How Does Off Page SEO Work?

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OFF PAGE OPTIMIZATION

Unless you build it correctly... they will not come.

David: In this session, we’re going to be talking about off page optimization. And this is a

topic that is near and dear to my heart. I see often, especially when we first start working

with a client, they might build out this really sexy website because they got a web designer

to build it, and they had no thought whatsoever about SEO and driving traffic to it. If you

build it, they will come - that doesn’t apply in the online space. We want to make sure that

we get our off page optimization right.

How Google really works

If you remember back a little bit earlier when I

was talking about the algorithm, the way that

Google works is based on this research report

algorithm. What we’re looking at doing with our

off page optimization is making sure that we’ve

got lots of other websites, lots of other research reports referencing our website. That’s

ultimately what’s going to get our search engine listings to rise up in Google.

Stage one is just making sure that you get your website right. Make sure that you’ve

selected your right keywords and done the on page optimization. Then when working with

clients, I usually like to turn on AdWords to get them some quick wins because what I’m

about to show you now can take two to three months sometimes to filter in, depending on

how competitive the market is.

This is just building on what I talked about as far as the research report. Google is really one

giant popularity contest. If I was to sit here and say, hey, I’m the coolest dude on earth. I’m

really good at my SEO. I’m awesome. Apart from being a little bit egotistical, you’d say, yes,

whatever. Once you start to get other people saying that, hey, he really is good at SEO. He

really is an expert. Then, I become the expert. So we start off by making sure we get our on

page optimization right, which is like me saying, hey, Google, I’m an SEO expert. The next

stage is making sure that we build up the relevant links back to our website.


Not all links are created equal. The links back to your website, some links are going to have

more weight than other links. If we had old man Joe here saying, yes, Dave’s an SEO expert,

no one really knows who old man Joe is and he’s not an authority. He’s just some random

guy. The reason I use Brad Pitt, I suppose for SEO I probably should have put another well-

known SEO company like Bruce Clay or something like that. But if that website, they’ve

already built up an authority in that particular niche, if they then were to say, hey, Dave

really does know his SEO and he absolutely dominates at it, because they’ve built up this

authority in the space, that has weight.

If you imagine this is another person saying Brad Pitt is cool. Right here, this is another

person. It might be written in the tabloids or something like that, and then you’ve got all of

these other people who might read this magazine. So you can see the way it filters up.

Certain links back to your website are going to hold more weight based on how

authoritative they are. What we’re trying to do is build a good variety of back links to our

website from a whole number of sources because that’s what happens naturally.

Now, we just need to make sure that when we get links back to our website that we’re

getting the links back to our website saying the right thing. So what I’m talking about

there is all to do with the anchor text. I’ll just open up one of our sites. We’ll have a look

here.

When people link back to our website, the

anchor text is the text that is attached to the

link that comes back to your website. So if I

want to make a particular page rank, the

keyword that I’m trying to optimize for this

website, is trading systems. So that means all the links that I’m going to build back to my

website, I want to make sure that the keyword, trading systems, is in that link.

When I’m building links back to sites in my own network, typically I like to build those links

back with the right anchor text. Here, I’m building a link back to my website with free

trading systems. The aim of the game is to get as many of these links as we can from a

variety of sources saying the right words that link back to your page that is relevant to the

keyword that you’re trying to rank for.


If we come back to a local business example, let’s say that we’ve set up our website. We’ve

got our home page and we’ve got services, and testimonials page and the Contact Us like I

talked about, and we assign one keyword for each one of those pages that we’re looking to

optimize. We want to make sure that all of the links that we’re building back to those

pages all link back saying the right thing.

So for the dentist, we’ll give you another example.

This is another client that we’re working on, having a

look at his website here. Now I’m handling more so

the SEO side of things here. I haven’t actually got to

start working with the on page conversion and that

type of thing. But using his navigation up the top here,

I’ll change to some different tabs.

If we look at the title tag just up the top here, the keyword that I’m actually going for this

particular page is dentist Prahran. So each one of these pages has a keyword that I’ve

selected for it. And then what I do is, using a whole lot of different sources that I’m going

to talk to you about, I’m building a whole lot of links back to this website using dentist

Prahran as the anchor text back to this website.

As we said, not all links are created equal. And the fact of the matter is, you can rank for any

keyword that you want to go after. It really is a game of looking what your competition is

doing, reverse engineering what they’re doing and then staying one step ahead of them.

