Outrank Your Competition With This SEO Method

www.theSEOmethod2.com 1

THE SEO METHOD 2.0

One method to outrank them all.

In this session we’re going to talk about the SEO method and this is 2.0. Just to get an idea,

a show of hands, who has actually gone through my course The SEO Method? There are a

few of you. The SEO Method is something I developed probably about eighteen months

ago and we recorded it for our team. Initially when we recorded, we didn’t ever have plans

to distribute it because that wasn’t our business at the time. It’s only now that I’m starting

to share what it is that we do, that was for internal training. It’s evolved and a lot has

changed since then and this is the process that we use to rank websites, both our own and

also for our clients as well. This is the system that we use.

There can be only one

Just before I get stuck into the idea of

talking about where we actually build links

from, I’ll give you a little bit of grounding,

just to make sure that we’re all on the same

page. Firstly, when it comes to SEO, there

can be only one. There is only one position

one on Google, so once you get to that

position one, a lot of people will continue to try and build links to that page where they’ve

already got position one. This is why it’s important that you make sure you do appropriate

analysis of your website so that once you’ve got that position one, you start to refocus your

energies and attention into some of the other keywords that you want to rank for.

The fact of the matter is, when it comes to SEO, with enough links you can rank for

anything. That’s all it is. You heard that in the pre training, the idea of the way the Google

algorithm is built and it’s all about getting those good quality links. I’m talking about

extremely highly competitive markets. If we’re talking about mortgages and porn and

gambling and credit cards, things like that, you can rank number one for those if you just

send enough links to it. That’s ultimately what they’re doing.


Obviously some of those niches are a little bit more competitive and they’re doing some

sneaky black hat things, that if you wanted to compete on that level you might need to

rise to that. The reason I say all of this is, you need to calculate what that return on

investment is for your time and effort going in to going after that keyword. You can send

tons of links to it but if you’re selling a hemorrhoid treatment e book, is it really worth

putting in all that effort? Make sure you know what the return on investment is and make

that analysis.

It might not be worthwhile if you’ve got a mortgage business going after mortgages,

because of how many links you’d have to send to it. It may make a lot more sense to go for

those longer tail phrases. Also when we’re doing SEO, the important thing always to keep

in the back of your mind is, we’re optimizing for a result, we’re optimizing for an outcome.

That’s why it’s very important to keep going back and analyzing your numbers. We’re not

just ranking for ranking’s sake. We’re not just building pages.

Big beats small

When it comes to on page optimization or

any SEO, it’s really big beats small. That’s

why e commerce websites do a whole lot

better. If I compare all of my sites to my

Planet 13 site, which is the e commerce site

that we’ve got, that gets the most amount

of free search engine traffic to the one domain name because of all of the pages on that

site. SEO now is becoming really a numbers game. It’s about having large volume behind.

I’ve had clients come to me before and they say to me, especially when we launched The

SEO Method, a lot of people said, here is the one keyword I’ve picked that I want to go

after. I want you to rank me for that. I’ve said, ok, that’s probably not the wisest strategy

because if you try to focus in on that one, you miss out on all of that low hanging fruit as

well. That’s why you want to make sure you go for a big basket of keywords.

That’s one of the reasons when we work with a client, even though on the lowest package

which is the silver package, even though we say we’re only targeting ten phrases, we’ll on

page optimize the whole site. We’ll do on page optimization on every page just to see

what sticks and then we start our targeting based on which keywords start automatically

doing well.


The reason SEO works so well with big sites is all to do with that linking internal structure.

That’s something I got from Leslie Rohde recently when I had a chance to chat to him. He’s

like the godfather when it comes to SEO. He was talking about, it’s all about big beats small

now. You want to just keep building pages. It’s very important if you’ve got a small

business, you go ahead and register or set yourself up a blog, put it as a sub domain on

your site if you’ve already got a site set up and just start building pages.

A lot of times as well, it’s better, rather than trying to make sure everything’s perfect, and

it’s very easy to try and get stuck in on some of these details, we were talking about

whether or not hyphens are important or not important, we were talking about some really

finer details in the actual linking structure. Sometimes it’s better to just keep on building

more pages rather than looking for that perfect keyword density or whatever, just keep on

building those pages.

Sad but true

Sad but true for you Metallica fans out

there, there’s no magic bullet. When it

comes to SEO, it used to be you could do a

lot of things with hidden text and keyword

stuffing and just scraping results. There was

the whole traffic equalizer phrase where

you just scraped the search engine results

and then fed them back to themselves and they ranked really well. But there is no magic

bullet now when it comes to SEO. SEO is hard work, it takes time. Building a business that

adds value to people’s lives is hard work, it takes time.

Life itself is hard work. It’s one of those things. You just need to understand, look if you’re

going to go down the SEO path or really adding value to anything, if it’s super easy and

you’re looking for that Holy Grail quick fix, you’re probably going to end up being quite

disappointed.

That’s why I’ve shifted away from, oh, I like to dabble with the grey hat things still. For

those of you who don’t know, white hat is very squeaky clean, black hat is more about

fooling and tricking the search engines and those things that they don’t like obviously,

white hat is squeaky clean and grey hat is in the middle.


Some of the things we’re about to talk about goes into that grey hat category but try and

focus more on the white hat, that is how you build long term business. One thing that I’m

finding now we’re going through the process of selling Planet 13 the Greensborough store.

I think the online for us presents such a fantastic opportunity. The point at which you will

make the most money is the point at which you sell a business.

You’ll pay for your bills and your lifestyle through running your business but where you’ll

cash out and make the big money is the point at which you sell a business. That’s not really

SEO but that is a key insight I’ve discovered.

The master plan

We’ll just map out a little bit of a master

plan as to how we’re going to approach

doing our SEO campaign and then we’ll

also talk about what are the actual steps to

do that. The first thing you want to do is

make sure that you know thyself. You want

to make sure that you’ve installed your

Google Analytics, you know how many pages you’ve got on the site, you know how many

are indexed. You want to make sure how many back links you’ve got, you want to have a

good extensive keyword list. Keep building that keyword list, try and think about how deep

those keywords can go.

By that I’m talking about, Planet 13 we’ve got the different categories and then beneath

the categories how deep can you go on those keywords. We can keep adding, every time a

new band comes out, we’ve got that new band plus all of the sub set keywords

underneath which is all the associated merchandise to that particular band. Have a good

clear understanding of how deep you can go on those keywords. Also you want to make

sure you analyze your competition as well. You should know your competition just as well

as you know yourself.

I’ll show you a little bit later some of our spreadsheets we have on Google docs and I’ll log

in and show you a campaign, how we log everything and how we’re keeping an eye on all

these sorts of things. We do competition analysis to see what they’re up to as well. You

should know a lot of the things I’m talking about there, site links, back links, all those sorts

of things, you should also know about your competition.


Once you know where you’re at, and you know where your competition is at, the next

stage is you need to define your strategy. What is your plan of attack? Are you going to go

for a frontal assault, and again some of these things are what I’ve learnt recently from

Leslie Rohde, he was talking about some of these things. But make sure you define your

plan of attack right from the get go.

Are you going to go for a frontal assault where you find out what keywords your

competitor is going after? You go straight after those keywords and you just try and beat

them by pure strength, by sending as much link juice and linking as you can to those

pages. The flanking maneuver is where you look at the competition again. The competition

really does define the race on what it is that you’re going to do. If you look at your

competition and see where they’re weakest, look for keywords that they’ve got rankings

for but they’re not really building links to.

It’s hard for someone to be able to keep an eye on their entire website and know exactly

where all the links are going to. There are certain points where they are going to be strong,

so you identify where they’re weak and then go after those first. The sneak attack is just

going after those really long tail phrases first. A lot of these things I talk about, this is really

more competitive markets. A lot of times your competition won’t know what they’re doing

in the first place.

For you guys to come here and listen to this SEO material, and this is not introductory SEO

material, we’re taking it up a notch to intermediate to advanced expert material, most

people don’t know this. Did anyone watch that video that we just sent out a little while

ago? Ben actually recorded it, nice work there, it was the Google versus the Yellow Pages.

I’ll show you that one a little bit later. Ben and one of the other guys in the office went out

and interviewed a whole lot of people on the street and asked them a variety of questions

about whether or not they used the Yellow Pages and other bits and pieces.

