The site Abicord.com has a Smoking Cessation page. If the site’s owner wants to improve the performance of the smoking cessation page in search engines, s/he could generate links back to that page.

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that. The site itself should also link to the smoking cessation page. These internal links must reflect the external linking on the site.

When you create external links to an internal page on your site, you’re telling search engines the page is important. If internal links on the site don’t reflect this importance, a search engine may decide you’re simply trying to fool it into ranking the page. This doesn’t usually end well!

As you’d expect, all the normal rules for linking apply. You want link diversity…

• Links from different domains
• Links from different types of web site, not only from directories or blog comments

You also want your links to appear over a period of time, rather than all at once. Linking works best when it happens naturally, and at a steady place.

It’s a different story when it comes to link building. This is something that you simply can’t do in one go. In fact, you’re rewarded for regular activity spread over a period of time.

You gain less in SEO terms by doing 8 hours worth of SEO work in a single day, than you will if you do 30 minutes twice a week over 8 weeks.

Why? Because search engines like to see content and backlinks appear naturally over time. The key to success with SEO is a small amount of regular activity spread over time.

It’s worth noting that SEO Research and Content Optimisation are one-off activities. Once they’re done, they’re done until some future date when you need to revisit your content (e.g. you’ve fallen off page one, or there is a major change in the way search engines work).

As such, you may well decided to take on SEO Research and Content Optimisation first and get them over and done with as quickly as possible.

Alternatively, you may decide to employ me to do SEO Research and/or Content Optimisation for you. And take on link building yourself.

The point is, SEO Research and Content Optimisation are tasks you can (and should) get done as soon as possible. Get them out of the way, and then allocate regular weekly activity to link building.

• It’s easy to understand:
  This intro is written for beginners
• It covers everything:
  Even though it’s aimed at beginners, it covers SEO from start to finish
• It’s convenient:
  Everything you need is contained on a single page
• You save time:
  It links directly to the best SEO resources on the web
• You save money:
  It’s totally free, and so are the sites/resources it links to

Do you want an easy (and free) guide to search engine optimisation? Are you overwhelmed by all the options out there? Have you found yourself bamboozled by highly technical information?

Perhaps all you need is a gentle introduction that brings together the various pieces of SEO, and puts them in content. It then links directly to more in-depth information should you need it.

In short, this is an excellent way to discover the power of SEO Optimisation.

Link bait can only work if people find it useful. In particular, it works best when people who write blogs, “how to” guides and resource sites think it will help their readers. As such, link bait tends to have these features…

• The benefit of having it is easily understood by others
• There is a well-defined target market that will find it useful
• 3rd party blog authors will link to it because it’s useful to their audience
• It’s the sort of thing people will click on if you tweet about it
• It’s not too long, wordy or involved

Examples of link bait include The DIY Guide to SEO, the Web Marketing Process Campaign Plan, and the Lead Generation Campaign Calculator. Each of these tools provides a specific service likely to be of use to the people they’re aimed at.

You can create your own link bait, and make it available for download via your site. Your link bait might take any of the following forms…

• Video
• Audio
• Text
• Slideshow/Presentation
• Flash application
• Ebook
• Top 10 list
• Web utility/application

In addition to the bait itself, you’ll also need a landing page. And if you have a landing page, you might as well collect an email address before making the item available (i.e. for future marketing communications).

Once your landing page is up, it’s time to start promoting it. This can be done via Twitter, Facebook, a Squidoo page, directories, classified sites, forums, and blogs. In particular, find those blogs, forums, etc that deal with your target market. Write to the blog owner, and make him/her aware of your item. With a bit of luck, s/he will spread the word to thousands of people and you’ll pick up lots of powerful inbound links very quickly.

You shouldn’t limit yourself to a single application. Always be on the look out for new ideas, because you never know what people will find attractive. Any given idea might turn out to be the one that gets you right to the top of Google.

• Google: The link command
• Yahoo: Site explorer

In this case, Yahoo’s tool is vastly superior to Google’s.

The Google tool requires that you enter the following into its search engine: link:yourdomain. For example, to see a list of the sites that link to the site google.com, you’d enter link:google.com into Google’s search engine.

