My First Website - Part 3 SEO and Backlinks

SEO:

First off, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The point of using SEO tactics in the design and content of your site is to rank better in search engines. You are making your site easy for the search engines to read, and also for your readers. So lets start off with a few simple things. If you have no knowledge of creating websites or Wordpress, then you may want to pick up a free wordpress theme that is SEO friendly. I think Blog Oh Blog, and Courts Internet Marketing School is a good start. Also search google for “free SEO Wordpress themes”. You could also pay someone, or buy a pre-made wordpress theme that is SEO friendly. Using a premium theme is the way to go. You want your site to stand out, not just look like every other cheap blog.

In The Header: If you do know a thing or two, then you can make any theme SEO friendly. Lets start from the top of your site, down to the bottom. You want your TITLE and Description meta tags to be perfect. Usually people have the title of their site target their niche keyword. Like I am in the niche, “Make Money Online Blogging”, so that is in my title. You also want this keyword at least once, if not twice in your description. Tuck it in there, dont just keyword stuff the description. Remember, when people use Google and Yahoo, they will see the title and description, so it you just make your description, “Make money online, make money online blogging, how to make money online, how to make money, how to make money fast”, you probably are going to have many people skip right over your site.

Next stop is the H1 tag: This is the strongest tag on the body of your site. Use your main keyword in it. I have “Make Money Online Blogging” wrapped in the H1 tag. You can see this right below my logo at the top.

How to use H2 tags properly: This is the biggest problem with many free wordpress templates. You know the right sidebar that lists all your categories, pages, ect? Well most templates use H2 tags for each one of the items. No. Use H2 tags to identify the titles of your pages and posts. Usually you include the keyword you are targeting in the title. So when you are editing your theme, ensure the title of the page/post is wrapped in an H2 tag.

The Body of Your Posts and Pages: There really isn’t much too this. Just type away, whatever you want. If you are trying to rank that page/post then you will include targeted keywords, and probably repeat them for keyword density. Depending on the length of the post, I will repeat the keyword 3-5 times. If it still isn’t ranking well, I throw some backlinks at it and see what happens. But backlinks is later on in the lesson.

Fix Your Sidebar: If your template is using the H2 days for everything in the sidebar, you will want to fix this right away. You can simply make them H3 tags, or I prefer to use DIV tags and declare how they look using CSS. It is rather easy. The only problem you will face is you lose the font color, size, ect. With a little searching through your CSS file, you should be able to fix it in just a few minutes.

Curing the Footer: Most of the time you will see a link back to the homepage in the footer. You want to you your site’s main keyword. This is called the Anchor Text. If you look at my footer, it reads “Make Money Online Blogging”, and the link points to my domain shudogg.com. When you link on other sites to your site, you want to use this anchor text. It helps you rank for that keyword.

That is the basics for getting your site off to a good start. There are more in-depth things to go into like keyword density, researching and targeting the right keywords, ect. But this is a tutorial on how to create a website, not marketing.

Backlinks: Backlinks is part of SEO, but I seperated it for a reason. The SEO part above is about how to get your site ready for the search engines and preparing it. The actual code underlying. For the rest of SEO tactics, you go to backlinks. I guess you can seperate this into two sets of backlinks. One to your main site, and the second to specific pages on your site. So say my Anchor text was just “Make Money Online”, I then have sub sections of “Make Money Online Blogging, “Make Money Online with Ebay”, ect. Each one of the subsections would be a post or a page within my main site.

You want to get a good amount of backlinks to everything you want to get ranked well in search engines. One of my sites, I rank well for some keywords, and not even found for the rest. So I need to get backlinks to the specific pages that aren’t anywhere to be found to boost them up individually.

So when you are getting backlinks, you want to get links to your main URL, and also specific pages within it. I usually say to start off with 500 backlinks to your main URL. 300 backlinks to each of your specific pages. So I would get 500 backlinks to my main URL using the anchor text “Make Money Online”. Then I have the pages within the site. I would get 300 backlinks to site.com/make-money-online-blogging using the anchor text “Make Money Online Blogging”. I would also get 300 backlinks to site.com/make-money-online-with-ebay using the anchor text “Make Money Online Blogging With Ebay”. See what I’m doing?

Where do I go to get backlinks? You can start off with using a directory service like One Way Text Link. I like them because you create an account for free. Then you are presented with tons and tons of directories to submit to. They link right to the site, and it keeps track of which directories you have already completed so you dont get confused. They also give the pagerank of the directory site, which is nice.

You could pay a service, or a person at WickedFire to submit your site for you. A lot do 300, 500, or 1,000 backlinks. Just tell them your anchor text and URL you want them to link to. So if you don’t like spending tons of hours getting backlinks yourself, pay a person at wickedfire to do it. Just a shot, about $30 for 500? Don’t quote me on that though. You could also go to other websites and email them asking for a link exchange. Also you could comment on blogs. The URL is what page you are working on for getting backlinks, and use your name for the anchor text. A lot of blogs use the “nofollow” tag, so they won’t count for backlinks in google. You can though find a decent amount of blogs that are “do follow”, those are the ones you want.

Lastly you have forums. A lot of forums don’t use nofollow tags that I am aware of. Find some really popular forums for your niche and create a free account. First thing you do is login and edit your account options. You want to find where you can edit your signature. Make your signature, or “sig” for short, crafty but not annoying and spammy. Include your link in the signature using the anchor text you are ranking for. Post comments but dont spam. 10 forums, 10 posts each = 100 free backlinks and should take roughly an hour if you have a niche where you can find decent forums easily.