Using tools like Pete mentioned, we’ve got Market Samurai. That’s a tool where you can

type in a particular keyword and find out how many back links, how many links back to

their website your competitors have. What you do is just make sure that you get a few

more links than them. So the aim of the game is look at what your competition is doing and

then just be that one step ahead.

You need to do that calculation in your head then to determine whether or not it’s worth it,

whether you’re going to get a good positive return on investment for building a number of

back links back to that page. I had, for example a $17 e-book about mortgages, and Pete

was talking about mortgages before, and I’m trying to rank for mortgages, a super high

competitive phrase. I might look at the competition and they’ve got 10,000 back links or

something like that.


I say, right, I better start building these back links. I go to the effort and the cost of building

those back links. Even if I do get to number one, how much money could I potentially

make out of a $17 e-book sale? Not that much. Our competitor over here who is selling

mortgages, the value of that lead is worth so much more for him because, as Pete was

saying, people bid up to $100 per click on the AdWords for this particular mortgage. They

can afford to do that because the value of that client might be $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000

on the back end.

So you can rank for anything. You reverse engineer how many links they’ve taken to build

to get what it is that they’ve got, and then determine in your head, is it worth me putting

in that same effort? Do I have enough in my business model, the back end, to be able to

monetize those people? That’s how I go through a calculation to determine whether or not

I go after something.

When it comes to local business though, the competitive landscape is still very early days.

So that’s why I said, just go after your most competitive phrase, and then put in your area

modifier in front because you can get just about any of those.

Pete: Just on the back linking material, the great US President George W. Bush has a couple

of things to teach us about this. One thing, just like winning an election in the US, it’s not

necessarily how many votes you get, just get the right ones. Obviously, the Florida state

issue he had there. So it’s not about the maximum number of back links, it’s about getting

good-weighted ones.

When it comes to the actual anchor text, an interesting story I always get a laugh out of, a

few years ago when it was very much weighted on what the actual text of the anchor links

was, when you Google miserable failure, the actual number one result was George Bush’s

profile page at the whitehouse.gov. There were so many people linking to his page with

the anchor text saying miserable failure, that he actually ranked number one for miserable

failure. So it gives you an idea of how important those back links are and the actual words

that are in that back link. I would assume that the White House listing page didn’t have

miserable failure actually in the words but he listed number one for it because of these

back links.


David: Pete is spot on. This idea that when you think of the whole search engine process

what we’re trying to go through, the on page optimization probably makes up 20% of the

equation and a good bulk, 80% of what we’re trying to do for ranking, is all in that link

building and what those links are saying. You can rank a website that might not have

miserable failure at all.

You know those rules of thumb I gave you. Make sure it’s in the title tag, make sure it’s on

the page, make sure that you put it in H1 tag. You don’t even have to have that in place

and you can still rank for a keyword if you send enough links to it with the appropriate

anchor text. They call it Google bombing. Google went in there after it happened. And it

ended up getting in the media and they actually pulled it out and manually edited the

results. But you can still do that to a certain extent.

Dave’s hot tips

Just a couple of hot tips here: you just want to

send links to the pages that you want to rank. So

that’s obvious. When I talked about making sure

that your site structure is set up, usually what I

like to do is make sure that you have your most

important pages that you want to have ranked at least one click away from the home page.

That will end up helping you out just the way Google passes (I don’t want to get into a

discussion about Google page rank).

Just think the pages that you want to have ranked, have them linked as closely to your

home page as possible so maybe one click away from your home page. Then just send

links to the pages that you want to have ranked. The other thing as well, and when I think

about what we’ve done in the e-commerce space with Planet 13, is bigger sites win.

The more pages you have, it gives you more linking opportunity. It gives you more tickets

in this search engine lottery that I was talking about. So bigger sites always win. That’s why

you see a lot of e-commerce sites things like Amazon and Zappos, they do incredibly well

and come up on a whole variety of different searches because they just have a huge

volume of pages. Once you’ve got all of these pages, then you can start to follow my rule

number one, send links to the pages you want to have ranked. It’s good to get off site links,

like links to your website from other people’s websites but you also will get benefit from

sending links within your own site.


Going back to that structure I talked about, when you set up a blog and you start to do

regular repetitive posts, you’ll get into a rhythm. Every week or every two weeks, you’ll

start regularly posting on this blog. In that blog, what should you do? You follow step

number one, send links to the pages you want to have ranked. As you’re building that

content, just keep firing. I know it’s on your own site. But just keep firing links to the pages

that you want to have ranked and keep building.

