Now don’t get me wrong it’s been hard work getting this type of traffic but it’s all free traffic from the search engines and if I can do it so can you.

I’m not going to reveal the website, Just to let you know I’m using wordpress as the main CMS which is a great bit of software. So what’s the secret to getting this traffic so quickly on a new website.

First is content, I’ve been adding anywhere from 3 posts to 10 posts per day. It’s a matter of getting into a routine when doing this. Adding an article first thing in the morning, adding one or two at lunchtime and then adding maybe a couple in the evening.

I use Google Reader and have feeds from various on topic websites, that way the news and updates are pushed to me so save lots of time searching for information. Now don’t get me wrong I have been researching and one of these paid off with links from a couple of very highly placed websites in the niche linking back to my post as a reference of the news (nice backlink and a little bit of traffic).

I’ve also been working on backlinks, not as hard as I should to be honest but this will be the key focus on this site over the coming months.

If you read some of the other articles on this site I do a lot of article marketing and distribute quality articles to quality websites and try get a backlink to my sites.

The next target is 100,000 per month, I think it might take a little longer but it’s very achievable if you add quality content and quality backlinks and give Google what the searchers are looking for.

You may think that you are doing things wrong and that is understandable. Many online business owners don’t have a firm enough grip on SEO practices to feel confident about their efforts. Therefore when a mistake is made they blame themselves. What is very important to realize is that the trends are going to continually shift. Therefore you must keep on top of them. That way you are always able to deliver what will help you reach your target market.

SEO Practices you want to Use

Here is some great advice about some of the SEO practices that you do want to try. First, ask yourself what is taking place out there online. People are going to social sites to gain access to information. One of the best places that you want to be a part of is Wikipedia. They get hits from millions of people each day on every topic you can imagine. You also want to submit materials to Digg and Propeller. Just about everyone has a MySpace page and views videos on YouTube. Therefore you need to get your information out there with both of these entities.

Links have always been a very successful part of SEO practices. You want to continue your efforts to get them out there. You need to use multi streams too so that no matter which direction your target market is coming in they will run into your information. Such exposure can be the difference between a profitable online business and one that never gets off the ground. You need to have your links with a variety of materials attached to them as well. Don’t use the same copy in all of these directions or it will hinder your efforts.

Ineffective SEO Practices

Likewise, there are several ineffective SEO practices that people still waste their time on. You don’t want to get into a position where you are just laying out keywords thinking that is the best way to get a good ranking. Your materials will be difficult for humans to read when they are directed towards robotic indexing. You also need to realize that each search engine has different criteria and that it is constantly changing.

You are only going to get indexed when you are able to offer something new for the search engines. Your materials may be rejected by directories too if they are too similar to what they have already indexed. You also need to be careful when it comes to how you set up your links. As we discussed you do want them in place but you only want them to be helpful. You can hinder your results if you have too many links on your pages that can take a person to the site of someone else.

It is crazy to spend time and money on SEO efforts though if you aren’t monitoring what you can get in return from them. There are plenty of terrific tools out there that can help you to get the most from your efforts. By having a plan of action you can evaluate where you are, where you are headed, and device a realistic plan to get your there. Here are some areas that will help you to evaluate how well your SEO efforts are going.

Identify the Brand to Non-Brand Ratio

Have you identified your brand to non-brand ratio? If not you need to make it a priority. You may think that as long as you monitor your traffic things are well but there is more to it. You need to be able to identify how much of it is coming from branding within the search engines. If you have a high ration here then do your best to get other methods into action. Once you do so you can significantly increase your traffic relating to non-branding.

Don’t Copy Others

While you can get great ideas from the materials of others out there, don’t copy them. It takes confidence and effort to be original but that is what will allow you to stand out with SEO. The search engines send their bots out all day long looking to index new materials. If what you offer is just to similar to what it has already found then it will skip over it. You want as much of what you offer to be indexed and being the one to go out on the limb with new perspectives and ideas is the way to accomplish it.

What is your Page Yield

What is your current page yield? If you aren’t familiar with that term it refers to your number of pages that are unique enough to get indexed each month. The ratio is determined by dividing that number by the overall number of pages you added. You do want to add plenty of new pages, but your primary focus should be on the quality and not the quantity of them. You need this ratio to be high if your long tail is going to continue growing.

