Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 3
One of the most important things you need to make your web site enticing to the major search engines is high quality back links. Back links are links from other web sites to yours. They’re best if they come from high page-ranked sites, contain your targeted keywords in the alt tags and are one way. Reciprocal links, links where they link to you and you reciprocate by linking back to them are okay, but one way links are better.
So, how do you get back links to your web site. There are dozens of methods. There are also dozens of Internet Marketers out there that claim their system or product can do it for you “automatically” or “while you sleep” or whatever. While it is true that some tools are helpful, and even a few are worth paying for, most are just over-hyped reworks of tools that are already available to your free. In the next few articles I’ll try to briefly cover a few of the methods I use and why. We’ll expand on each of these with more detail in upcoming articles.
Link Exchange Services
Link Exchange Services are online services that you join to make exchanging links with other site managers easier. A quick Google search on “Link Exchange” will reveal hundreds of these services, many of them free or at a very small cost. How do you choose? What you want is quality and relevancy above all else. The search engines give you the most credit if the back links to your site are from high quality sites that contain content relevant to your own. If you’re blogging about fishing in the upper Midwest, it won’t do you a lot of good to have back links from gambling sites or sites that sell Chinese pseudo-Viagra. In fact, it may even hurt your ranking. But having back links from sites that have something to do with fishing or other outdoor sports will help tremendously because they’re viewed as relevant by the search engines.
Personally, I’ve used a couple of the pay services in the past. They’ve helped and did boost my rankings, but I’m not sure it was helpful enough over the free sites to make much of a difference. I’m experimenting this time with WorkFromYourRV.com. I’m not using any of the paid services. Instead I’m using all free link exchanges and relying on blog proliferation to get it done for me. In that respect, we’re on this journey together and we’ll see how it works.
Bottom line … link exchanges are a small part that can be beneficial to your overall effort to rank high with the search engines. However, it is only a small part.
Blog Proliferation
The entire point of a blog is to attract readers. Duh! That is also an excellent way to get back links to your site. Many of you are probably reading this article from somewhere other than WorkFromYourRV.com. That’s because I make my blog articles available to the public at large in a variety of ways. I have an RSS feed that syndicates my articles, not only to many of my readers, but to other services that attach my blog entries to other peoples sites. In addition, I upload my blog articles to article services where they’re made available for search and download.
There is another complete segment of the “make money online” market out there that will teach you to set up blog sites in which you don’t have to write a single article. Instead, you scrape relevant, on-topic articles from other sources and include them in your blog. That’s a perfectly legitimate business niche and someday I’ll run a series of articles on how to do this as well. I don’t feel it’s as effective as writing your own material, but then again, it’s easy and you can maintain many more sites using this method.
Those types of sites have to get their material from somewhere and that’s where you come in. Publish your articles through RSS and to the article directories. Make them available for free use and they’ll get picked up and spread over the internet in no time – especially if you write substantive articles.
The reason this benefits you is because all these article services allow you to put a byline at the bottom where you put links back to your site. These links become quality one-way links to your site from other sites. The best kind!
I’ve had my best luck with EzineArticles.com. They are the most restrictive, but seem to get the most attention because of it. Every article you submit to them must follow strict guidelines and is reviewed by a human being. That makes them more difficult to use, but highly respected. About 75% of my articles that I receive back links from come from EzineArticles.com. If you’re only going to bother with 1 article submission site, go with them.
A couple more sites just in case you want more. I also use ArticleAlley.com and GoArticles.com. GoArticles.com will even let you put links directly in the body, so if you embedded an affiliate link, as I sometimes do if it’s relevant, they’ll even let that pass. EzineArticles.com won’t. There are many more, but these are the ones I use most. You can experiment with some of the others, but just watch your traffic sources to see how they’re helping, if at all. We’ll cover how to tell where your traffic is coming from in another article series.
That’s enough to keep you busy for now. We’ll continue with this subject next time.
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
I’ve mentioned several times in previous articles that I’ve always had my best results from affiliate ads. Since that’s the subject of this article, let me clarify that a bit. The last thing I want to do is leave you with a false impression that PPC ads aren’t valuable. Quite the opposite.
PPC ads have one distinct advantage over most other forms of online advertising – they start making money immediately. That’s important whenever you start a new web site in an attempt to add to your online income. We’re all prone to discouragement. If we put in a lot of work and get our blog going, then nothing happens, our first reaction is to abandon the effort and write it off as a failure.
The truth is, making money online usually isn’t as “instant” as most would have you believe. While many people do make large amounts of online income, and many of them rather quickly; most make it more slowly. PPC ads give us that instant encouragement that something really is happening and we really are making money online – even if it’s just a small trickle at first.
Affiliate ads will make larger amounts of money in the long run – at least they do for me. I have friends in the internet marketing business that make an impressive living off nothing but PPC web sites, but I have more friends who, like me, take a more balanced approach. I look at like I look at my investment portfolio – diversify!
If you’ve been following this entire series, then you’ve already set up one or more affiliate relationships, either directly with the vendors you plan to use, or with affiliate clearing sites like ShareASale or Commission Junction. Placing the ads into your blog is the next step.
I use a 2-stage approach. First, I have a sidebar panel that I put a group of ads in that are related to my blog. Second, I place appropriate affiliate ads in some of my blog entries. If you’re reading this entry on WorkFromYourRV.com, you can see the ad panel to the right. These are all affiliate ads that have relevance to my blog’s subject and, when clicked, take you to the vendor’s website where you might possibly purchase their product. If you do, I get a small commission. Same with the ads in the blog entries. These are usually more focused and are relevant to the specific blog entry in which they appear. This type of sales is as old as sales itself. My Father-in-law spent most of his early career as a shoe salesman in the days when his entire income was commission from each pair of shoes he sold. This is no different, just adapted to the Internet.
One note of caution here. If you’re in this for the long term, choose your affiliations wisely. Nothing will kill a blog, or even an entire online business faster than recommending disreputable companies. Your readers are YOUR customers – always remember that. They took your advice when deciding to purchase a product, and will likely blame you if the experience goes bad. Personally, I BUY EVERYTHING I RECOMMEND. I realize that can get expensive, and may be out of your budget, but it is the only way I know of to insure the product is legitimate and has value. All of my friends in this business that are successful have the same attitude. You can’t please everybody, but you certainly can make your best effort to get close.
To put affiliate ads in the sidebar of your blog, look for plugins or widgets on Wordpress.org and follow their instructions. Most are reasonably simple and will present your ads in a clear way on your site. For example, if you signed up as an affiliate for Amazon, you can take a look at the AmazonSimpleAdmin widget. It allows you to embed Amazon ads almost anywhere in your blog. If it’s appropriate to display related eBay ads in your blog, then you may want to check out the WP Tag Ads widget or the eBay Sales Lister widget. These scan your blog tags or content and select appropriate eBay ads to display. If you are interested in a Zazzle store, there’s even a widget (Zazzle Store Gallery) that will display products from your Zazzle store.
To embed other affiliate ads into your post you can simply ad an image to your post, or you can use a plugin. I personally like to just insert the images using the Wordpress post editor while I’m writing the post. That way I get full control over where in the text the affiliate ad appears. Just insert the image, then replace the image code generated by Wordpress with the code given to you by your affiliate. If you don’t want to go to that much trouble, try a plugin like the WP-Affiliate plugin and see if that matches your needs better.
In the next few articles we’ll cover more about the layout of your blog and how to start driving traffic to your blog. After all, if you don’t have readers, you can’t have customers. Watch for new videos as well.