One of the questions was, ‘Do you know what SEO is?’ I think one guy out of everyone they

interviewed knew what SEO was. The rest of them had no ideas – is it search engine

office? Search engine operations? They figured it was search engines because we were

asking them questions relating to Google. But that just goes to show most people don’t

know.


The sneak attack is you go for those long tail keywords and then you almost sneak up on

them overnight. You’ve gained all these long tail keywords, you’re building links to all

these deep internal pages. Through your internal linking structure, that’s going to make

these other more competitive phrases just pop up. Almost overnight, if you go for those

long term phrases and just start milking some of those sales, they won’t know what hit

them.

One day after you’ve built that whole long tail keyword network you’re going after, you

can funnel all your internal linking juice by linking to the pages that you want to rank and

then you’ll almost pop up overnight, and they will say, where on earth did he come from?

That’s another way to do it.

You’ve got to try and think in your head, typically, I wouldn’t go for a frontal assault, I’d go

more so for the flanking or the long tail. The long tail is probably best if you’re going for an

e commerce website, whereas the flanking maneuver works best if you’re going after a

small business service based type thing.

The master plan – part 2

The first thing is, you need to know yourself.

The second thing was you need to plan out

what your strategy is. The next thing you

need to do is start to channel your power.

This has to do with making sure that you

link to the pages that you want to have

ranked.

Don’t use no follow. I think new school linking or new school page rank sculpting is all

about linking to the pages that you want to have ranked. Don’t worry so much about the

no follow material. Figure out what are your key money phrases and the ones that you

want to go after. If you’ve logged your analytics and you’ve made sure you’ve got Google

tracking all of the different goals, you should know what pages are converting for you. You

can start to target the pages that are going to convert. Those are the ones that you want to

rank first, obviously. Then just funnel it to the pages that you want to rank.


Depending on the size of your site, you can just jump around. Build a blog. If you’ve got an

e commerce site you can build it into the linking structure where all of the links are fired

throughout the site and into some of the different category pages. If you’ve got a service

based business, build that blog and in those blog posts just make sure that you link back to

the different pages that you want to have ranked with the appropriate anchor text. That’s

the way I’m talking about channeling that power.

Then after that, it is just power in numbers. Keep building and building; if you’re not

growing, you’re dying. I would look to get some system in place that causes this content

generation to happen automatically. You almost want a system. If you’re running the day

to day of your business, sometimes it’s hard to step out and then focus on your SEO

because you’ve got phones to answer, you’ve got clients to work with. Try and build in a

system, and we’ll talk about that in the outsourcing module that means this happens

automatically.

We’re at a stage now where we’ve got a set process. Meagan’s put together this fantastic

step by step process. Basically, I just say here is the website we want to promote and then

Meagan makes it happen with all of the assistants.

It starts off with the Ezine articles and then it trickles down to all the things we’re going to

talk about. That’s where you want to get to, whether you hire someone to plug in to try

and help you but you want to get to the point where that building happens automatically.

The building is so key when it comes to SEO.

Finally, you need to build your links naturally. We’ll talk about how to make it look natural

because we’re going to do some manufactured style links and we’ll also look at some

natural ways to do it. Eighty per cent of all of your rankings when you think about the SEO

pie, 80% of your rankings come from your off page optimization as I said in the pre training

video. So it is really important to make sure that you have a system not only for generating

that content but then you also generate a system for building links over time naturally and

that’s what we’ll have a look at today. Then we’ll introduce the SEO Method.

Just to summarize, know where you’re at, define what your strategy is, channel your

power, then start building, and then start building links. That’s the secret to dominating

online when it comes to SEO. So I’ll actually get into the meat of it now.


Wave I

Wave 1. I tried to find photos for each of the different sections where you’d have 1. I

thought if you were in a war, you’d use arrows first because that way you’d try and kill off

the bad guys first at a distance and then you’d go in and wave 2 might be your infantry or

something like that, but I didn’t quite get all the photos. That’s wave 1, the arrows.

Directory submission

This is the evolution of the SEO Method 2.0.

First we have our money site and that

encompasses all of your sub pages as well.

The first stage of what we’re going to be

doing is directory submissions. For those of

you who have worked through the SEO

Method, this has changed slightly.

The reason we do this first is, it’s really easy to do. There are different services to do it,

they’ll drip it out over time. The way that we do it, I go through it and I’ve got my link.

Throughout my presentation you are going to

see I’m going to use some of my affiliate links.

Part of my business is, I am an affiliate marketer,

so I am going to tell you my affiliate links. That

said, I’ll tell you what the company is as well if

you want to go there directly. If you want to use

your own affiliate link that is fine.

The company that we use is Directory Maximizer. Basically we submit our websites in there,

we usually do it to 300+ domain names. We ask for PR1 and above, so page rank 1 and

above. That said though, depending on what the client’s requirements are, if we’re going

after a really competitive niche and I know this is a long term play, I just do as many as

they can do.

The reason I do that is, a little while ago I did an interview with the guys at Directory

Maximizer and they talked about, they do a lot of analysis of the different sites that make

up these directories and they said, over time some will improve in page rank, some will

turn into paid directories as well. So if you just submit to everything at the moment it

might be page rank zero but who knows, in three years it might be a page rank 4 and

require $50 for you to sign up. So I just say the more the merrier if money is not an issue.


The reason I do directory submissions is mainly to get the URL links back to the website.

We’re trying to replicate what happens in nature when it comes to SEO. When people link

to your website, a lot of people will link to your website, it is pretty to link to your website

with the domain name as the anchor text. So the reason we use directory submissions is to

make sure we’re getting tons of inbound links back to our website with the URL in the

anchor text. That’s the main reason for doing it.

When Google does their analysis, it’s not going to look very natural if all of your links are

just these keywords as the anchor text. So that’s why we use directory submissions. They’re

not really that beneficial. Back in the day, you could get a website ranked just by

submitting to directories, but times have changed now. If you can get into things like some

of the bigger known directories, just for some of you who are not familiar with what

directories are, think of DMOZ or the Yahoo! directory.

Directories are pretty much a free for all. DMOZ is

one of the more well known ones, so it’s obviously

got a very high page rank. All it is, is just a whole lot

of categories and you can click on a different

category and go deeper and deeper until you see a

site listing. So they go out and submit. This is the

way the web used to be before Google came along. That’s the way the search engines

used to be. You’d head over to Yahoo! or Excite and Lycos and you would basically

navigate your way around these directories. But things have changed now, it’s all about

search.

We’re getting the inbound links back to our website with the URL. They’ll submit them. If

you want, I would vary the anchor text and the descriptions and the titles with Directory

Maximizer. They’ll let you mix up what you want to have, which is good, sort of natural.

That way all of the links pointing back to your site aren’t saying exactly the same thing. It’s

a pretty natural thing. They’ll also group the submissions.

If you have registered your domain name as I have suggested, a year or two before you

actually start using it, you don’t need to worry as much about the speed at which you’re

building links. I haven’t really seen that many situations where building links too quickly

has caused an issue. I have seen it happen, but when it happens, you can just keep

building links and then that will overcome whatever issue that was. You keep building links

and then Google says, oh we must have got it wrong. Then they’ll put the site back in the

index.


I wouldn’t worry too much but to keep things

looking as natural as possible, I would drip the

submissions because they have that as an option

available there. The first thing to do is draw up our

directories. I need to draw 300 of these. That is

stage 1.

Question: David, are you talking about submitting your website to 300 separate proprietary directories?

Answer: Yes, and I wouldn’t do it by hand. If you wanted to do SEO on the cheap, you

could figure out some of the higher ones and go out there and do it yourself. But this

service, they have a team over in India and you tell them what you want and they’ll go and

do the submission by hand for you. It costs about $50, it’s worthwhile.

Question: You’re going to cover that later?

Answer: We’ll talk a little bit about outsourcing and so on later.

EzineArticles

Round number 2. Round number 2 is EzineArticles,

an oldie but a goodie. EzineArticles have been

around for a very long time. Most people know what

article directories are. There are a whole lot of

different article directories out there, one of the

most powerful ones. GoArticles is pretty good, Ezine

articles is the one we focus on.

