For almost any type of website, the key is how to get traffic. Whether you have a personal blog, or you are trying to create the next ecommerce empire, if no one comes to your site, there is no point having it. If you are full of cash, you can always use advertising to bring traffic. Most of us do not have that luxury and must resort to free methods to get traffic. I am going to share a proven method I use to get ranked for most keywords (this excludes the massive competition ones). One tip: avoid super long tail keywords in the beginning, you need to get your site recognized as an authority first, then you can add those for extra juice. In general Google will depreciate your site if you only concentrate on those types of terms and it will be harder to rank. This is my opinion, so take it for what its worth. 1. Before you even get a URL or anything else, do your keyword homework:
You need to find 3-4 low to medium traffic keywords to work on that do not have that much competition to get your site started. Search for terms that get about 1000-2000 searches per month. Depending on the niche, you can jump this up. The real key is not the searches, but the competition. Get a list of about 15-20 possibilities and go to Google. Make sure you install the SEO quake toolbar (just Google it), its free. This will give you a great analysis of every site on Google when you type in a term. Look for page 1 to have a majority of the sites as PR0 to PR3 or so, with no authority sites in the top 5. If a bunch of articles are there (ezinearticles.com etc) or hubpages, squidoo - this is great. Those can be easily beat most of the time. The SEO quake toolbar will compute this automatically for you. Pick the 3-4 easiest candidates, and mark them down.
2. If at all possible, find an aged domain with PR already:
When searching for a domain, make sure you hit up the various services that offer to search recently expired or soon to expire domains. You can search by keyword, and while you may not find the "perfect" URL, its much easier to start building from an automatic PR3 site than a completely new site. Make sure you check this out first.
3. If you cant find a good aged domain, find one with your keywords in it:
Assuming you have spent the time and done number 1, take your strongest keyword and see if you can find a domain with those words in it. That will just make it that much easier to rank. Additionally, if other keywords are a variation of this main url keyword, that is even better.
4. Take your domain and put some kind of site on it:
If you are not sure what you want to do, that does not mean you have to sit and do nothing while you figure it out. When a site is new, you can change the entire layout and really not affect anything. Install wordpress on the site, put a decent theme and add some content. Make sure you have an about page, a disclaimer page, a contact page and a privacy page. It does not have to be wordpress, but that is super easy to get a nice looking site in just a few minutes and the search engines love it. Remember, this is NOT your final site most of the time, we just want to get started with keyword ranking.
In Wordpress, make 3 or 4 pages, each page name is one of your keywords. Add a nice article to each related to the keyword. You need to write these yourself. Make sure they are around 450-500 words, you will be using these later on.
Make sure you add categories to the blog. You guessed it, the 3-4 categories you will have are your keywords.
5. Once you have this setup, use an indexing program to send out your site:
There are many free indexing programs out there. What do these do? They submit your url to websites that capture statistics, which in turn create a record for your site. An example of this, and perhaps the most well known, is Alexa.com. There are 1000s of these all over the world. These are not for keyword ranking, this is to get the search engine spiders over to your site to index it. Using this method my site and pages are usually indexed within 24 hours.
6. Start creating profile links on forums:
There are 10's of thousands of sites that allow the user to create an account, and in their profile area, put a do follow link to their website. Some are just a link, some allow a bio area which allows anchor text. We are going to take advantage of their generosity and create a bunch of accounts. You can of course do this manually, but I have software do it for me. Also, there are tons of very good people who advertise this service for a small fee. If you do not want to buy software, take advantage of this. You will need to rotate amongst your keywords. On average, you will need about 200 per keyword in the beginning. Once you get going, that will increase a lot. But we do not want to go overboard. If its a brand new URL, only create about 20-30 the first few days, then pick it up a bit until all the keywords are covered. If its an aged domain with PR, you can do it all at one time and be done with it. Now you see why I like aged domains!
7. Make note of all the profile URL's and ping them:
Submit the list of profile URLs to ping services. One website that will do it for you is pingoat.net, but there are many others. Search Google for free ping services. Pinging basically tells the search engine spiders that there is new content to crawl.
8. Note the URL's of the profiles, and social bookmark them:
Again, here it pays to have some software to help, or pay someone to do it for you. Sure you can create bookmark accounts manually, I did it for a long time. It just comes down to how fast you want results. I personally have better things to do with my time than spend 7 hours to open 100 accounts manually when that can be done in 15 minutes with a program. Again its your choice. You will want to social bookmark every profile URL you get.
9. Now that we have got the party started, its time to submit our articles:
Now we take the articles we wrote for each page and rewrite them. I usually use a program that creates spinnable versions, but I always do it manually and not auto. There is no article rewrite program I have ever seen that does a decent job. Do not use these, spend the time and do it right. We are now going to submit each article to approximately 200-300 article directories, with each getting a different version if you have spun the article, or about 80 if you have not. Remember, we are submitting our rewritten version NOT the original. You will get nothing really for taking an article off your site and then spamming it all over the internet. Make sure each article has the correct keyword in the author box (if that is the type of directories you are submitting to), or in line with anchor text being your URL.
I like to make about 60% of the keyword links to the home page URL, and about 40% linking to the page with our article on it. Again, for article publishing you will need some software or some outside help. You can do it manually, or if you contact me, I can point you to a few good sites that will distribute your article to unique sites over time for a modest monthly fee.
10. Once your articles are published, you want to start creating web 2.0 properties that link to your site:
I am talking about Squidoo, HubPages, Tumblr, Facebook, Wikipages, Wordpress.com etc. There are a bunch of them. Create accounts, add content, link to your site. This is a long term process. Of course, bookmark all sites created, ping them and the like. The search engines love these sites and the more you can create content on them that points to your site, the better off you will be.
11. If you are feeling really adventuresome, create an RSS feed out of linking in articles, profiles and sites you make:
There is software that can do this (some free if you search) and websites that will do this as well. You put all the urls you want, it creates the RSS feed. Take this RSS feed and submit it to RSS feed aggregators. This gives additional power to the links you create and in general will create a higher chance the search engines will index your links.
Of course this is an overview, but if you follow these steps you can rank for almost any term you want within reason. Is there more you can do? Sure. I did not go over every method, just the general method I use which works.
Once you get to 10, you can repeat the list starting with profile links and of course the articles will need to be new. After 10, if you want you can change your site, just make sure to keep the focus on the keywords if you do. By then you really should have a good idea of what you want your site to be, or if you already had the idea, the design is done and ready to be deployed. By not waiting, you have a head start on traffic.
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Contributor's Note
I learned all I know about SEO through trial and error (mostly error), and learning what I can from those who are successful.
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