You’ll then see a list of all the sites that link to Google. All? Well, no actually. And that’s why Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool is superior.

With Site Explorer (click the above link to visit), you enter the URL of the site into a search box. Then click the “Explore URL” button. You’ll be presented with a list of pages Yahoo has indexed from that site.

Near the top of the page you’ll find 2 buttons. The first is currently selected, and titled “Pages”. The second is titled “In links”. Click the “In links” button to see all the pages that link to the site of your choice.

As you’ll quickly find, the list is far more extensive than Google’s link command. You get more information, and more useful information. This tool provides additional features, allowing you to find out much more about the people linking to you.

From an SEO perspective, Site Explorer is more useful as a way of finding out the the kinds of website that tend to link to you. This makes it easier to find new sites that are likely to want to link to you.

Want more free SEO tools?

Want more free SEO tools to help you with your search engine optimization? Check out my favourite free SEO tools, and download your own copy of The DIY Guide to SEO (DIY SEO).

It tells you what’s working and what’s not, stepping through every single SEO component on the page. It’s an excellent way to learn about SEO, and provides practical advice you can use immediately.

This report isn’t some automated cookie-cutter system either. Significant sections are created manually by SEO professionals. It’s like getting an expensive consultant totally free of charge.

If it’s so good, why is it free? Monkey Design House, the company behind the report, offer it on a free trial basis. Once you see how good it is, you’ll want to use it on other pages on your site. They charge a modest fee (still excellent value) if you request additional reports.

Click here and get it now.

Let’s the get the ball rolling with the first Internet Marketing secret…drum roll please…

SEO Quake:

SEO Quake is a brilliant plug-in that runs in the Firefox web browser. If you plan to do any SEO work at all, get SEO Quake. I use it every day.

I’ve included a screen capture of SEO Quake in action. You can see it to the right of this text. Let’s take a quick look at the information it can tell you…

• PR: Google’s PageRank score for the web page being viewed
• Google I: The number of pages from the site that Google has indexed
• Bing I: The number of pages from the site that Bing has indexed
• Rank: The Alexa rank of this website
• Age: The age of the domain
• Links: On the left is the number of internal (to the site) links to this page, with the number of external (to the site) domains that link to the page displayed on the right
• Density: Click to see a keyword density report on the current web page

SEO Quake is a collection of very useful SEO tools and information – combined in a single browser plug in. You even can switch it on and off at will, so it never makes a nuisance of itself.

If you’re doing any SEO work at all, make sure you first get SEO Quake and install it in your browser. And stay tuned for more Internet Marketing secrets.

Prospective clients often say “get me to the top of Google”. The questions I must then ask are…

• The top of Google for what?
• How much do you want to invest?

These can be frustrating questions from the client’s perspective. Most people don’t know what keyword phrase best serves their interest, and haven’t given serious thought to the amount they’re prepared to invest to get there.

This article takes a look at what’s involved in the SEO process, and so make it easier to understand what set of compromises will work best for the website owner.

SEO has 3 parts

There are 3 separate parts to search engine optimisation. They are…

1. Research
2. Content optimisation
3. Backlinks

These 3 parts must be done in the correct order (i.e. 1-3 in the above list). Search Engine Optimisation always starts with research.

Research

It’s not possible to optimise a client’s content until I know what keywords I need to optimise for. For most clients, that means…

• Looking at how search engines currently see their site (keyword density reports on the main pages)
• Looking at where the site currently sits in search engines
• If the site is doing especially poorly, find out why
• Build a short-list of useful keywords for this site…
  • Number of searches per month
  • Amount of competition for each word
  • Quality of competition for each word
• Create a plan of action and a proposal for the client

The research step can take anything from 2 through 8 hours. The time involved depends largely on the complexity of the client’s site and nature of the industry they’re competing in.

For example, the research phase for London Security Guards was short because it was a brand new site, and there was no complexity to worry about.

It was an entirely different matter when it came to Perspex Furniture. In this case, the client had specific requirements that were counter-productive to SEO. There is also quality competition that required additional effort. As a result, it took longer to work out an SEO plan likely to work.