What I would do as this point, when you’re creating content, this is content that is going to

be close to your website. There is not much difference between your website and where

this content is going to be placed. Because of that, you want to make sure you put out

your best quality content. You want to write articles that are good quality, they’re not

written by someone who doesn’t speak English as their first language. You can do that but

I would suggest you write good quality content with good headlines and things like that.

Submit at least ten of your best.


This is the way we work with clients. It will depend on the competitive nature of the niche

you’re going after. Obviously, the more competitive, all you’ve got to do is jack up some of

these numbers. Half of what I’m going to go through here you can actually end up ranking

with, doing one or two stages. If you’re dealing with a local business or whatever, you’re

not going to have to require all of those links.

So ten of your best. Make sure you do direct linkings to your site and also deep linking. So

they allow for a resource box at the bottom of your article. At the bottom of your article

you can put in a link back to the home page. You can also put a link back using an anchor

text link back to a deep page. I recommend you do that.

Let’s actually jump over and I’ll show you what one looks like. As you see, I don’t hold

anything back because I know a couple of things. Especially in the trading niche where I’m

at, the quality of the content is always going to be good enough that people are going to

want to come and see my material, the same with the SEO material.

I’m not one to hoard. I’m all about giving your best material away, not necessarily for free,

but don’t hold anything back. You’ll do much better in life by sharing your best material.

So that’s why I don’t mind showing what I’m doing. You can try and compete.

The reason I’m going to show you this is just so you

get a feeling for what an article looks like. We’ll go to

David Jenyns, SEO strategies. Here is the resource box,

it is a good quality article, ‘Four Major SEO Strategies

You Should be Using’. I think that is a reasonable

headline to get someone’s attention. Down in the

resource box is what I’m talking about here, the

anchor text there, SEO Experts. If you look at the URL down here, you can see I’m building

the anchor text to that deep page with the right anchor text. I’m also building a link back

to the home page as well. That’s a good example of the way that we do it.

Once you start publishing loads of articles on EzineArticles, go ahead and update your bio

as well and you can put a photo on it. That just shows you’re a real person; a lot of people

don’t do it, it makes it stand out a little bit more, your eyes are always attracted to images.

As the person comes down here and looks at that, they’re going to be more likely to click,

because their eyes are down here. Use pictures, it’s a good idea.


As part of your workbook at the back as well, I’ve printed out some of the best practices

guides from EzineArticles. You can head over to the website and get them for free. It will

take you through the process of writing articles. The reason I give you that, I would suggest

that you go get the pdf versions so that when you do build your outsourcing team, one of

the first things that they do as part of their training is read the guidelines that EzineArticles

gives them.

We’re deep linking down here and some of these

pages also are linking to some of the deep pages

as well. Whenever you’re doing any deep linking,

you’ll want to have some standard rules of thumb

that you follow, but you don’t want to have a set

system the way that you do it. I think it’s a good

idea to send some deep links down in there but I’m not going to say that you need to send

five links to this page or five links to that page.

Send some deep links around, share the love. By the time the link juice gets back to your

website, you’re going to be doing that new school page rank sculpting where you’re going

to be linking to the pages you want anyway. That’s going to funnel the page rank into

where it needs to go.

Firstly, we make sure everything is right on our own site. We submit to directories. Then we

go over to EzineArticles. Then once the article has been submitted and accepted by

EzineArticles, because they are really finicky on making sure that the content is unique, you

want to make sure you’re not submitting content that they will find duplicated elsewhere.

Otherwise you get into trouble and you have to beg for forgiveness.


2nd tier article directories

Once they’ve been submitted and accepted,

then take those same articles and go submit

them to a whole range of second tier article

directories. I talk about EzineArticles as

being the first tier article directory. Second

tier, there are a whole lot of other lower

quality article directories. If you think about

in the directories space, DMOZ and Yahoo! are two killer ones, but there are a whole lot of

sub category ones that aren’t nearly as high quality. The same thing with EzineArticles.

EzineArticles is high quality, and then there are a whole lot of average ones.

Whenever we talk about submission to the next level down, usually I like to automate that

stage. If you try and do that manually, the return on investment that you get for going out

and trying to submit to those article directories doesn’t make it worthwhile. So you want to

make sure whenever you get to those second tier type things, and we’ll talk a little bit

about that when Ben does the video as well, for those second tier ones you really want to

try and automate that.

I use Content Crooner. It used to be known as Article Marketer but then they changed over

and that is the new service. Quite a lot of these services I’ve actually done interviews with

the people from each different service so you can get insight into the way the service

works.

Basically what they do is, you submit the article once

into this Content Crooner and then they will

automatically go out and spam it or post it to a whole

lot of those second tier article directories for you.

They’ve got a big publishing network and it just makes

it really easy. You’re taking the same article so they’re

going to be linking through back to the home page.

Question: Could you say something about duplicate content from a Google perspective? Google doesn’t like seeing the same content plastered all over the net and yet this whole principle about putting out multiple articles, or the same article in multiple places and

directories seems to fly in the fact of that. What’s the truth of that?


Answer: As far as duplicate content is concerned, I talked about it in the pre training videos

when talking about press releases. We did a press release for the Google versus Yellow

Pages promotion and you can see the article or press release got indexed over 900 times

and it was exactly the same article. Google is definitely indexing them. I have heard where

Google will try and decide where the first occurrence or instance of it has happened, and

then that becomes the most important source.

If you were searching, I think the keyword we were targeting was Google versus Yellow

Pages. Hopefully the press release would come up as number one because it was the first

source on PR web and then all of those second tier ones.

As far as duplicating out our content, this is why any of these mass duplication ones are

done very automated. The algorithms bounce around and change. You’ll still see a benefit

out of that, so that to say having duplicate content isn’t going to help you is not the case.

You’ll definitely get some benefit out of it but it may not be as strong as good quality

unique content. I say the more the merrier and the easier it is to plug in something

automated like that the better.

Question: There is a supplementary on that. If your are going to try and make content different by spinning, what degree of spinning and massaging of content is necessary

and works?

Answer: I think we might even be able to move onto that now. I think the next section is

Blog Networks where I spin. This one, you don’t really get the option to spin, so you just

submit it as is. We’ll talk about spinning. Another question?

Question: I was just going to say, when I do link building, I don’t worry about the duplicate content type issue because I’m doing it for the link anyway. So I really don’t care, as long as

the link counts, whether it is indexed or not.

Answer: Good point. A link is a link is a link. Any link back to your website is a vote for your

website and is good in the eyes of Google to a certain extent, if you exclude bad

neighbourhoods and porn sites and things like that. But any link is really a good link

whether or not the content gets indexed and found and appears in the search engines.

We’re not really building it for someone to find it and then read our press release on one of

these mass duplicated sites and then come back to the website. Good point there.


Blog networks

The next one we’ll talk about is Blog Networks.

Blog networks comes back to the idea of

submitting articles that are spun content. Is

everyone familiar with what a blog network is?

I’ll talk a little bit about what it is. A blog

network, typically speaking, is a network of

websites usually under the control of one

person. When you buy access to these blog networks, you’re basically buying access to all

of these blogs. They will have thousands and thousands of blogs on a whole variety of

different topics.

You then log into this one interface and then you’re able to then post an article and then it

will get pushed out into this blog network. That’s ultimately what a blog network is. There

are a few things that are important when analyzing what blog networks you’re actually

going to work with. Google can link together networks quite easily. They’re really smart.

They pay these engineers who sit there and they know things. If you put AdSense on every

one of your pages, that is going to link that network together. They’re smarter than that,

there are just different things where they can link it together.

So when it comes to a blog network, you want to make sure that you select the blog

network where users submit the blogs. This is really key. If you got a whole lot of inbound

links back to your website, from a whole lot of blogs, different blogs, they can be on

different domain names, but if they were all coming from the same domain name registrar,

they were coming from the same hosting account, they were coming from the same IP

address, that is going to be a red flag for Google.

You’re trying to spam them and send them tons of links from something that is clearly

under one person’s control. You’re trying to game the search engines and that is what they

don’t like. This is grey hat, and this is why it is important that you don’t go too heavy

sending links from these blog networks back to your website. You need to vary where

you’re going to be sending the links to because you don’t want to get into trouble.