Replicate nature

What we need to do is effectively replicate what

happens in nature. That’s ultimately what we’re

looking to do with this whole off page

optimization. Google doesn’t like the idea of

someone gaming their search engine, like the

miserable failure example Pete talked about. Google wants to give the best and most

relevant information to the user. So the way you’ll get the best results in your search

engine efforts, is to make sure that you try and replicate nature as much as you can.

What am I talking about there? It’s not natural to have all of your links when you start

doing link building and I’ll give you some ways that you can do link building, it’s not

natural to have all of those links just linking back to the home page. In nature, people

might be writing a blog and then they’d say, oh, this page is interesting but it might be

three levels deep. They might find an interesting page on your blog, and then link to it

from their blog. So basically you’re sending links deep within the site rather than just through

to the home page URL.

When you’re building these back links you want to send them to a variety of places. Don’t

just send all of the back links to the home page. Make sure that you distribute it

throughout the site. We also need to make sure that we get it from a variety of different

sources as well.

It’s not natural to have all of your links coming from exactly the same method. We’ll talk

about EzineArticles. If you had all of your links coming back to the website from

EzineArticles, that’s not natural. We want to look at building different ways to build links,

getting blog comments, and I’ll go through the different ways. You just want to have a

variety of different sources.

You need a variety of different anchor texts as well. This comes back to, again, it was a good

example with the miserable failure. When they did this Google bombing, they got


everybody to link to that White House page saying miserable failure, and everybody linked

to that page with exactly the same anchor text.

Google got smart, and this was early days before it started to evolve. Google is now

thinking, well, it’s not natural to have every link coming back to that webpage saying

exactly the same thing. Some people might link to it with George Bush is a miserable

failure. Someone might link to it just with the URL. Someone might link to it with click here.

You need to be making sure that you build those links back to the website in this natural

way.

Also we’ll build these links over a period of time. This is something I used to believe but I

haven’t seen anything that supports it. I don’t think you can build links too quickly to a

website if it is aged. We talked about registering a domain name, letting it age, putting

that content on there. And then later on, when you come back to develop it, if you’ve done

that, you can’t really build links too quickly.

My belief is the idea, all you have to do is look at a press release. Press release, and we’ll

have a look at PRWeb. And when you distribute a press release online, it’ll get distributed

out over to a couple of thousand different websites. It’s all exactly the same content and

your website goes from zero links to the next day having 10,000 links.

The old school theory is the idea that is not natural to go from zero links to 10,000 links. I

think it has to do with the way you build those links, as long as you’re building it naturally.

A press release is natural. It might not be natural to have 10,000 links all appear from

WordPress blogs over one night. That type of thing is what we want to build out.

What I’ve got here now, I had a product called the SEO Method, I still do, where I go quite

heavily into the way that I do SEO. This particular product is good if you’re going after very

competitive markets. We use a lot of different services to gain access to different websites

that we can post content on, so that we can link back to our own website. But working

with local businesses, you don’t need to do that this hard.


A simple plan of attack

So pretty much I’ve put together a simple plan of attack

on how you can build back links to your website. So

after you’ve followed the structure of what we’ve talked

about and you’re up to, right, I’m up to my SEO now

and I’m going to start building links, here is a simple

plan. I tried to make it so the cost is as low as possible.

So a lot of the sources I’ll be talking about are just free.

Directories

I’ll start off and I’ll just talk you through this

process. Stage one, let’s just say we’ve got our

website here. That’s our primary money phrase.

And then we also have coming off that, we’ll

have our second-tier pages. So these are what I

was talking about, products and services.

These are your most important pages. They’ll be one link away from the home page. In

addition to that, you might have your blog and there are going to be some different posts.

Just for now though, we’ll just focus on building links. Over time, we will start to build links

to the blogs.

The first thing that I like to do, and I’ll do this as soon as we first start working with a client,

we’ll make sure that we build links. We submit to directories. Directories are, before Google

came about, I don’t know if anyone has been on the internet long enough to remember

what the home page of Yahoo! used to look like, or Lycos or things like that. It would just

have a whole lot of different listings of different categories. You’d click and say, right, I’m

interested in health and you’d click that. I’m interested in physio and you’d click that, and

you’d drill deeper into the site. Then it would just have a list of businesses and websites

and things like that. That’s what a directory is.

Those directories, once Google came around, pretty much went the way of the dodo.

They’re not really that useful for us as searchers because we just type into Google what it is

that we want to have found or what it is that we want to find. But these directories still

exist and they represent a good linking opportunity for you to make sure that we build

links back to the website.


So one of the first things that I do is, I’ll submit to about 300 directories. We use a service

called Directory Maximizer. You pay about 16c per submission. So it’s quite a cheap service.