Content Optimisation

As soon as the client agrees to the SEO plan, content optimisation can begin. Its main function is to ensure the search engines index the site for the selected keywords.  This involves the following…

• Make sure the homepage is focussed on the 1-3 most important keyword phrases
• Make sure internal pages support the homepage
• Make sure the navigation includes all pages we need Google to find
• Register with my Google webmaster account
• Build and submit a Google sitemap (XML document)

This can be a quick process, because the hard work is done during the research phase. Of course, there are exceptions. This corporate entertainment client also serves the wedding reception, private party and charity function market. The 4 different markets have incompatible keyword phrases, making it very difficult to optimise effectively. That’s where experience really pays off.

Backlinks

For all but the least contested keyword phrases, content optimisation isn’t enough to get a site into Google’s top 3.

If a keyword phrase has any competition at all, it won’t be enough to merely optimise content. Backlinks will also be required. Here’s why…

Google looks at who is linking to a site. It records the context present in those links, and attempts to match them to the main keywords it finds on the page being linked to.

It’s not enough to generate a lot of links. To be successful for specific keyword phrases, it’s useful if those links are…

• Contextual
• From sites with good PageRank
• Directed to optimised page(s) within a site
• Appear over a period of several months (i.e. not all at once)

Backlink generation is the final component that pushes a site up Google’s results pages. The number and quality of backlinks required depends entirely on the keyword phrases the site is competing for.

The more searches per month there are for a particular keyword phrase, the greater the number and quality of backlinks must be. The amount of time required to generate those links increases too (i.e. one hour per week for 6 months will deliver a better result than 6 hours per week for one month).

Here is a way to get hundreds of pages ranked high in google!

An automated SEO service which promotes your site in search engines with no previous knowledge required.

Three easy steps, and you can begin getting better search results, more traffic and more customers.

There are plenty of similar products, all promising to make to chore of SEO nice and easy. Yet it’s not easy. I know this because I do search engine optimisation for a living. Here’s why SEO is never fast and easy…

• It’s a moving target
• Google targets automated services
• Research and optimisation can’t be automated
• Lots of people use them

A Moving Target:

Google changes its rules, indexing and algorithms. These changes sometimes result in top-ranked sites falling far from the first page.

Unless an automated service is very new, there’s a good chance it’s based on some previous ideas about how search engines work. In my opinion, the most likely outcome from using such a service is a website that fails to dominate Google’s rankings, and a bank account that contains less money than it used to.

Google Targets Automation:

Google doesn’t like automated services. In fact, it actively targets them and punishes the sites that use them. You can see this yourself by reading Google’s webmaster guidelines. Here’s an extract…

Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches…

Google rewards original content with something unique to say. It likes content that adds to the conversation about a particular topic. Naturally enough, this excludes anything that is generated automatically by a computer program.

Research and optimisation can’t be automated:

Good SEO starts with keyword research. This involves the following…

• Make a list of the useful keyword phrases for the business in question
• Find out how many searches are made on each phrase per month
• Find out how much competition there is for each phrase
• Make a judgement call as to the best keyword phrase for the site in question
• Select 2-3 additional phrases

What an SEO expert is looking for is a phrase the client can realistically compete for. The resulting phrase has to fit the client’s budget and time-frame. If the client has an unlimited budget, the most prolific keywords can be selected. If the client has little money, a far more modest phrase must be chosen. Such a client may only be able to compete for a single word.

The next step is to optimise the site’s content. Once again, this requires  knowledge, experience and judgement. No computer program is capable of performing such a task.

Lots of people use them:

Lots of people use these automated services, in the vain hope of reaching the #1 spot in Google for dozens of different keywords. If 100 mechanics are using automated services, clearly only 10 of them will get to page one of Google.

And in fact, I predict none of them will reach page one. The more people that use such a service, the sooner it comes to Google’s attention. And then everybody using the service will find themselves falling further and further from the top.

The fact these programs are used by lots of people is my main objection to them. They’re a clumsy ham-fisted approach to SEO, and serve only to separate people from their money.