To go for a good blog network, you want to find one where basically they allow users to

submit their own blogs. There are a few different blog networks and I’ve got a few listed

on the next slide where the users will submit their own blogs. So they will host them

themselves and register them themselves. The reason a user will submit a blog is because

they want content, unique content, they’ll spin the content which I’ll talk about in a

moment.

They get this good unique content on the website and it’s a way to build their site. As I

talked about, SEO is now a game of numbers and you want to build as many pages as you

can. So there is an automated, easy way to get content generating into your site. I wouldn’t

suggest you use that content for your primary money site, but if you’ve got a feeder site,

why not go ahead and set a blog up and sign up to one of these blog networks and submit

your blog and receive content?

So there are two sides to the equation in a blog network. You’ve got one, the website is

going to receive content and two, which is what I’m talking about, because we’re doing it

for link generating purposes, the second piece of the puzzle is to be able to log into the

account and then submit content and then have it get distributed across a large network

of sites.

Basically what we do is we take the ten articles that we’ve now submitted to EzineArticles

and to Content Crooner. Then we get the articles spun. So we’re getting this hand done.

We’ve been testing around. There is some software called Content Boss. It’s the best

spinning software that I’ve ever seen. Spin basically means make a unique version of the

article. You’re taking one article that you’ve already written and you’re trying to create

variations of it so that when you republish it out, it looks unique and you don’t have all the

same duplicate content issues that we were talking about.

The way to get it spun though, most spinning software, all they’ll do is they’ll use a

thesaurus and they’ll swap words. Instead of, I went to the market, it could be, I’ve gone to

the market. The way Content Boss does it, I’m not even sure how they do it, they use their

own proprietary technology called Wrangling Software. It actually changes the structure of

the sentence. So I would still get it human reviewed on the other end but you can basically

cut and paste your article into this. It will use its wrangling software and spit out a unique

version on the other side.


On that other side, then you get someone to read it, make sure it looks ok and then you

can go about submitting it through to the blog networks. We have someone, Grace, is

doing a lot of our spinning at the moment and basically what she does is, there’s different

syntax and it will vary based on the article blog network that you go after. So I won’t talk

too much about it, but basically we spin at a paragraph level.

So when we write an article, we write one article which gets submitted to Ezine, then to

the second tier. Then we get that same article rewritten another two times. When they get

rewritten, we make sure that each paragraph is interchangeable. So I could take one

paragraph from one article, put it on another article and it would still read and make sense.

Once that happens, then you use the spinning and they put the syntax and they have an

open bracket and a pipe to signify that the next bit of spinnable content is appearing and

then another pipe for the next piece and then a closed bracket. Basically it will vary and it

will depend on what network you go for. Basically it will spin that article and create a

whole lot of different variations by randomly selecting a paragraph out of each of those

spun sections and creating a unique article.

So we get that article spun and we go ahead and submit it. We use Content Boss for some

of them but at the moment a lot of them are just being handwritten as well. When we

actually send the links back, again it varies from blog network to blog network, you get the

opportunity to put in your own anchor text. This is the benefit from paying to get into

these blog networks. We’re now allowed to take advantage of their blog network and send

links back to our website.

We publish out to all of these blogs and they’re all linking back to our website and we get

to define what that anchor text is. Most of them vary, but you can have them anywhere

from one, two and three links that you’re allowed to embed into the article itself. Also

some of them use video as well and I’ll talk about some of the different services in a

moment. But some of them allow you to embed video.

If you have video that is created, one of the things that will help your video to rank well on

Google Video Search or even on YouTube are the number of embeds for a video. That will

help improve your search engine. By embed, I just mean you can actually, when you visit a

video in YouTube, there is a little embed code. You can copy and paste that embed code

and that means you can display that video on your website. You can embed that video into

these blog networks and then it gets pushed out across all of those different sites on that

blog network and we’re embedding that video in all of those pages.


As far as where to send links back, I would send about two out of every three links, go back

to your home page, send it back to your money site both the home page and also a deep

link. Also send it to an Ezine article.

This I suppose is the evolution of the SEO Method, is the idea of starting to promote your

promoting pages. We’ll get a lot more into that, but the idea of almost creating mini

authorities. An authority is when something has enough links to it, that little page

becomes an authority. Once it’s an authority, it may not be a Brad Pitt, but it may be a

Miley Cyrus. We’re trying to build up the Ezine articles to be a Miley Cyrus so that way

when it links over to use it’s still passing some of that page rank or page juice.

We’ll probably only take those ten articles and you need to be careful, this is when I said it

was grey hat. I wouldn’t go and massively spam these blog networks back to your website.

If you do a whole lot, you just need to make sure you really balance it out with other link

building. If you’re going to send out more material to the blog networks, make sure you

send out more articles to EzineArticles and those second tier article directories. Make sure

you submit to as many directories as you can.

If you’re going to go anything grey hat, you need to balance it out with as much other

things as you can as well, so it only makes up a very small percentage of your overall

campaign.

Question: I don’t want to get too anal or granular on this but you’re saying to balance it out so obviously it is of importance because you raised the question. With your directory submissions and things like that, is there a rule of thumb like you wouldn’t go more than 10%, 17%? Someone might say ok, all of a sudden I paid $50 and I got 300 links to my site and I leave it for five months and I haven’t built anything else and I’ve got 305 links to my

site and 300 of them are directory links. How do you assess that?

Answer: I’d say start off this way, submit to 300. Do your ten Ezine articles, do ten second

tier, do ten spun versions. I’ve set up those rules of thumb. Once you get to that point then

you can go back and start to analyze.

Question: So it’s to complete this process and not really pull it apart and do it bit by bit because you’ll kill yourself.

Answer: Yes, so what I’m going to show you now and what we’re going through is what I’d

say is my first wave of SEO. Once I do that, you’ll see wave 2 where we go back and start to

be a little bit more targeted in that link building.


Blog network – part 2

Obviously I said I’m grey hat here so you

want to make sure that you pick your blog

networks very carefully. I personally know

two of the guys behind the AMA and

Unique Article Wizard and I know on good

authority about Jason Katzenback as well,

who is part of this other blog network, the

Bloggers Directory. I make sure I do my research because it is really, really important if

you’re going to do this to make sure all of these blogs are user submitted and it’s done by

someone who understands good SEO.

You don’t want to get them linked together, you don’t want to have a footprint where all

of them are having the same format or something like that and it links it together and

makes it obvious that they’re somehow interlinked. So these ones that I look at, AMA,

Article Marketing Automation, PLR Pro boys are some of the sharpest internet marketers

here in Australia, they’re really sharp, Dan and Mark, both really good guys as well.

Then we’ve got Unique Article Wizard. I’ve been chatting with a guy over there, Darren.

From both of these, Unique Article Wizard and AMA are where we get our best success.

Then Portal Feeder is the last one. Portal Feeder has closed and then opened, and then

closed, sometimes you just can’t get in. They’ve got a whole range of different things that

they do but one of their components is their own blog network.

Each one of these blog networks has over 10,000 different blogs submitted to them on a

whole variety of different topics, so that when you post your article in, you can select the

sub category of where you want to get that article posted.

I know we were talking to Paul during the break about making sure that if you were

building links for, let’s say, a pizza shop, making sure that when you’re building those links

for the pizza shop, it’s coming from on site and relevant and on topic websites. I talked a

little bit about that in the pre training video. I don’t think it matters so much. Any link is

better than no link.

If my website is about band merchandise, me getting a link from CNN, even though it is off

topic, or me getting a link from Brad Pitt’s website, there is going to be still a lot of benefit

from that, even though it’s completely off topic. He’s already got that reputation or they’ve

already got that reputation and then they’re voting for my website.


That said though, who knows where the search engines are going to go and I always try

and make sure I’m doing the smartest things I can, thinking what’s coming down the

pipeline? They may introduce something, so if you can select it to appropriate categories,

you might as well.

Some that I’m still testing are SEO Link Vine is a new one Brad Callen launched. Brad Callen

is another extremely sharp marketer and I trust his work. Article Blueprint is one we’ve just

started testing. Meagan’s just made some initial training videos for the assistants. The guys

behind Content Blueprint, Tim Godfrey, the jury is out on that one, I don’t know.

SubmitYOURArticle comes with a high recommendation from the Unique Article Wizard

guy, Darren. I haven’t tried it myself but I just know their network isn’t nearly as large.