The benefit of building these back links using this directory method is we’re going to build

a whole lot of back links to the website with the URL as the anchor text.

When I talked about building links back to the

website, I said that we want to make sure that we

build it naturally. And some people will link to our

website with URLs, some people will link with specific

words that we’re trying to rank for, and some people

will link with click here. By using the directories, there

are a whole lot of different websites. And if you imagine sites like DMOZ, and I’ll show you

that one. That’s a good example of a directory just so you get a clear visual of what it is.

This is one of the more well-known directories and I don’t think Directory Maximizer

submits to this one because there is a bit more of a manual process required. As you can

see, we’ve got our main top tier categories and then you can just keep drilling deeper and

deeper into the site before we’re given a list of websites. You can see some websites.

There are a whole host of directories like that across the internet that we can build links

back to our website. This particular DMOZ are linking back to the websites with the name

of the company. A lot of the other directories will just be linking to the URL of your website.

So I use the directories, you’ll be linking back just to your home page with the URL. You’re

not going to get as much. It’s not an authority if you think back to me and Brad Pitt. These

aren’t Brad Pitt type links, these are lower quality links. And the reason we do it is because

we want to make it look natural. A lot of what I’m going to show you, it’s all making it look

natural. So we’re building links from a good variety of sources.

Question: These 300 directory sites are really set up for exactly what you’re talking about, as opposed to expecting any punter to just simply go to that directory site and look for

something? They’re not human friendly, are they?

David: If you visit them, they look human friendly but they don’t do very well in the search

engines. The chances of someone going there and using it are slim to none.

Question: So they really are made for this process?

David: Initially they weren’t but I think it’s evolved into that way. New listings are popping

up and some of these directories have higher value than other directories. So the reason a

person will build a directory, they’ll build it.


They’ll try and build up the authority of this directory and then they’ll try and sell links

within that directory. So what we’re doing using this directory service, we’ll submit to 300

sites.

Depending on if your budget allows, just submit to every directory you can. Some of those

directories over time will evolve into higher authority directories and you’ll be in from day

one and then they won’t charge you. You’re not going to be charged an additional fee.

They might introduce that later on down the track. The reason I say 300 is more of a cost-

type thing, I want to keep this as low as possible.

Question: On that side of things, I’m definitely using that Directory Maximizer service now as well. Do you think it’s worth paying the extra money for those high page ranks sites, the PR 6, 7, 8 whatever? I noticed on Directory Maximizer some of them are $60, $70 for one

link. Is that really going to benefit, do you think?

David: Google has openly come out and said, we don’t like paid links. Anywhere where

they’re publicly advertising, we are selling links on our website, I won’t buy any links from

them. I don’t mind approaching a webmaster and saying, you’ve got a really good blog,

can you link back to me, and it’s not advertised. Anywhere they’re selling links actively, I

wouldn’t buy links because Google has openly come out and said, we don’t like that

because you’re trying to game the search engines.

So the good thing is, we build those links back to the URL. We’ll vary the text submission as

well. They’re submitting to 300 directories using services like Directory Maximizer. I’ll just

mix up the title and mix up the descriptions, just to keep it natural. So it’s not all exactly

the same.

The good thing about them as well, they’ll drip feed the submissions. It won’t go from zero

one day to 300 directories the next day. They’ll drip it out over a period of three months.

So they might get you 20 back links one day and 30 the next, and just drip it out over time.

That’s a link, you can either go through my affiliate link, it’s no different. Or if you want to

go directly, it’s Directory Maximizer.


EzineArticles and GoArticles

The next step that we use is EzineArticles and

GoArticles. EzineArticles is just an article directory.

Just to explain some of these sites, you’ve got a

better understanding of what a directory is now.

I’ll give you a good understanding of what an

article directory is.

An article directory, there are a whole lot of sites around the web that allow people to

submit articles on various topics. The reason EzineArticles exists, for them obviously,

they’re getting a whole lot of unique articles written for their website and people are

submitting it to their website, and they can then put advertising around. They’ll make

money off AdSense and there are a few other ways they monetize this particular website.

But the benefit from us, we’re allowed to submit an article to their site and we get the

chance down the bottom to link to our website in our resource box.

So we provide a good quality, unique article, it’s not selling a product or service, it’s more

so you might talk about, here are seven tips on how to reduce lower back pain or

something like that. That might be a good article. Then you write it and you submit it to

EzineArticles and also GoArticles, and then we get the opportunity in the resource box to

link back to our website.