Do you have a Great Keyword Yield?

Do you have a great keyword yield? You want it to be around 2.4 keywords per page. In order to find out where you stand, take the number of keywords you offer with each page. You will want to subtract those that aren’t creating additional traffic. In order for your long tail to work here you have to have a high ratio. If it isn’t where it should be then make it a priority to figure out places to make quality changes.
Are your Keywords getting you Vistors?

Find out if your keywords are getting you visitors or not. You should be able to anticipate 1.9 hits for each keyword on a page. By measuring this you can see the thickness of your long tail. Once again if your ratio is less than it should be then you need to make some positive changes in order for SEO practices to help you the most.

Identifying your Index to Crawl Ratio

By identifying your index to crawl ratio, you can find out how you are stacking up out there with the search engine bots. You want as many of your pages as possible to get indexed. As we talked about, you need to offer high quality and original materials in order for the bots to pick up that material and decide it is worthy of adding to the index. You should be using tools that ensure your materials aren’t too close to what other people are offering.

Don’t Forget about the Engine Yield

Last but not least you don’t want to forget about the engine yield. Your ratios need to be evaluated with the various search engines. If you are only looking at one of them you are failing to get the most from your SEO practices. Since each of the search engines have different criteria for their rankings you need to see if you are doing well overall. You don’t want to form your SEO materials just to get a top ranking with one of them but being terrible with the rest. This just isn’t an effective way to reach your target market.

While it is essential to engage in SEO practices, the focus needs to be on using those that are going to be the most effective. You will realize that there are trends that shift all the time out there with consumers. Therefore you have to be ready to modify your SEO practices in order to be able to stay with them. There is plenty of potential out there for a successful online business if you are doing your best in this area.

Via : redcardinal

Here are a few tips to help get you started

1. If you sign a contract with a company put into the agreement that they link to your website. I see this all the time with web development companies that will almost always leave a link on their customers website.

2. Start a Blog - Blogs are a great way to get links. But be careful don’t try to sell anything from your blog keep it non-commercial or low. You can find tones of information on blogs from an SEO point.

3. Submit your site to quality directories, not crappy little one. The like of Yahoo, Best of the Web, Business.com are what you really need to think about.

4. Ask for links - Yep it’s simple really just email relevant website and ask them to link to you.

5. Pick up the phone - You would be surprised how simple and easy this is. This can work in two way they can give you a free link (or not) or you can suggest you write a quality article for their website and they give you a little credit within the article that links back to your website.

6. Ask your visitors to link back to your website (if your reading this and want to link to me please do - I’m a nice guy …really) the important thing here is not to have message all over your website with link to me everywhere.

7. Promote your site using conventional PR, PRWeb is good and if you have a marketing department where you work ask them for leads.

A friend of mine works in a company that have one competitor and if they are over worked or cannot get to a job will refer the other company. This is how small business works in Ireland even in the SEO game where if one guy is to busy will recommend a friend/competitor.

Referral links between competitors can happen in a couple of ways

Sharing excess work

As I already said above this happens when a sudden burst of business hits them. Instead of turning work away a small business owner will refer a trusted colleague that they know. Trust is the keyword here and if you have a trusted partner whom you link to this says a lot about you professionally and algorithmically.

Referring specialties

If you offer a specialty services (which is what SEO is) like most specialty services you’ll be busy, with this comes more work and needing to refer work that may not be actually what you do or is not the right fit for your expertise is all part of the game. Look for business that do offer this service and become partners both in linking online and offline.

Now if you know a little about linking I bet your saying this sounds like a reciprocal link campaign!!

Yes you are correct

And believe it or not reciprocal links still work from a business point of view and from an algorithmic standpoint. An authority link from a high profile industry site is what we all want for our websites and having a number of referral links from partner website will do you no harm.

So 10 years ago two guys started this small company with a backing of $100k and a few computers, 10 years later the company is worth a few billion (maybe $150 billion).

I wonder how many millionaires Google has  made and how many companies have started and succeeded on the back of Google success.

If like me your trying to succeed in your online business lets hope we are part of the success that Google now has.

One issue could be the time of year July/August just seems to be so slow.

Is everybody on holidays?

I like quality links – I’m sure we all do

I do lots of article marketing, and before you ask it’s not all article directories. I write quality articles or I hire a quality writer to write maybe a 1000 word article on the subject I’ll sometimes get 10-20 articles done.