That’s a little bit to do with blog networks. With blog

networks you’re going to send links to Ezine, you’re

going to send links back to your money site and send

links back to your deep site. Later on when I introduce

the videos, when you introduce videos, you’ll also link

from these blog networks down to the videos as well.

Try to do it in a random fashion as well. Like I said, there is no exact way to do it. If you

follow those rules of thumb that I’ve given you for numbers to push out, and then make

sure you’re linking to the right areas and just mix it up.

100 word posts

Next one, this is a new one which is the

hundred word posts. We’ve been doing a

little bit more. This you may or may not

need to do this, in that you’ll need it for

maybe more competitive niches. You don’t

need to do it for everything. There is a series

of networks that have opened up, very

similar to blog networks. The only difference is some of these networks what they’re

actually doing is going out and purchasing expired domain names that have very high

page rank.


Domain names are dropping off all the time and these domain names may have had

excellent SEO value. There is an opportunity sometimes if someone doesn’t renew it, you

can snap up a bargain. These guys are building up networks within those sites, at least

Linkvana is, and they’re building up these networks of high page rank blog networks.

The difference is, rather than it getting sent out over a very large network, you submit only

once and it will get published through one blog, but it’s going to a high PR site so you’ll

get fewer links but usually they’re supposed to be higher quality. I’m talking about twenty

inbound links. When you compare that to something like our blog network, ultimately by

submitting ten articles, we actually take the same spun version and we drop it into all

three. Whether or not that is lazy, you decide.

So the hundred word posts, these are unique. If you think about it, we’re posting it out to

the three different networks, we’re getting tons of inbound links. This is that idea I was

talking about. You want tot make sure that you get that balance right because there’s a

good chance that some of these networks, not so much the Portal Feeder, but maybe the

Linkvana network because I don’t know the guy, they might not be as separated as they

probably should be. I’m wondering if they’re on the same IP address. He says they are, but I

don’t know the guy and I don’t know how well he knows SEO.

For that reason, you’re only going to get twenty links. This is all offset by all of the other

links that you’re building for the website as well, just so you don’t raise any flags that

you’re sending a whole lot of links from one very small network. I’d probably send ten of

your links through to your money pages, and by money pages I mean pages that you’re

trying to rank which are those internal pages and home pages and then maybe ten to your

EzineArticles as well. You’re just trying to build up those mini authorities.

Then we talked about, Linkvana is one of them and Portal Feeder is another one. That is in

addition to their blog network. You can submit the full article. They’ve got these little

hundred word posts and Article Blueprint is another one we’re testing as well.


The order in which I’m giving you this is the

order in which we do it and the numbers I

give you are the numbers we use. This is the

system that I use to rank my websites.

You might not have to do all of this and I’ll

give you a cheap way to do this because

already we’re starting to look at quite a few different services that you have to sign up for

but I’ll give you a cheap way to do the same thing. The reason I do this, obviously it’s my

business and I don’t mind that being an expense.

That’s wave 1. We go ahead and do that on every site and I’ll follow those first few

strategies that I talked about right at the start: know thyself and picking out your plan of

attack, make sure you funnel your attention into the pages that you want to rank. We do

that on every site. That’s standard, yes, what happens. Then we go can go back and

analyze the results based on what happens there.

Wave II

Then we move into wave 2. This is more so

dependent on, if it’s our own site and it’s

one of my real primary sites, then I will do it.

If it’s a feeder site, I probably won’t worry so

much. If it’s a client site, it will depend on

whether or not they’re happy to pay for us

to come out and record some videos and

that sort of thing.

Ben’s going to go into to more detail in his session on video which we’re all looking

forward to a little later on. I say the video part is optional but not really, because video

offers the lowest hanging fruit at the moment. It’s so much easier to get a video ranked,

people love to consume the content, you should be embedding it into your website. You

will get much higher engagement, people stick longer, reduce that bounce rate by having

the videos on your site.


I would open up a YouTube account and I

would submit those to YouTube and then

use these distribution services, which Ben

will go through so I won’t go into detail.

We’ll do ten videos and have them linked

and embedded if the option is there. Then

we use a service called TubeMogul or Traffic

Geyser and that is like a Directory Maximizer or a Content Crooner but for video. So they’re

just a distribution service where you’ll sign up to a whole lot of other web 2.0 properties

and then they will go ahead on your behalf and post them.

There is still more. This is the web 2.0 section. What we do at this point in time, and as I

said I’m in a competitive niche so I need to do a lot of these things to rank. You might just

have to do Ezine and second tier and you might rank. You just keep on slowly working up

the order until you start to get the rankings that you want.

Web 2.0 domination

So web 2.0 domination. Web 2.0, I’m talking

here about sites where you can create

profiles, things like WordPress, things like

Blogger, Weebly and Tumblr. These are

sites that allow you to sign up, create a

profile and create a page on their website

and then once you’ve created that page on

their website you can link back to where you want. Some of them will allow you to send no

follow links, some of them will no follow all of the links, but some of them won’t be, so

you’ll get benefit.

It’s almost like you’re building up another little network of websites that you have control

over. It’s like a cheap way of building your own network. Rather than going out and

registering another five or ten domain names and building them up as mini authorities,

you can use web 2.0 options.


For these web 2.0 properties I should probably give you an example of what one looks like

just so you know. I’ll use Posterous, which is one I’ve started to play around with. There is a

whole host of these that are popping up.

Question: You mentioned before about no follow links. Could you just explain to everyone what that means?

Answer: Ok. I should have got you to watch the pre training video. No follow link has to do

with passing the page rank. Certain search engines are still going to follow it though,

Yahoo! and Bing. There is still benefit for getting those links and I wouldn’t not build a link

based on the fact that it is no followed.

This is an example for my David Jenyns one for on

Posterous. I’m using this one for a different reason than

building back links because this is my own personal one.

I’m using it more for branding purposes. You can create

posts on here and link back to your content. That’s just

what I mean by web 2.0 style site.

Sign up for ten profiles, create at least one piece of content on those ten profiles and link it

back to your website. I’d link it back, if you can, embed YouTube videos. I would try and

embed YouTube videos if you can; not all of them allow it. The rest of them send back to

your money page, send back to your Ezine page.

It’s almost like your own blog network

effectively. It’s like you control this network.

So I would send links all over the place. The

reason I mainly send to Ezine and my site

and YouTube has to do with the way we log

where our links are. You’ll see that when I

jump into Google docs later and I’ll show

you a spreadsheet of the way that we log all of this. We don’t actually log, it’s going to be

very hard to log second tier article directories. It’s very hard to log blog networks, it’s very

hard to log one hundred word posts. Because we’re not logging where those URLs are, it’s

hard for us to build links back to them.


There’s a service called Link Wheel that will go ahead and set up these profiles for you. You

give them the keywords that you want to optimize for, they will get one of their team to

go over, sign you up with an account on twenty different web 2.0 profiles. They’ll put up a

piece of content for you, they’ll link back to the pages that you tell them you want them to

link to and they’ll embed the video and they’ll do it all for you. They’ll send you an Excel

spreadsheet with everything listed down with the log in details. I think it is about $200.

They’ll send it to you and then you’ll have those login details so later on, if you want to go

back for the next wave, you can just keep adding content to these pages. I personally

wouldn’t be adding the content myself, but once you get through the outsourcing module,

this is something you’d want to outsource.

Make sure though that you go to linkwheel.net, no ‘s’. Someone registered linkwheels.net

and I went to that company first, because I had heard about linkwheel and we were testing

it out and had a really bad experience. When I said have you heard of linkwheel.net, they

said, no, no, we’ve never heard of them, but the branding is quite similar and the whole

process is really similar, so you can just use my affiliate link and you’ll go to the right place.

They’ve got a few different levels where they’ll set up more profiles for you and you can

also get them to make a video for you. I think they use Animoto and they just create a little

flashy video that will then get embedded into the web 2.0 properties as well. If you contact

them and you’ve got your own videos they’ll embed those in as well.

SEO on the cheap

That is the way that we do it and I know

there are a few paid things there. If you’re

going to go down the paid route, the first

areas I would start to drop off, if money was

an issue, is you don’t have to submit to all of

the blog networks. Just go for AMA or

Unique Article Wizard. I’d drop off the blog

post, the hundred word posts as well. I’d keep the web 2.0 because the good thing is, it’s

like you’re building your own little blog network and it can be useful later once you start to

build your own links.