Pete: Just quickly as a side note, those ads that you can see on the page are the actual

content network ads.

David: If you want someone good to follow, how about starting here? Go to

davidjenyns.com. We submit loads of articles. We have tons of different aliases. I don’t

know if I should put that on a recording or not.

We submit a whole lot of different articles to

EzineArticles. Down in the resource box this

particular account, my primary account sends

links back to my trading network, or it’ll send

links back to my SEO network. So this is an

article we had written for our SEO website and you can see, I want to rank for SEO experts.

And if you look down in the bottom left hand corner, you can see I’m linking back to my

page that I’m trying to rank and it’s a deep link. So it’s not my home page link.


So if I click on that and open it in a new tab, you’ll see it’s not going to take me to the

home page, it’ll take me to the About page which I’ve optimized for SEO experts. We are

also sending a link back to our home page as well.

When I selected Melbourne SEO Services as my URL, I did that by design. If we’re building a

whole lot of back links back to my website using the URL as the link, I’ve effectively put the

keywords in there as well. So even when people are linking back to my website with my

domain name, they’re also linking back to my website with my keywords as well. So there’s

a little bit of a double whammy there which is good but it depends on what your branding

is.

Like I said, usability should always come first. So typically, if you’ve got a brand name, I’d

have that in my domain name. We were creating Melbourne SEO Services from scratch, so

that’s why we did that.

So there are different article directories: EzineArticles and GoArticles. I’ve given you

numbers because I think a lot of SEO material out there, they say here’s what you should

be doing, do this, do this but they never really give you specifics like here is how much to

do. So I’m going to give you some hard numbers. Most of this for local business will work

like that. This is a local business workshop.

If you’re going after competitive markets, keep the ratios that I’m going to go through the

same, but you can just scale up the volume. If you’re going after the trading market or

Metastock, you’re probably going to need to do more than 10 EzineArticles and 10

GoArticles as well. But you want to link to your home page, link deep within the site and

I’ve got a link through to my Ezine.

YouTube

The next thing that I’d recommend, and I won’t

go into this in great detail now because I’m

going to go through the way that I do video

marketing, but get yourself 10 videos. Start off

with 10, and I’ll talk about where you should

place those and that type of thing. We’ll get

some easy rankings for video when people search on YouTube because YouTube, people

still haven’t quite figured it out yet. So it’s really easy to rank for very competitive terms.


But we won’t get any real back linking benefit, mainly because they use a particular tag

called no follow over on YouTube. This means you don’t get the linking benefit back to

your website but there is still a reason we use YouTube and I’ll go through that in more

detail.

Just drop our Ezine in and we’ll be linking through to our home page and also some of

these deep pages as well so you get a little bit of both. The next step was YouTube and I’ll

link back to my home page with YouTube. Here’s one we did for the dentists. Here’s

Jonathan Hartley at his best. Basically what we did is, we started off, worked with a client,

we went in there, asked them a whole series of questions. Then we cut them up into

YouTube videos, and then we figured out what keywords we’re going after, then we

loaded the videos.

This is all Ben’s handiwork. He puts some nice little music. It just lightens things up. And

then it goes into being able to hear a little bit more about what they offer down at the

dentists there. I’ll go into that in more detail. I’ve got a session that is specific to that

because I think that is really where the web is going.

Blog comments

Another strategy we use and this is all about trying

to offer some low cost ways to get going with your

SEO, is doing blog commenting. Blog commenting,

everyone is familiar with what a blog is? There are

blogs out there, people writing on various topics

and at the bottom of a lot of blogs you have the

ability to add a comment so you can engage and

interact with the person.

We can go to davidjenyns.com. There are a few different ways we can search for blogs to

find blogs like this and down the bottom we get the ability to add your name, add your e-

mail and add your web address. The web address, you can see Eric Qualman has come over

here and made a post on my website and he’s linked back to his website socialnomics.com.

It’s linking with his name so it’s not necessarily got the keyword in there but we’re still

getting benefit because we’re getting links back to our website.


Some sneaky people you’d see they might write here, trading systems, that’s their name,

first name: trading, second name: systems and then link back to their website. But when I

see that as a blog owner, I feel like they’re just trying to build links and unless that

comment really adds value to my blog, I won’t approve them. So I’d usually suggest that

you use your real name in there and you can build some back links back to your site.

We’ll start off, I’ve given you a number15, and then as well at the end of this presentation, I’ll

say, once you’ve done the initial set up, I’ll show you what you should do ongoing to keep

it maintained.

Question: Do most blogs these days add no follow tags to your comments to the anchor text?

