In fact the first lesson in that course is all about figuring out where you’re at with your own backlinks. I’ll be reworking the lesson right after the Thanksgiving Holidays (I’m out of town visiting w/ family). In the meantime, here are a couple of alternative options:

1) If you’re using the firefox browser, there’s a plugin called SEO Quake that gives you all sorts of data of any page including google backlinks, bing index data, domain age etc.

2) Go to http://www.majesticseo.com/ and enter the root domain (i.e. affiliatetreasurechest.com) The unregistered version gives you some pretty good data on backlinks (see http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/summary/hillbillyhousewife.com?IndexDataSource=F for an example).

3) Take a look at backlink watch http://www.backlinkwatch.com
it gives you a list of the backlinks with anchor text and some other data (how many other outbound links are on that page etc.)

For the purpose of lesson one, I’d mainly use majestic seo to get a quick overview of where you’re at and where you need to go (by checking out competitor’s urls). For the purpose of finding other pages that link to your competitors, I suggest using backlinkwatch.com.

All three of those tools are free and I’ll check them out in more detail this weekend before I rework the lesson.

P.S. I put this blog post together by reusing the email I sent to my Easy Link Love student. It’s a quick way to add useful fresh content to your site. For more tips on content creation shortcuts take a look at this Affiliate Shortcut report.

This works both for pages on your own sites and other web pages.

Go to Google.com and enter “info:www.webpageurl.com” in the search box. For example, if I am searching for this particular post, I would enter info:www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/1560/advanced-google-search-for-index

Let’s take a look:

In this example, the web page is not indexed by Google (which makes sense because I haven’t published it yet ).

Now let’s look at an example of a page that has been indexed. We’ll use an older post from this blog as the example.

As I mentioned above, you can use the “info” search command to check if pages on your own site or any other site are indexed. I use this quite a bit when I’m writing articles and guest blog posts. I go back a few days after my content goes up and see if the page is indexed. If it isn’t, I can do a couple of things to make sure it gets indexed.

The easiest thing to do is to point a link to the unindexed page from a site that gets indexed frequently. This could be one of your own sites that you update frequently, or even a free blog that you set up mainly to get pages indexed. You can use either a blogger or wordpress.com blog for this.

Even something as simple as submitting the page to some of your favorite bookmarking sites is enough to get it indexed.

If pages on your own site aren’t getting indexed, start by making sure you can reach the page from your home page. Can you click through another article or category page and find your way to the webpage in question? If not, add some internal linking.

Another good idea is to log into Google Webmaster tools and submit your site information. Google will tell you if there are any crawling or indexing issues that will keep your pages out of the Google search results.

P.S. Let me know if you have any other questions about search engine indexing and I’ll answer them here and in future blog posts.

• Step 1 – Visitor has a problem and “googles” it.
• Step 2 – He arrives at my site where I share some good information on how to solve his problem. I then invite him to join my list for more information on the topic.
• Step 3 – Reader joins my list, I start building a relationship via email by providing more good information with some affiliate offers sprinkled in.
• Step 4 – The subscriber likes and trusts me and ends up buying a few of the products.

And it all started with a Google Search and my site was ranking on page 1.

Easy SEO Tips For Free Traffic

With that said, here are 10 quick and easy SEO tips that you can start implementing on your own sites right away.

1) Use Keyword Rich Title Tags
Include the keyword you want to rank for as early as possible in the title. For this post for example, I’m trying to rank for “easy seo tips”.

2) Incorporate Keywords Early In Your Content
Try to use your keyword again in the first 150 words of your article or blog post. This will reinforce what you are telling the search engines with your title.

3) Use Tags To Your Advantage
No, I’m not talking about the tags you use on your blog. I’m talking about html tags, in particular the bold and h tags. Bold your keyword once in your content and if you can include a h1 or h2 tag (those are headline tags) that has your keyword in it (or a slight variation).

4) Internal Linking Counts
Make sure you link to the new article, page or post with your keyword as part of the anchor text of those internal links. I recommend you use WordPress to manage your niche sites. If you are using the keyword in the title, it will also be in the anchor text of your internal links.

5) Practice Deep Linking
You already know that getting links to your site is important. Go out and get links, but don’t just point them all to your home page. Send about half the links there, and the other half to interior pages including categories and articles or blog posts.

6) Anchor Text Variations Are A Good Thing
It’s tempting to use the exact same keyword-rich anchor text for all the links you are building back to your page. That doesn’t look very natural though and can actually hurt your rankings. Mix it up and throw some links in that have the url as the anchor text, a variation of your keyword and even things like “click here”.