Here’s SEO on the cheap. If you don’t want to go through all that, I would submit to three

hundred directories, I would go to EzineArticles and GoArticles. GoArticles is like an

EzineArticles, it’s like a first tier article directory. I’d submit twenty articles there and three

hundred blog posts. I’d then go do blog comments.

I haven’t really talked too much about them. It’s a little bit more manual process. You

search for blogs in your particular community or niche and you comment on them,

intelligently comment on them. I’ll talk about how you keep an eye on your competition

and how to identify blogs like that in the web 2.0 section. Basically you want to engage in

the community, you head over to these blogs. Preferably if you can find ones that have the

no follow removed, that’s probably better, but some of them will be no followed as well.

Just go out and try and post thirty comments, engaging, actually read the post and then

reply based on what the post says. Don’t just make a spam post because then a lot of them

will get moderated and you won’t end up seeing it and you’ve wasted your time anyway.

Just make sure that you make a good quality post there and then they’ll let you link back

to their website.

Don’t make it look like, hey, I’m here just trying to send links back to my website. Just have

your name, and when you have your name you have the ability to set what your website is.

So the anchor text will be your name, like David Jenyns and it links back to Melbourne SEO

Services or something like that. You’re not necessarily getting exactly right anchor text but

you’re still getting an inbound link nonetheless.

YouTube and TubeMogul, TubeMogul is free, that is just one of those distribution services

Ben will go through. I would also go out and scout out doing guest blog posts. This is all

the rage at the moment, it is the big thing because it is so effective. You find other blogs in

your community, contact them and say, hey, can I make a post for you and post it on your

website, and then in the resource box you link back to your website. If you can get

someone who has a very authoritative blog in your community and then you can post

some content on that and then link it back to your website, that’s going to be a great link

back.


Then I’d link to everything using AMA and web 2.0. For AMA I think your only expenses

would be directory submissions, I think Meagan said it was $50 and then AMA or the other

blog network, Unique Article Wizard, $30-$40 a month. Then go out and do some manual

web 2.0. This is if you have your own site that you were working on and you’ve got that

focus. It’s really important to focus and just have that one area that you focus on, otherwise

it would be hard to try and implement that on the cheap for multiple websites because

you’d spend so much time creating profiles.

It’s a good idea to do this once or twice anyway because that way you get to learn a little

bit more about web 2.0 and the way some of these different services work.

Question: If you are doing this for a client, how much editorial control do they want to have on this? A lot of this is going out under their name, it’s their brand, and some of the articles you get written overseas are pretty lightweight frankly, and not very good and yet it’s going out as if it’s all said by this person who has a brand to maintain and so on. Do

you get the actual business to write the articles themselves?

Answer: That is preferable. If they’re going to write you some content, that is going to be

the best way. But a lot of times when a client contacts you for SEO, it’s because they don’t

have enough time to do the SEO themselves. So if you’re going to outsource it, one really

easy way might be, you interview them over the telephone or over Skype and you record

the call and you send the call off to someone and you have them make articles out of it.

That’s one way.

Or you can try and write the EzineArticles step yourself and make sure it is really good

content. That way when it gets distributed up, that same quality content is going up until

the point at which you reach the blog network. Once you start to spin, hopefully it’s far

enough away from your website. A lot of those blog posts aren’t going to rank, all these

blogs are PR 0, not very well-optimized and it’s more about getting that inbound link and

it’s not so much that a user is going to find that, read the article and then head back.

So you want to make sure that you still are getting quality and it doesn’t read like rubbish.

But just don’t put things like resource boxes on the bottom of them, and just be sending

just the links back. The only person who is going to twig is someone who knows SEO and

they move their mouse over it. A lot of these blogs they’ll change the formatting so a link

doesn’t even look like a link. They’ll remove the underline attribute and things like that, so

unless you’re really digging in, you might not even realize. Does that help?


Wave III

Then wave 3. So first wave, put the content

up, that I talked about above the line. Then

wave 2, do the video material from web 2.0

below the line. We’ll do that for most sites

without looking too much as what we’re

getting as a result of that because we know

that it works.

Then we let it sit for a month or two just to make sure that Google finds the links and

everything starts to get spidered. Then what we do is, we review the analytics for easy wins

and that’s when I’m talking about, you look for what keywords have you started to rank for

as a result of everything that you’ve done and looking for the keywords that are on first

page and driving your traffic but not in position number 1.

The next step is you identify what those are and then you also send more links to the

pages that you want to rank for. Once you’ve identified those easy wins, you might go

back to some of the other stages and do a little bit more link building, really targeting it to

those easy win type keywords.

You can also make sure that you funnel your page rank, your internal page rank. If you’re

building pages, write another few extra blog posts linking through to those pages that you

want to have ranked. Send to high converting pages, pages not number 1 and also videos

as well.

A lot of videos will, once we’ve uploaded them and we’ve done our on page optimization

and we’ve done some embedding, we’ll then go back and see which videos are most

viewed. I’ll go to my channel, I’ll look at my most viewed videos, and then if they were

submitted on the same day, I will say, this one seems to be doing well for some reason. I’ll

type it in, is it in position number 1? If it’s in position number 1, don’t worry about sending

any more links to it. Oh, it’s in position number 3, I’m going to go ahead and start doing

some more link building.

At this stage 3, is when you want to start promoting the promoters. I would call all of those

pages, hundred word posts, blog networks, second tier, EzineArticles, YouTube, web 2.0,

they’re all your promoting pages. So now in wave 3, start promoting your promoters. So go

to your blog networks specifically, and start sending links. Start making posts that go only

to your promoting pages.


In wave 1 we talked about, two links go to your website, one will go to your home page

and one will go to a deep page. When you go back to promote the promoters, all of the

links will be going through to those promoting pages. So you’ll link through to your videos,

you’ll link through to your EzineArticles and you can go really heavy on that. I mean there’s

a point at which you should take it a little bit easy if you follow my rules of thumb as far as

the speed at which you should be building links.

When you’re building links to EzineArticles and all those, they’ve got so many links, I don’t

think there is anything you could do that’s going to raise any sort of filter. And what are

they going to do? Take YouTube out of the search results? I don’t think so. So you can go

really heavy, building as many links as you want to those, especially to video. Just start, get

in the blog networks and send as many links as you can and don’t hold back when you’re

promoting your promoters.

It is the same with web 2.0 as well. You can jump in there. Why not submit ten articles to

the three blog networks all focusing down on your web 2.0? You do that, instantly it’s

going to pop up, it’s going to become an authority and then that authority site, that web

2.0 site is linking back to you. All of that Google juice or page rank is going to end up

flowing back to you.

Wave IV

What we’ll do now is the final wave. That

will get you ranked for 95% of whatever it is

that you’re going to do unless you’re going

to go for really competitive things. That said

though, here’s the next wave if you either

want to have something a little bit more fun

or you want to try and build some links in

some more creative ways. Number one is, look where the competition is going. Using the

Yahoo! Site Explorer that I showed you in those pre training videos, analyze where they’re

building links from, then go contact those links.

During the break we were talking about building links from .gov. Someone had seen his

competitors were getting links back to their website from the City of Casey; local

government was sending links to his competition. So then he went and then contacted

them, it took him a few weeks, but ended up getting his link on there as well from a

.gov.edu.


They are fantastic links because they’re seen as authorities and he got that link back to his

website. So it took a little bit more effort to get that link but the benefit from that link was

definitely worth it. Look where your competition is getting links and then go and copy

that. Really that is what it comes down to with SEO. It’s seeing who is above you and what

is it that they’ve done to get to where they’re at. A lot of it just comes down to how they’ve

built their links and what are the anchor texts to those links? You analyze that, then you

just reverse engineer and you do the same thing and do a little bit better and you’ll be well

on your way to knocking them off.

Some other things that you can do are building some link bait or doing press releases. Link

bait is just creating good quality content that someone is probably going to want to share.

If you create a good piece of content on your blog and then someone reads it, sees it’s of

value, then someone might republish it or link to it. That’s a good way to get links and also

press releases. Press releases are fantastic; they cost a little bit.

