it!

Web 2.0 backlinks all depends on the site, and the abuse they've been getting. Google's been getting smarter about these links, and they've slowly become less and less important, regardless of the PR of the page, because people tend to abuse these sites in order to get the links.

There's still a few good sites left, and those sites include HubPages (but ONLY if you get a high enough score to get the nofollow taken off), Squidoo (will get better now that they're improving their quality), etc.

I use Web 2.0 sites to get indexed faster, but never for serious backlinks. Most will help give a quick boost in the rankings, but that fizzles out quickly."

[James Stein]

 Jeff,
  There is one thing I will agree with your friend on and that is how many self proclaimed marketers ruin websites by spamming them left and right. As soon as something popular comes out there you go, it is over-run by wannabe marketers that want to use it for nothing more than spamming their links.

 This is one main reason why many do not like marketers and the bad part of it is because of those that do spam these sites, the entire industry suffers because then all of a sudden all marketers are spammers in the eyes of the consumers.

 As for PR and Do Follow / No Follow ... None of this means anything at all. I do not understand why so many still pass on this bad advice about Do Follow and No Follow when it has been proven time and time again that these tags mean nothing at all...

 Go make a post on any of the following sites and you will see they get indexed and if you actually bookmark the post you will see increased rankings.

 http://www.digg.com
 http://www.clipmarks.com
 http://www.articlesbase.com

 Now google does not like my site (it is indexed but with no title or description) because it is obvious that I have pushed hard against their sidewiki with http://www.blocksidewiki.com

 If we do a search for SideWiki Blockers you will see ClipMarks listed #1 (at the time of this post) and it has been #1 ever since I posted it. The #1 spot is my bookmark. Mind you clipmarks is no follow but that does not matter at all because I still get traffic because my bookmark is there. My traffic stats shows direct traffic due to that link being in #1 spot.

 Normally clipmarks would just help raise my listing but as I said google does not like my site and that is fine... I have no problem with google not indexing my site properly because there are other ways around that. If you will notice on that same search my article on articlesbase also shows up and I have my link on 2 or 3 of the sites that show in the same search results.

 So as you see I still drive traffic and it does not matter if the link is no follow or not... This is just looking at google, remember there are many more search engines besides google and those links do matter to yahoo, excite, altavista, and etc. because these search engines do not care about Do Follow or No Follow tags.

 As you have already seen ArticleProductions.com can and does get authors top listings and it is a PR1 ... So that blows the entire PR thing out the window as many articles on my site outrank EZA which is supposed to be like a PR6.

 Bottom line here is - ignore any advice about PR, Do Follow and No Follow because the facts are they mean nothing. You should be getting yourself listed anyplace you can and not run your business around google's way of doing things. Many make this huge mistake, if you follow just google and market your sites according to what google likes then what happens when google changes ?? All your marketing goes out the window when they decide to change things around.

 As far as the backlinks fizzle out after a bit, well this is not 100% true either... This depends greatly upon you and the reason why is because your links will stay longer if you continue to build backlinks and the web 2.0 sites you are dealing with, you actually login and participate and continue to add valued content.

 The reason why many marketers will say these links fizzle is because they will use automatic means to create an account and post to a site and never login and participate.

 Give you an example here:

 Let's say you own a website such as faves.com and you have 100,000 members, well that great! Now let's say that 75,000 use automative means to post links to the site and another 10,000 are dead members.

 Now this looks good because your site has links which means content - But since these 75,000 people never login and use some automative means to post it will hurt your site in the search engines. The reason why is because the spiders from the search engines follow links for "groups" "friends" and etc. but they see very little content and over a several months period that content does not grow and thus the search engines devalue that site.

 Thus after awhile those links that are indexed start to slowly fizzle out in the search engines because there is no new and fresh content on many parts of the site because very few actually login that site and "participate".

 This is why I always push so hard for people to take part in the communities they join, do not just post your links and run to the next site. This only hurts you and the website you are posting on.

 I know this is probably more information than what you asked for but hey I was on a roll ... 

 James

[oscarkool]

haha, good stuff James!

Definitely a lot of stuff to take notes for.

So for all of those bookmarking sites you use for your service, you actually log on those sites and participate from time to time?

[James Stein]

 Jeff,
  For the sites that offer social options, yes I do..

 There are far too many people that just want to auto submit everything and never lift a finger to take part in a website. How can these people expect a site to give them link juice and they never want to login and be apart of the community ?

 I am all for automation but I also think automation has it's place. When we automate everything we do then we are no longer in control of running our business.

 I am from the old school - I still think sending "personal" emails to your list, members, customers is a good thing. I do not use any kind of auto-responders. If I have to be so cold as to just send a pre-created message out on a certain date then I do not need to be in business any longer.

 I prefer sending a "just created" email to my list, members, and customers.

 This same concept applies in many other cases such as social media websites, login and take part in the community ...

 James

haha, good stuff James!

Definitely a lot of stuff to take notes for.

So for all of those bookmarking sites you use for your service, you actually log on those sites and participate from time to time?

[oscarkool]

Great to know James, thanks.  I think most people, including me, get caught up in this automation process of just trying to get our stuff to rank higher and faster to be #1!!!!!!!!

Definitely some great stuff to ponder over the next couple of days.  Gonna work on setting up all of my bookmark profiles. 

If I do end up wanting to use automation software, should I log in about once a week and spent a few minutes for each site taking part in the community?

[James Stein]

I login mine randomly, no set time really .. honestly it only takes a few minutes at each site.

Make a value added comment, create a few friends request, maybe boost a few of your friends bookmarks by giving them a vote. Doing this is what helps not only your friends and the site but helps your bookmarks as your friends will be opt to do the same for you in return.

James