Well, its been awhile with no posts in here, but this lean spell has been created by my having several large freelance writing assignments to wade through and they pay the bills! So following belatedly on from the last post entitled simply: Content, where I not surprisingly wrote a lengthy article all about the need for good, keyword rich content to boost your blog site’s overall credibility and authority, I will now look at the other side of the SEO coin, links.
By links, I mean the inbound links that your site attracts from outside sources, namely other websites, blogs, Squidoo lenses, Hub Pages, free blogs, and social bookmarking tags. Inbound links from all of these sources will create authority fro your site, so it is important if you want to rank well for certain keywords that you procure as many of these backlinks as you can.
Authority will eventually get you a highly coveted placement on page one of the search engines, but to get there, depending upon the niche you are targeting, you need to have a lot of authority. Well that’s certainly true for highly competitive niches like make money online, or payday loans, or finance, mortgages, credit cards etc as well as some of the more visciously fought over scraps from the technology world with items like iPods, digital cameras, camcorders, mobile phones etc. I think I’ve made my point here.
Of course, if you are targeting less competitive niches and especially for long tail keywords, you don’t need anything like as many backlinks to rank well, as long as the competition as is does not have them either. All you need is a few more good strong keyword anchored links more than the site occupying the top spot and you will overtake them. Thats a fact and so many people still don’t see it.
I’m not going to try to tell you how to compete with the how to make money online brigade, because it takes huge resources in time and money to do that and in the end its really not worth it. So I’ll instead look at how to overtake much less stiff competition in a smaller niche.
Now, I can’t go telling you which niches to target, as all the ones that I know that make money fast for me will stop doing that if a load of competition turns up at my door and ups the ante!
So I’m going to have to be general here about niches. But suffice it to say there are literally thousands of untapped long-tail keyword niches out there that anyone who stumbles over them will make easy money if they work it right. As I’ve already said, its all about procuring more strong, keyword anchored one-way backlinks than the sites at the top of the list you are targeting.
So how do you know how many of these links you’ll need to overtake the top site in the list?
In a word, you’ll need a good software tool that will tell you how many links a competing site already has, so that you can go ahead and beat them. There is only one software tool that I personally use and swear by and that SEO Elite. You can look at any other website or blog and it will tell you how many inbound links a site has, the text anchor used for those links and, importantly the PR of the sites providing the links.
Armed with that knowledge, you will then know exactly what you need to do in order to overtake that site, by obtaining more of the same links that the other site has. Now you probably won’t be able to get those links from the same sources, so you need to get creative here.
- Find sites that occupy the same niche
- Find the sites with the same or higher PR
- Find the sites that will give you a keyword anchored link as opposed to a crappy unanchored one
- Find sites that will not require a reciprocal link
- Go outside and see the pig flying across your neighbourgood!
- Yep, I didn’t say it would be easy, but that’s what you have to do. But you don’t always have to go cap in hand and beg borrow or buy those links, although do it if you can. If you’ve been following this blog since its re-entry into the world wide web, which is about 7 or so months, then you should have been diligently building periperal sites of your own that can provide those links for you. By having your own sites with PR and authority, you bypass most of the problems that your competitors will have in obtaining sufficient links to beat you to the top spot.
Ok, you’ll still need to get external links if the top site you want to overtake has a lot of good strong links, but they don’t always. Sometimes you can take that top spot with a mere handful of correctly anchored links versus the other site’s larger volume of un-anchored links even from higher PR sites than you. That’s because when it comes to links, it is all about keyword authority. If your site has greater keyword authority than your competitors, then you will overtake them in the SERPs.
The greatest keyword authority comes in the form of links from high PR sites in the same niche as you that place your keyword in the link’s anchor. One of those will outweigh many links from unrelated sites that are not correctly anchored. If your sites don’t have high PR, then even a PR0 site can give greater authority links than a higher PR site in an unrelated niche that gives a straight un-anchored link.
So with that in mind, you can actually beat any competition in any low competing long tail niche if you have sufficient indexed websites and blogs occupying the same niche that you can focus links to one main site from.
And that’s how to easily make money online without spending it on buying links that could, even the next day lose their juice through a slap if they’re caught selling links! Think about that.
Terry Didcott
Make Money Hints