7) Get Indexed Fast With Social Bookmarking
The search engines won’t start ranking you for their keywords until they index your new content. One of the quickest ways to accomplish this is by bookmarking your new blog post or article via a few social bookmarking sites.

8) Invite Readers To Link To You
You’d be surprised how many of your readers can send you links. All you have to do is ask. Create a “Link To Me” page and install plugins that make it easy to share your content via twitter, facebook etc.

9) Article Marketing Still Works
Don’t forget about article marketing. It always has and still works both to send you free traffic and links. Get in the habit of writing an article per week and submitting it to a few good article directories. I like to change up the titles each time I submit it to a different directory.

10) Guest Blogging For Powerful Backlinks
I saved the best for last. Some of the most powerful backlinks you can get are from guest blog posts. Approach a few blog owners in your niche with a quality post that includes one or two links back to your site.

Recommended Resource - Nicole Dean’s Blog Tour Guide

Last but not least I want to share a resource with you to learn more about guest blogging. It’s Nicole Dean’s Blog Tour Guide. In it, she shared her systematic approach to guest blogging. She schedules several different appearances on various blogs during a given time frame and has some neat tricks up her sleeve to make it almost impossible for a blog owner to say no to your guest post proposal. She then shows you how to leverage your time, effort and the flood of traffic you’ll be getting from your blog tour. Take a look at:

http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/blogtourguide

P.S. I’m wrapping up a short report with some of my best traffic shortcut strategies. They are perfect when you have an idea for a new affiliate niche site and want to get it ranking quickly. I’ll let you know as soon as the report is available.

My reply every single time is that he’s welcome to try it, but I’m done. I’ve spend way too much time and money trying to do the Google Adwords thing. I break even at best, but usually spend more than I make.

Here’s What I Do Instead To Get Traffic

What do I do to get tons of traffic each day instead? I market with content and rely on free traffic from the search engines, as well as direct traffic from other websites that publish some of my content and word of mouth.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Search Engine Traffic

Google [ how do I ping my blog ] (without the brackets). Here’s what you’ll see:

I’m in position #3 on page one of Google Search Results for the term. And that’s just one of several hundred keywords I rank well for on this blog. That sends me quite a bit of traffic.

And here’s an example of a little bit of content on someone else’s website that’s brought me quite a bit of traffic:

It’s a blog post on NicoleonTheNet.com that I contributed to. It’s called So You Had A Bad Day  …

A couple of things I want you to pay attention too …

1) This took me about 5 minutes to write and submit.

2) I get a link back to my blog and my picture on someone else’s site. In this case Nicole Dean’s blog. That brings me quite a bit of traffic and recognition.

3) Look at the social media buttons on the left. This post gets tweeted and shared on facebook quite a bit, bringing even more traffic back to me via “word of mouth” traffic.

Of course this isn’t the only way I share my content on other sites to get traffic. Here are a few other things I do on a regular basis:

• Article Marketing
• Article Syndication
• Guest Blogging
• Blog Commenting
• Forum Participation
• Participating in Webinars
• Short Report Marketing

I try to do something every single day that sends more traffic to my websites and I recommend you do the same. Each time you do, a little more free traffic will flow to your site.

But What If I need Traffic Fast?

Without a doubt the biggest advantage of Pay Per Click advertising is the fact that you can send traffic to a new page or website quickly. That traffic then allows you to test and tweak your offers and more importantly make sales.

There are times when I need traffic to a new niche website fast as well.

Last year, for example, I started building a site around a hot Christmas toy. Unfortunately I didn’t get started until early October and needed immediate traffic to take advantage of holiday sales.

Over the years I’ve developed two different strategies to help me get FREE SEO traffic fast. I’m not sitting in the sandbox for weeks and months, instead, I’m getting SEO traffic from day1 and a decent amount of it within a couple of days. Stay tuned for more info in a few days.

P.S. How about you? What are your favorite and most effective traffic strategies?

We all have those posts on our blogs when we were first starting out and didn’t really know what we were doing. We also get lazy sometimes along the way and don’t do as good of a job as we could to make sure each and every blog post is:

• well optimized for search engines
• still current in the information it shares
• inviting the reader to take some sort of action, be it to join our list, leave a comment or buy a product

Does this mean you should go through each and every blog post you’ve written over the years? Of course not. Instead, take a look at your stats and look at those posts and pages that are already getting a fair amount of traffic and see what you can do to make them even better. Here are some tips

Traffic

Let’s start by looking at how we can improve traffic to those older blog posts. There are a couple of little tweaks you can make that won’t take you more than a few minutes each that can easily multiply the amount of traffic your getting.