David: Yes. I think I might have to explain this no follow issue. What happened a few years

ago, when people started to realize the way that the search engine algorithm worked and

it’s all about having the appropriate anchor text linking back to your website with the right

keywords, people saw using blogs as an opportunity to spam, put as many comments as

they could to build back links.

So to counteract that, Google came out with a thing they called no follow. What it enabled

webmasters to do, you could add this no follow attribute to any outgoing link from your

website. What it would do, it would mean that they don’t get the benefit that they would

have previously got from a link back from you. It’s like you saying, let’s not pass any of my

authority over to that website because I don’t really want to pass any authority. Google did

that, so that way it would hopefully would reduce a lot of blog commenting spam. So no

follow is in effect on a lot of blogs. It may even be as a default option on WordPress which

is a blogging platform.

That said though, we’re trying to replicate what happens in nature here, so I’m not as fussy.

I definitely like to build links back to my website where there is no no follow. But building

links to your website with no follow in it is natural. Rather than getting really caught in the

details, I suggest just build 15 links back to your website or comment on 15 posts. Some of

them will have no follow, some of them won’t.

Different ways that you can find places to comment on, you can use Google Alerts. I think

Pete might talk about that a little bit later. You can also use Blog Search. If you just go to

blogsearch.google.com it’s just the specific search for blogs within Google.


So whatever keyword you type up, it’s only going to come up with blogs that you can

comment on. So that’s a good place to go. The blog comments primarily, as I said, most of

those are going to get linked back to your home page.

Web 2.0

Then we’ve got Web 2.0. There are a lot of different

ways we can build links here and the whole idea is

we want to make sure that we have a good variety

of links back to our website. The initial set up does

take a little bit of work. But the ongoing

maintenance, once it’s set up isn’t nearly as bad. In local markets, what I’m giving you here,

this will get you to the top of Google. You don’t even necessarily have to follow all of this

and it’ll happen.

Web 2.0 is another way that we can build back links back to our website. There are

different services like WordPress, Blogger. These are all services that enable you to have

your own blog, but you have it on their website. So it’s like they give you a free blog and

they host it for you. These are like free blog hosting services. Three I’ll suggest are WordPress,

Blogger and Posterous. What we’re looking at doing here, effectively, this is almost like what

Ian was talking about earlier, the idea, do we register all of these other domain names and

build up our own little network of sites that we can then send our links back to our website?

Effectively, what we’re doing is the cheap, easy, low-cost way is going to a service that lets

you create these websites for nothing. And a lot of these services have already created a lot

of authority. If you imagine, WordPress has probably got hundreds of thousands of blogs

installed on here. So they’ve got a huge number of pages in their network, so Google sees

that as an authoritative website. So you’ll get a little bit of a kick start if you build your blog

on the back end of these different sites.

They work just like a normal blog would. I suggest just setting up three and then what you

might do is have three unique bits of content on each one. Now when I think of the quality

of the content, when you’re posting on EzineArticles and GoArticles, you want your best,

highest quality work. Typically, I’ll get that written in-house. Once you get further out, over

in the blog networks, it’s not as important to have that super high quality content. This is

really just about creating opportunities where we can link back to our website.


You might go to needanarticle.com and get a $7 article written from somewhere in the

Philippines or something like that, and post that content on there. What you do is from

here, again you link back. Here is a good opportunity. You almost, once you’ve built up the

authority in your home page and you’re starting to rank for the keywords that you’re going

after, if you want to get really strong and make sure that a competitor can’t shake you,

then start to treat each one of these other little methods as mini authorities themselves.

So how do you build a website up to be an authority? If you want to build a website up to

be an authority, how would you do it? Sending links. So to build up authority, we want to

make sure that we send links back to some of these different things. I might actually link in

this blog network, link up to our EzineArticles, link to our YouTube, link to some of these

comments and that starts to increase.

I probably wouldn’t do the comments because I feel like I’m just building up someone

else’s website. But I kind of own the EzineArticles page and I kind of own the YouTube, so

send links back to those pages. That will build up the weight of these particular links when

they link back to your website. Now an EzineArticle that’s got lots of links from a blog

network becomes like a mini authority and it’s passing more goodness back to our website.

I’ve given an example there. Ryan is working with some of assistants at the moment. We’re

building up some networks in some different industries we’re looking to dominate. Here’s

a good example of what a blog in the blog network would look like. The way that we build

content for these particular blog networks, we don’t get articles written. I distribute a

whole lot of content.