I’ll then contact website owners and ask if they are interested in publishing an article on their website, letting them know of course that this article will NOT appear on any other website and is an exclusive article for them.

Now how good is that for a website owner!

Free article
Free content
Quality article
Quality written

This of course is slow and takes time, I finally got one reply yesterday after 2 months waiting to let me know the article was published. Lucky I waited and didn’t use the article on another website.

Was it worth the wait? Hell yeah it’s a quality website

So I guess the lesson is you really need to have self belief that what you are doing is working and maybe as we move into winter more people will be online and might find time to publish your articles.

As I’m sure you are aware PageRank is a Google trademarked term, it’s their measure of the importance of a page. But, if you look into it, it’s acttually more than that it is the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm (Google PageRank). As we work with SEO it makes total sense that we make use as best we can to point PageRank in the right direction.

Most inbound links to a website will point directly to the home page, this page typically accumulates the most PageRank.  What you need to think about is how do you use this PageRank to flow deeper into your site.

One of the key things you need is site wide navigation using keyword rich text links rather than graphical buttons. You want to try shape how PageRank is distributed across your webpages using “rel=nofollow.” allowing you to send PageRank to link you want and not to others.

The “rel=nofollow.” Was first introduced in 2005 to help discourage comment spamming on blog, which at that stage was out of control but now handed control back to the website . After this the search engines evolved there thinking and began to realize that  nofollow was a much more versatile tool.

Okay so now let’s look at some samples of what we can do with nofollow tag. Most websites will have a Privacy Policy page I’m sure nobody wants to write for the word privacy policy so this little tag helps.

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/privacy.htm>Privacy Policy</a>

It’s as simple as can that, but let’s look at an example of an e-commerce website.  Here we have a screenshot of komplett.ie I have highlighted the Apple iPod nano.

1 - The product name as a text link
2 - The product image thumbnail
3 - The “Buy” button

You could nofollow the product image thumbnail and the “Buy” button to funnel more PageRank through the much more contextually relevant product name.  By strategically adding the “rel=nofollow” attribute to links on your webpage you can improve the flow of PageRank within your site to the most relevant pages the ones that make you money.

This is an advanced SEO tactic and must be used with care but if you’re looking to get a jump on your competitors just take a quick look at PageRank sculpting. Just adding a simple tag can make a big difference to your search engine rankings.

There are very few fundamental mistakes in this e-mail, these guys will probably send out thousands of requests on a daily basis and don’t even check the websites they are requesting links from.

From:     ++++ +++++ [+++++++++@gmail.com]
To:      Webmaster
Subject:  Get Quality Home Page Link

Hello,

We visited your site http://www.++++++++++.com and are interested to swap links with your site.

We would add your link at the home page of http://giprimex.com/ which will actually help to increase the search engine rank of your site and give you some
targeted traffic too.

We’d appreciate a link back from the home/internal page of your site for
the mutual benefit.

If you are interested please reply to this email with your link details.

We look forward for your positive response.

Best regards,
++++ +++++

For starters my website does not relate to the subject, I usually don’t reply to any requests from a free e-mail account like Gmail or Hotmail etc. they say that the link will actually helped increase the search engine ranking and give me some traffic I really don’t think this will happen.

At the time of this post they have a page rank of 2, which is not a major problem as a page rank is overstated, as we’ll talk about in later posts.  I don’t do much reciprocal linking (I do some) reciprocal linking to a site that is not related in any way simply does not work in 2008.

So best practice comes down to the type of site you have, if its a brand-new website that has just been launched for the first-time ‘then you basically have nothing to lose and may pickup a few good links along the way but don’t expect great results.

If however you’re running a campaign for rte.ie that has good ranking then you are basically wasting your time, as there is zero value in submitting this to the 1000 directories that you can find.  I mean let’s look at rte.ie it’s a 12-year-old website (maybe older archive.org only go back to 1996) do you think a well-linked site is going to benefit from a few new links from these crappy little directories?  I don’t think this website would even benefit from a Yahoo directory listing at this stage  but that remains to be seen.

Have we asked the question?  Is there such a thing as best practices? if you have a well established site that is really well linked and ranking well then submitting to directories is going to have little effect.