For the Google versus Yellow Pages little promotion that we did, with the press release I

think we spent about $360 to get that one done because we wanted to embed the video

and get maximum distribution. We got almost overnight 950 inbound links with the

appropriate anchor text with the video embedded. I think that video is not more than a

few weeks old and already it’s well over a thousand views.

I’m coming from a space where I don’t really have much of a foothold in SEO. We’ve

literally only just launched the company in January, if that. We got back late in January

because I had some time off and then I had two weeks off as well to go to that conference.

So the actual work that has gone into it is small. But it just popped up like that from doing

some good quality content.

Guest posting which I talked about, is another avenue you want to have a look at. It’s very

big, I haven’t done too much of it. Whenever you’re thinking about any terms of

promotion, especially with guest posting and you’re asking someone else to do something,

put yourself in their shoes. What is it that you would like to hear for you to want to it?

Don’t just spam out all of these people saying, hey I want to write a guest post for you.

Imagine if you got that. We get requests for different things all the time in our e support

and Meagan just deletes them out before they even get to me. It’s only the ones that take

a little bit more effort to make sure that, yes, they’ve looked at what it is that they’re doing

and they’re going to add something of value. Then that’s when they make it through to

me.


When you’re contacting someone else, you want to think in that same process. How can

you get them to do it? Well, you might start off by saying, what can I do for them first? It’s

that law of reciprocity. Read Robert Cialdini’s book Influence and he talks about how to

influence different people. That’s one of the things, if you give someone something, then

they’re more likely to reciprocate. If I was doing guest posting, I might do something

where I’d say, hey, do you want to post on my blog first? Then ask for a guest post back.

Then we’ve got the final wave. At the

moment we head towards using web 2.0 for

building our own network. We’re using web

2.0 because it’s free, you don’t have to

register domain names and you can

leverage off the work that they’ve already

done. If that’s still not working, then the

next step, the final step and now I’m starting to talk about, ok, now you’re going after

some really competitive terms. You’ll go back to those domain names I told you to register

at the start of the year and that you’ve let age and so on.

You might start off by installing a WordPress blog on the websites. You’ll go over to

something like one of the blog networks and you’ll start to get content fed into these

websites so that they can start to age. Then you will start to treat them like mini

authorities. Imagine applying all of that to each website and then you control your own

network. Then you can send the links exactly where you want and you’ll be controlling the

links from very highly targeted, very authoritative websites.

If you’re operating in a niche, you should be thinking like this anyway because things are

getting more competitive. You can dominate just about any niche with just three blogs. I

did some little testing for some internet marketing launches that were coming up and we

only registered a small network of sites and we actually went ten and I think internet

marketing is more competitive than some niches, but we’re building those little sites up as

mini authorities.

Then I had my own blog and I started sending links from pages to my blog for a particular

product launch as the product was coming out to make sure that I would rank well for that

particular product when the product launched. We did really, really well and that is in a

competitive niche. If you can control that network, if you say, right, I’m operating in this

space then you can build up a network around that particular niche, and it is probably

something that you should look at.


Don’t get caught up when you do it, though, in doing unique registrations, hosting, IPs,

that’s the wrong thing to be focusing your attention on. It’s that whole idea of trying to

game Google.

Question: You would perhaps not install Analytics under the same account on those? Do you track those in the same way that you track your main site?

Answer: If you were building up a network that had maybe over fifty, then I might start to

try and segregate them a little bit. But I don’t think anyone is going to get to that point just

doing three or four. Keep them all the same. Don’t stress too hard. Even on the same IP,

don’t get caught up, I’ve been down that road.

Web Host For SEO was the hosting company that I signed up with. They give you ten

unique IP addresses and it was all about trying to create these separate networks. It’s more

effort than it is worth. You’ll do something stupid. It will end up linking them together

anyway and then you’ve just wasted the last six months of your life trying to keep them

separate.

So the lucky last thing as well for social book marking.

Social book marking, my thoughts on it. It can’t hurt

but I personally don’t see a huge benefit in it. You

won’t get a huge benefit from the inbound links. It’s

good for getting things indexed. Ryan’s actually been

doing some testing recently using Traffic Bug. I don’t

know whether you want to have some comments on

your results on what you saw using Traffic Bug?

Ryan: Basically what it is for those who haven’t used it before, it is a service where you can

submit your links and you can spin a few descriptions and titles. It will automatically

submit them through to directories and other RSS directories and social book marking. So

it just automates the whole process. You submit it once and then it is done. Anything I do

on my blogs or anything, I submit that straight into Traffic bug and it just helps with that

initial getting it ranked or getting it into the search index.

Especially when it comes to videos as well, I’ve seen some videos I’ve created in YouTube

have gone from not ranking at all to actually coming up, even in some cases to number

one for that particular keyword in YouTube. So in that respect for social book marking and

getting it to RSS directories, it’s very well worth it. It’s only about $20 a month as well.


David: So Ryan is out there doing the testing, so there is some benefit to it. If you can

automate it then you might as well put it into the system, but it’s finding the balance. Is it

worth the effort? Personally I don’t do too much of it. If you are, here are some different

services to look at. Traffic Bug will really automate it. Immediate Edge has their own little

social book marking network and it is an Ed Dale thing and also SocialMarker is another

way. Basically you enter in a whole lot of your book marking accounts and it will then

automatically log you in and pre populate things and make it easy. I’d probably say that is

not worth the time in my opinion.

Relax & breathe

You need to remember that I’m operating in

a very competitive niche. Everything I talked

about there, and I know that was a massive

brain dump and hopefully you took some

different elements and you’ve got the step

by step plan and it is all in the notes.

Chances are, depending on who you’re

working with, if you’re working with local business, go for your EzineArticles, your second

tier and maybe a blog network and you will be fine. Going after more competitive things,

you start to add it in.

I’d still definitely do video, video is the way of the future. Ben will talk all about that. Most

likely you’ll only need wave 1 and 2 and you might not even need that. Half of wave 1 can

be enough. Obviously, I don’t have enough time in the day to go out and do this on every

one of our websites, so it’s important you start to build a process and a system for the way

that this is done. I’ll talk about that when we talk about how I outsource things and the

way that we create the system. That way, you’re not out there having to do all this

manually.


80/20 rule

The 80:20 at the tail end of the tape is, you need

to know yourself, define your strategy, channel

your power, so make sure you link to the pages

you want to rank, power in numbers, keep

building numbers and then build your links. It’s

really key that you create a system that makes

these things happen on a regular basis. You don’t want to be out there having to build

these links yourself, but it is important that those links are continually built.

So creating systems for link building and page generation are very important, then make

sure that you view your own results. Have a look at your Google Analytics, see where

you’re ranking, go for those low hanging fruit. I always like to talk about that, go for your

low hanging fruit.

There are certain things that are right under your nose and rather than you going for a

hyper competitive term, you’ll be better off going for some of these longer tail phrases and

the net traffic that you’ll get will be more and very much easier. Log where you’re building

your links.

The last thing I want to show you guys is how it actually

looks and then we’ll have some questions. I’ll just go into

my Google docs account and show you what it all looks

like from an administration point of view. Google docs, I’ll

be talking about tools later on in the day, but Google

docs is definitely one. We’ll go SEO company. These are more so some of our websites. This

is the way that we’re logging things. We’ll look at Melbourne SEO.

We’ll stat off at the top left hand corner, there are a little bit more site details. Down on the

left has to do with some of the different stages that we talked about. Sometimes we don’t

write the articles ourselves and we use a service called Need-An-Article to get them

written. Ten have been requested. Now we’ve actually got forty-three articles on

EzineArticles. Directory submissions we’ve got thirty-nine of them posted on Content

Crooner. Blog Network we’ve had thirty-three posts through to all three and there are

seven videos on YouTube and they’ve also been Traffic Geysered as well. Then web 2.0 I

use Linkvana to build a link network.


We log how we’re traveling. The first step you want to do, and this goes back to what we

were talking about mapping out your keywords. Here are all of the URLs. These are the

primary URLs. I usually make the keywords I’m really keen to build links for, because I’ve

gone back and analyzed which keywords I want to be spending a bit more love on, we’ll

make them green.

That way when our assistants jump in there, they’ll still spread the links, but they’ll more

heavily weight where they’re building the links based on those green links because they’re

the ones that we consider important.