I do a lot of interviews. I give out free videos, all that type of thing. And Mum comes in on a

Tuesday and Meagan makes sure she’s working on the right thing. And Mum will just

transcribe. So Mum’s sitting here transcribing all the audio that I do, and then that

becomes the content for these Web 2.0 properties.

Of these ones, you can see some of the keywords that I’m trying to link back to. So I’m

linking back to my page Robert Somerville on my blog, davidjenyns.com, because I want to

rank for that particular keyword. We’ve got a whole variety of sites that we’re building up

this whole network and it’s funneling that page rank back. The next step for us beyond

that is we’ll build up each one of those Web 2.0 as mini authority sites. That’s when you

really start to get a lot of power because you’ve got all of these mini authority websites

that you have control over, so you can determine where those links go.


Question: Do you do that so that you get to the point where your Web 2.0 sites and EzineArticles are outranking your original site that you’re trying to keep up the top?

David: Yes, it all comes down to weighting. Just make sure you send more links back to

your home page than you’re sending to other things, and that will keep it above. That said

though, it’s probably not a bad problem to have if it’s your content. I’d love to have the top

10 positions, and my website’s down the bottom if I own all the other nine. So it’s not that

bad a problem to have.

The idea, as well, when you put these bits of content in there, always have ways that you’re

drawing the user back to your website. So you want to tell them in the resource box, click

here to go watch the free video with Rich Schefren, or download a free audio.

Now that you know your avatar and you know what it is that they’re looking for, in all of

these bits of content that you’ve distributed out everywhere, they’re just little feeder sites.

So you want to filter the traffic back to your site. So you give them a reason to come back

to your site. We do this for SEO reasons to get our website to come up but users might find

it as well.

Question: I’ve noticed there seems to be a tendency, particularly amongst some SEO companies, they actually borrow articles that other people have written and then just post maybe the first paragraph on their website. What do you think about that as a strategy?

David: It’s just a way of creating content. Personally I’d just ask your mum to transcribe

some material for you. But that’s me. You can just go ahead and rip articles. To a certain

extent, I would feel bad if my article got ripped and I went to that website and I found they

didn’t reference back to me. So I don’t do that type of thing. I always think in terms of, if I

was to find that, how would I feel if my content was taken? So SEO companies, maybe their

ethics levels are a little bit different to mine.

Question: I’ve done that quite a bit. You go somewhere and here’s your article, and they’ve put a slightly different paragraph at the front, and the rest of it is

exactly what you’ve written.

David: If they’re linking back to you, then fantastic. If they’re not linking back to you,

because that’s the whole point of EzineArticles and directories like that, is you want

webmasters to visit EzineArticles, say, oh, that’s an interesting article. I’m going to

republish it but it’s almost like an implied agreement. If you’re going to republish my

article, you want to make sure that you include my resource box. That is the implied thing.


If you find that they’re not and they’re just ripping it off, usually I find the best thing to do,

I’ve got a little standard letter that looks formal and you can just do a little bit of cut and

paste, which is a bit of a cease and desist. You just e-mail it to them and say, you’re using

my content. Take it down or I’ll be taking legal action or make it look like it’s coming from

your lawyer.

With all that said and done, the way that I focus my game, my game is a little bit different

in that very rarely do I look at what the competition is doing. I’ll do my initial competitive

research but then I just keep my eye on my own game.

You’ll be better off writing another article and sending a link back to your website than

going through the effort of sending them an e-mail, following up and waiting for them to

remove the content. You’re probably just going to get better return on your investment by

doing that. So I always focus on what I’m doing. The competition can do whatever they

want. I know I’m doing the right thing. And you just focus in and then you’ll end up

beating them anyway.

It comes back to that whole idea, why I said right at the start, promote a company that

you’re proud of and that you believe in, and just give it your 100% all and focus in on that.

That’s how you’ll get the bigger returns. I used to do so many little sub-niches and different

ways to try and money and scams. I’m getting the best benefit by picking one thing and

going really deep on it.

Blog networks

Then we’ve got the blog network. There are

different services out there that have built up a

whole mass number of blogs that are usually user-

submitted. I’ll give you an example. There is a

service called AMA. Article Marketing Automation

is the name of the service. They allow two types of

people to come to that service. One, the person who wants to submit a blog and have

content distributed to their website, or two, the person who wants to submit the article to

get distributed out to their website.

All it is, it’s a network of 10,000 different blogs all on different categories, different topics.

What we’re able to do is purchase a subscription to AMA. You log in. You can get articles

written, post it into this service and it will drip that article out to all of the different

websites that are applicable within your niche.


