by Shawn Harden on May 30, 2010
Well I have been continuing to do research in an effort to learn as much as I can to help me in my SEO efforts. I have had my first product site up for about a month now, and now its time to get busy trying to rank near the top of the search engines.
I have been spending all my extra time this week writing arcticles and submitting them to the various article directories. I have been using some great tools to help me along the way, but I will go into more detail on that at a later date. I have also been submitting material to a variety of Web 2.O sites along with doing a good deal of social bookmarking.
The goal of all of this is to create solid backlinks, so I can eventually rank at the top of the search engines for my chosen keyword terms related to my site. I have learned a good deal on this subject in a short period of time, and the ultimate goal is to achieve the top position per search term in Google’s rankings. This process is definitely going to take patience and time, because the process of link building is slow and steady.
I read a great post on John Thornhill’s blog written by Daniel Sumner. It talked about sticking with your online marketing efforts despite all of the frustrations and setbacks. I can definitely relate to this already, and I intend to push forward. For anybody reading this post, realize that success rarely comes overnight. It probably will take time to even see a break even point on your investment.
This goes for any business. Most all businesses take a loss for the first several years. Run your online endeavours just as you would an actual business. Get a business license and save the receipts for all of your purchases. Training, hosting, domain purchase, printer cartridges, membership fees, software, etc., can all be written off on your taxes. This helps you to recoup some of the cash that you are putting out as you run your business.
Well I am still following the masterclass, building links for my product site, and my list building efforts will be beginning in the next phase of my efforts. I am keeping a game plan in mind, and following it to the best of my ability. Oh yea, I actually made my first sell off of my product site. I’m hoping to see plenty more in the future. Will check back in soon, as I will update you on my efforts.
by Shawn Harden on May 16, 2010
As the week is ending, I am diligently working on my link building skills. As a newbie to this adventure, I have acquired a good bit of knowledge in a short period of time.
Backlinking is extremely important in getting your listings or sites to the top of the search engine rankings, and of course this means Google. The Wal Mart of your online experience, but I digress. Getting your listings to the top of Google is an assurance of free traffic, and is probably the best source of traffic that there is. This seems like an impossible undertaking, and I personally believed that at first. But a better understanding of the process shows that this can be accomplished.
The first thing you need to understand is keyword competition. Basically, whatever search term or phrase someone types into the search engine when searching for an item. It is very difficult to go after a highly competitive term, but a lesser searched term within the correct boundaries can be a valuable thing. For example,” dog training” is a very competitive term. But if you were to focus in on a very specific type of dog training, such as “german shepherd dog training”, the competitveness of that search phase is far less. A good measure of a less competive term is 50,000 pages or less. You can type the phrase into Google using quotations,”your keyword or phrase”, to get the number of competing pages from Google.
Building backlinks with anchor text is basically the foundation of SEO. Anchor text is nothing more than your keyword phrase made clickable linking to your destination site. There are a few things you can do on your site’s page itself, but building backlinks is VERY important. You need a good number of them, and linking to pages with high page rank is important. Page rank is Google’s interpretation of the importance of a page. No one really knows how they come to this conclusion, but that really isn’t important. Linking to the high page ranked pages is. There are a good number of ways to obtain backlinks, and a good number of tools you can purchase to help you in your effort.
I am doing some heavy research, acquiring tools, setting up accounts at Web 2.o sites, learning some nice tricks, and starting to link build. These skills can be invalubable, because you can apply them to affiliate marketing efforts, and also apply them to products that you produce yourself. Masterclass students can relate to this last statement. Imagine creating a product, finding a low competition keyword phrase, applying that phrase to your product, and getting to the top of Google for that search term. The search term would need a decent amount of daily searches, but there are tools available to help you with this.
I am also following the Masterclass on a weekly basis. I haven’t started creating my first product yet, and probably will not until I gain some more knowledge and experience. But I am following closely, downloading everything, trying to get to the forum, and checking out some blogs when i can. I unfortunately still work a full time job, and am extremely busy trying to fit everything into a limited amount of time.
Until next time, got to get back to business.
