Super Cheap Search Engine Optimization

Off page optimization is the process of getting other sites to link to yours. On page optimization is important but it pales a little in comparison to how far up the rankings off page optimizing can get you and the following paragraph will prove it.

To illustrate the point go to Google and type in 'click here'. I'll wait. I bet you see Adobe in the number 1 spot. Now if you go and check Adobe's site you won't find any optimizing on their site for that particular keyword phrase. So how do they rank number 1? This is a forehead slapping moment for a lot of people, well it was for me anyway. Adobe has Adobe reader right? So when you go to a site that has a pdf document for download. they usually have a link that also takes you to the download page for the free Adobe pdf reader. No points for guessing what the phrase is alongside that link. Yep, that's right 'click here'. There are so many sites with an Adobe pdf Reader link that says 'click here' that Google has no choice but to rank them number one for that keyword phrase.

This is no excuse to go slack on your on page optimization. Every little bit helps.

The more websites you have linking to yours the better. That's not the entire story though. Google has an index called page rank which represents the quality of a site. One being lowest and ten being highest.

The number of links on any given site is also important. Again the more links the better. You might be thinking at this stage that you could set up a network of 100 sites and then put a link on all of them back to your main one. Not so. Google also checks the IP address of where the link is coming from. If the IP is the same your main page will be severely penalized.

It's best not to try to trick the search engines because it's just not worth it. You don't want to spend hours developing a site and then have it banned because of nefarious page ranking tricks. The Google team is very smart and are constantly tinkering with their algorithm in an effort to get quality content in front of as many people as possible.

Here's a sure fire way that will get you some Google love but it does involve a fair bit of work. I'm assuming here that you've chosen your niche keyword phrase to work with and have checked out the competition. If not, go here to find out more about keywords and niche markets.

OK here goes. Type your targeted keyword phrase into Google. Then go to the top ranked website that relates to the niche your focusing on. Do a link check on this site. Go to the Google search box and type in the following

link:http://www.domain.com/

Replace domain with the actual domain that you are researching.

You will see a bunch of links which link to that website. Here's where choosing a highly targeted keyword phrase or long tail keyword comes in because you need to check out all of these websites and the more tightly focused your keyword is the less websites you will have to research.

1. Check if the page title of the page linking to the competitors site contains the sites main keyword phrase in it. If it does, then that is a point to them. If not then it is a point to you.

2. Check if there are any anchor text links that link back to the page you're trying to beat. You especially want to check if the keyword that the site that you're trying to beat is in the anchor text itself. If it is that's another point for them, if not that's a plus for you.

3. Now you need to check the number of links to their site an the type of links to their site. Then you need to find out how many links are linking to the page that is our target site. This means we have to do the link: thing in Google. See, I told you. Getting to number 1 is NEVER easy.

4. Write down the number of links to your target page and the number of links to the linking page. These are the numbers that we need to match or exceed.

5. The next step is to get the page rank of each of these sites which can be achieved by downloading the Google view bar to do this. You're wanting the page ranks that link in to the page you're trying to beat to be a little on the low side. This will give you more of a chance to beat it out.

6. Make sure you write all this information down somewhere or preferably put it in a spreadsheet and save it. These are the numbers that you need to beat to get to the top of the SERP's.

You may be thinking right about now that surely there is an easier way. To be successful in this game you need to do the work. If you only want to be a part timer then you're probably going to get sick of it and throw in the towel before you see any results. For those who go into it full time and stick with it they will definitely reap the rewards. However, there is a marvelous piece of software that does all this stuff automatically. In the grand scheme of things it is fairly cheap but to first timers it might be considered quite pricey but you have to be serious about this stuff if you're going to make it.

The software is called SEO Elite and if you build a few niche web sites then it is a massive time saver. You can check it out here!.

If you're like me you're probably thinking about rethinking you're target phrase after reading all of the above. Scary stuff, especially if you've got a busy life. The first time I used this method I was looking at a site that had over 200 backlinks. Phew! That's a lot of research. So I went back and researched my keywords some more to get those numbers down. Not only did I get a more tightly targeted keyword phrase but I also reduced the number of sites to less than 50. Much more manageable.

After you complete all the above tasks the next step is pretty simple. You just need to emaill all of the above sites that you have researched and send them an email requesting a link exchange. They put one on theirs and you put one on yours. You won't get accepted by all of them but with a properly worded request you should get most of them as it also helps them with page rank as well. it's important that you have a quality web site with good content otherwise you are just wasting every bodies time.

Article marketing is a great way to get back links. The fastest way to get it done is to use freelancers. A basic 300 word article can be gotten for about $3.00. If you're hard up for a bit of cash you can do it yourself, it's labor intensive but worth it. Once you get going and the dollars start coming in you can always pay someone else to take over while you concentrate on other aspects of your business.

I could give you a list of article directories but you want the ones that currently have the most Google love. Just go to Google and type in article directories. The top directories listed are the ones you want to submit to as they are currently Google's favorites. This way you can always have a list of who the top directories are all the time and nobody has to give you a list. Lists can be outdated in less than a month.