Then we’ve got the URLs to promote, so the keywords are listed in one column, URLs to

promote are listed in another column. That way the assistant can go in and say, right, here

are all of the keywords that we want to try and link to. Melbourne SEO Services home page

they’re building links for: Melbourne SEO Services, SEO Services and Melbourne Search

Engine Optimization.

They can go in there and we’ve already got Melbourne SEO Services and that’s why it’s not

green anymore because we’ve got that and we’re going for some lower hanging fruit

before we come back to SEO Services because it’s going to be a very competitive term to

go after. Let’s build some of the almost like sneaky attack, where we’re going for some of

those weak points and then we’ll come back to SEO Services.

She can go in there, copy the URL and then as she’s building things in the blog network,

she’ll just copy and paste them into the appropriate places to make sure that we’re

sending links to the right places. We have a little bit of competitive analysis as well. Here

are some notes of some of our competitors that we keep an eye on. We are doing some

Traffic Bug as well. So we’ve sent some Traffic Bug to some of those pages.

So that is what it looks like for on page. We have our primary and our second tier

keywords. The third tier, longer tail terms you’ll find on our blog. Lower down is where we

actually log our Ezine articles. So Ezine articles that we went for, the keyword that we

optimized for, the type of link that it is, where the link is, so that that way, when the person

doing the link building, she can go on, copy and paste the URL that she wants. She’ll put

the appropriate anchor text and then distribute it out.

They’ve been Content Croonered, they’ve been AMAd. The reason I’m showing you all this

is to show how it all ties together. These are things that, regardless of how many internet

marketing courses you’ve watched or gone through, they don’t show you these sorts of

things. We’ve got the keywords and then the secondary URLs.


Along the way we started to learn different things and we said, let’s put initials for the

assistant who submitted it and when it was submitted and different things like that. So our

system is constantly evolving. Down the bottom is our YouTube. Sometimes I’ll put where

the video is ranking if I get time to go through and have a look at it. There are our titles,

there are the keywords we’re trying to optimize for and there is the link to the YouTube.

That’s why I was talking about why we build links to Ezine and YouTube is because that is

what I’m logging. Also those internal pages, I’m logging all of those pages as well.

Question: If you’re registering a brand new URL, you hear a lot of guys say let it sit for a little while. I know you did mention it before, but as a time frame for doing this, just to walk me through step by step doing this. I go for the jewellery niche, I register such and such and then I let the domain sit there for a while before I go and drip feed 300 directory

submissions on to it. What is the timeline?

Answer: The timeline has to do with how smooth your system is. Sometimes if you try and

manage each of those, you’re going to have it dripped out just based on the fact that it

takes time to organize each one of those stages. So we’re at a point now where we’ve got a

pretty finely tuned system. But even still, I don’t think we’re ever going to be building links

too quickly.

We’re not at a point where we’ve got enough assistance where it pops in the top, shoots

all the way down and could happen within a week. I’d say time frame-wise, this will

probably take you a few months to probably get all the way through that, or a couple of

months to get all the way through that.

Question: These are just a couple of things that I‘ve picked up along the way with link building. A quick and easy way to find .gov and .edu links of your competitors is if you install something like SEO for Firefox. It gives you little options. Some people are nodding because they already know that one. You can just click .edu and .gov and it takes you to a version of Yahoo! Site Explorer that shows you just those links.

The other one was, sometimes Yahoo! Site Explorer seems to give a false impression of the

number of links that you’ve got. There is a paid tool which I now use which is SEO

SpyGlass. Somehow that gets around the thousand link limit on Yahoo! Site Explorer and it

also draws links from a range of search engines. So you actually get to look at more of the

site’s links. You never get to see all of them, it just doesn’t happen, but it gives you a lot

more to look at. So I just found those two things useful.

Fantastic. Have I given you anything?

Answer: You have.


Question: Just following on from that, I’d just like to add into that mix opensiteexplorer.org. If you’re an SEOmoz member, then you also get a similar view but it is based on their own crawl of the web. So it tends to be higher authority. There are not as many links but you tend to see

the good links, so that is really good.

Question: You were talking before about getting the low hanging fruit, which in my strategy I actually went for. Obviously it was easy and I wasn’t that experienced in it. I’m in that position now where I want to now change the strategy and go for the higher fruit so to speak. All the work I’ve done to date in the last few months, I’ve actually witnessed in the last couple of weeks where I’ve started changing strategies and keywords and on page things has actually affected the ranking.

I actually ended up getting a number one ranking for a lower key phrase that I have noticed in the last couple of weeks has dropped to number two.

My question is how do you go about changing your strategy without affecting the good

work you’ve put in for the lower hanging fruit and those search terms? I don’t want that to

keep dropping down because I’m changing.

Answer: What I would do is firstly, make sure if you have already done your on page

optimization and you’ve selected your keywords and you’ve already started link building,

leave it be. Just start building new pages. There is nothing to say that you can’t change the

structure of your site slightly. Rather than having it in the top navigation, you might move

that link now to the bottom of the page and then add that new page in that you’re trying

to go after.

Never ever delete a page, if a page is indexed and you’ve built links to it, just bury it deeper

in your site so the value is still there. You can just still point the links to wherever you want.

So if you’ve already done that, keep it the way it is. If you want to make any minor tweaks,

keep the same keywords but for then for any new things I’d do that strategy. I had a look

at your site. You probably need to create a blog and then go after some of those other

phrases as well and post content that way.

Question: On that point, so you obviously track all the keywords that you’ve got number one for. If one of them does drop off like that, number two, do you immediately stop what

you’re working on and say, no, let’s put that one into the mix and go back?


Answer: I’d like to say yes, but it just depends. I’ll probably do a site analysis once every

couple of months or something like that where I’ll go in and I’ll have a look at how I’m

doing. It’s not an immediate thing. I don’t have any watches set on it or anything like that. I

just keep doing the good things and then when I go back I can reanalyze things. When I go

through that wave 2 or 3 when I look back at what I have done, then I’ll say, right, where

am I getting traffic from? I’m on page one, but I’m not in position number one. Then we’ll

start to highlight those links green. Then they’ll get links built to it.

Question: With blogs, and your posts, what is your point of view on updating the posts, as in an old post, then going back and adding a video to it?

Answer: Yes, I think you can keep going back and updating posts. I personally wouldn’t

because I would spend more time creating new content than I would be updating old

content. I think you’re going to be much better off to just constantly building new content.

I’d say yes, it’s ok to go back and edit.

The only time that new content might be getting added to the website is when comments

happen. So it’s good if comments are happening, if you can encourage comments on your

site. Clearly that’s a sign that people are interested in it, so if you can encourage that then

that may or may not help, I don’t know. But if I was Google, I’d probably have something

like that in my algorithm because that signifies that it is something of importance. So the

page will get updated that way.

Question: Just expanding on that a little bit, with the web 2.0 sites, with the site that I have. Over the few years I’ve built up Squidoo lenses and that sort of thing too.

I’ve tried manually to keep up with the content. Once you’ve built them out, would you go back and build content back to it again?

Answer: Yes.

Question: And do you automate it?

Answer: I don’t do any of this. I don’t personally do it myself. I think it is a good idea to go

back and get the web 2.0 content updated.

Question: Ok, so you think the strong ones like wordpress.com or Squidoo or Amplified or things like that, if they are good, you would update the strong ones on a regular basis?

Answer: When you say update the strong ones…

Question: If you’ve got a Squidoo lens and you’ve had it for three years and it is ranking on the second page, it may not be on the first page or whatever, but you would keep

updating that rather than just let it sit there?


Answer: When we say updating, it’s like what we were talking about?

Question: With regular content.

Answer: Yes, I wouldn’t be doing regular content so much, I’d just be creating new pages.

Question: On that site?

Answer: Let’s say Squidoo, you can create new pages under that same Squidoo account. So

you would add additional pages for that Squidoo account. I thought when you were

talking about adding content, you were talking about, here’s my Squidoo page and I’m

adding a new module. I wouldn’t worry about that, I’d rather create new content. If you

want it to come up on page number one because it is on page number two, send some

more links.

[Google vs. Yellow Pages video]

I know that’s pretty heavy-duty material. Even if you only apply 5% of what you’re going to

learn today, you will be head and shoulders above the competition. As much as because

you’re in the space you think people know about it, most people don’t know about it. So

you are in the right place at the right time.