Let’s say we’ve got the Melbourne SEO Services. We write an article. We go into this blog

network. It might be to do with becoming an SEO expert. We post an article in AMA. And

the AMA system, Article Marketing Automation, will post that same article out to a whole

variety of different sites. We’re allowed to embed different things like video and links back

to our website.

The problem with this is it can be considered a little bit you’re trying to game Google.

Whenever I try and look at these sorts of things, I’d like to think, if Google came to me, can

I reasonably justify what it is that I was trying to do other than I’m just trying to game the

search engines? So anything that is slightly outside of that, where if they said, why are you

submitting to this service, it’s getting posted out to all of these different sites? So clearly,

the only reason you’re doing it is to affect rankings. Long term, they might figure that sort

of thing out.

I’d probably suggest, if you are going to do blog networks, use them as a way to build up

mini authority for all of these other different services. So we’ll start sending links over to

our Web 2.0. We’ll send them up to YouTube. They enable you to embed YouTube videos.

We’ll send it to our Ezine. It’s just a way to build up those links. Whenever you do anything

that’s slightly grey hat, as long as you’ve got enough good links back to your website, it

can outweigh anything bad that you do.

Sometimes we will send some links back to our money site after we’ve got a lot of this

already in play. You want to make sure you’ve got a lot of good links. If AMA only makes up

a small percentage of your overall link building method, it’s going to be hard for them to

reverse engineer.

That’s why when using AMA and services like that, to build links to these Web 2.0

properties, if you imagine each one of these, like I said, they’re huge authority-type

websites. They’ve already got millions and millions of links coming back to it. So if we do a

little bit of AMA, it’s not even going to a blip on their radar. You can actually go really

heavy on the blog networks and promote some of these other different methods heavily,

and you’ll see some good results. EzineArticles is a good one for that one.


Who do you know?

Another suggestion, who do you know? It’s

always good if you’ve got clients, suppliers,

charities, friends, anyone that you know, go

through your own network and try and build up

some links from your own network.

Press release

Then we’ve got press releases. Pete is going to talk about press releases in more detail. We

used a press release for that video that we watched at the start of the day. That was part of

a press release campaign that we did, and we built a whole lot of back links back to our

website. And you can actually see I’ve embedded the picture. That’s the actual press

release on PRWeb, and then that gets distributed across tons and tons of different news

websites out there. So we’re building links back to our website.

There are two benefits for press release, SEO reasons and also for getting media exposure

and that type of thing. Typically they’re going to link all the way back to your money site.

You might have one or two deep links as well. Your friends, typically I’d get them to link

back to your home page as well.

Wax on wax off SEO

The final thing is, I gave you those set numbers of what you can do to jump start your

website. If you just step back, you’ve got the process that I gave you right at the start of

the workshop and the way that I work with clients. You know at the point of which this will

kick into gear, after you’ve figured out your target market, done your on page optimization,

done your conversion work that Pete talked about. Get some quick cash by driving traffic

through AdWords. The reason we do that as well, it can help you identify keywords that are

worthwhile to you.

Then we look at introducing SEO which I’ve just talked about now. Once you do that, here

is just ongoing maintenance. I gave you those numbers of what you should be doing and

this is just the wax on, wax off of SEO.


For the ongoing maintenance, you’ll most likely get the rankings that you need from what I

just talked about. But do one Ezine per week, one YouTube, five blog posts, one Web 2.0

website posting which you’d post one on each, so there are actually three bits of content there,

and maybe one press release every couple of months. Once you know the formula that Pete

will talk about, you can do it more often.

If you break it down, the reason I wanted to put that together is just to show you, that can

look a little bit overwhelming at first. But when you break it down, the time that you need

to actually implement that, you could be dominating the search engines in five, six hours a

month or something like that.

Question: It’s five or six hours to maintain. What about the initial setup? If one person was trying to implement what you’ve just described there, Dave, do you have any idea of the

number of man hours that would take?

David: This is one of those things, this is why my clients come to me for this because the

implementation of it. If you’re trying to run a day to day business, the last thing you want

to then be doing is digging into SEO because you’ve got clients to serve. If you were to do

it yourself, I’d allocate a certain amount of time each week. Let’s say, if you did maybe five

hours a week until you get through that first wave, that might take you two or three

months or something like that. But the long-term benefit, once you get some of these

rankings, they’ll end up hanging around anyway.

I thought through this in great detail, the order in which I give it to you is the order in

which you should approach it. That may look simple to a certain extent. But a great deal of

thought has gone into building that and it works incredibly well.

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