Keyword Research – Start by looking at what keywords your blog post is optimized for (if any). It may be time to go after a slightly more competitive term.

On-Page SEO – Another case I run into all the time with my own posts is that I start to get traffic for a keyword I just happened to be using somewhere in the body of my blog post, but don’t have the page optimized for. In that case something as simple as rewriting the title of the post and including that term in it can get me ranking much higher for the keyword and send me quite a bit more traffic.

A Few Fresh Links - The last step I like to take is to add a few fresh links to the content to make sure the changes are indexed quickly. This will also proof to search engines that the content is still relevant and “fresh”. This doesn’t have to be anything complicated. Bookmark the old blog post via your favorite social bookmarking sites, write an article or guest blog post and include links to 2 or 3 old blog posts.

For more strategies, take a look at my link building program at www.EasyLinkLove.com

Conversion

Now that we’re starting to get more traffic to those older blog posts, it’s time to look at conversion. What do I mean by that? Conversion is simply a calculation of how many people take the action you would like them to take compared to how many people arrive on your webpage (in this case your older blog post).

Step One – Determine What Action You Would Like Them To Take

We start by figuring out what action we want our readers to take when they finish reading the blog post. This could be to leave a comment, sign up for an opt-in or even to buy a product. With older posts, I often don’t have a call of action and if I do, it’s an outdated one. I tweak my blog post and add the call to action to the bottom of my blog post as a P.S. You can find an example at the end of this post.

Step Two – Measure Conversion

The next step is to measure conversion. You can do this via “Goals” in Google Analytics if you are selling a product. If your main goal is to get comments, just keep an eye on things and see if people are submitting them. If your goal is to get more people on your list, create a new webform via Aweber , set up a split test and start measuring opt-in rates.

Step Three – Tweak, Test and Tweak Some More

Last but not least it’s time test and tweak. Take a look at your conversions, make a small change and see if you get better results. If you are working on getting comments to your blog, change the P.S. and see if you get more reactions. If you are going after list signups, set up a split test of the optin form at aweber and find out which version converts better. If you are selling products, set up Google Website Optimizer in combination with Google Analytics goals to track conversions.

Of course you don’t have to do a lot of testing and tracking on each and every old blog post you set up. Instead I focus on the ones that will have the biggest impact, or in the case of building my list, I may use the same optin test across various blog posts and test results across my site.

Set aside some time this week to go through at least 2 or 3 old posts and improve what’s already there. Then continue to tweak a few each week. Over time you will see your traffic, optins and sales go up across the board.

Now get to work!

P.S. I’d love to share more Affiliate Marketing Tips with you. Take a few seconds to sign up for my list below to get an email update each time I add more tips and strategies to the blog. I also have a few extra goodies to share in the weeks to come that you don’t want to miss including a short report on getting a lot more out of each and every article you submit to an article directory.

Yesterday we talked about traffic and how you can get more visitors from sites who are already sending new readers to you. Today we’ll focus on how to use keywords to increase both your rankings and thus your traffic to your site.

In particular we are going to optimize for those keywords that you are already getting traffic for. To find out what your site is ranking for, log into your Google Analytics account, click on “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords”. You’ll find a list of keywords your site is ranking for and how much traffic each of them is bringing you.

If you don’t yet have Google Analytics installed or aren’t familiar with it, here’s a short repot you can download that will give you a good overview. Google Analytics Made Easy (PDF)

When I pull up a keyword report in Analytics for this site for example, some of the keywords that pop up are:

• how to use aweber
• how do I ping my blog
• affiliate marketing blog
• how to find affiliate programs on my niche
• adwords keywords review
• aweber blog broadcast
• how to create link redirects in emails
• how to use aweber on wordpress
• affiliate marketing goals
• best niche markets
• bleeding link juice
• clickbank commission theft

Once you have your list, it’s time to do some sorting. I like to separate them into two categories. Keywords that match and are optimized for existing content and keywords I can create more content around. Let me give you some examples based on the list from above.

Keywords like “how to use aweber” and “how do I ping my blog” are phrases that I deliberately optimized blog posts for. I’m keeping an eye on those, check how well I’m ranking for the keywords and then work on building links to rise higher on page one of Google for them.

Other terms like “how to find affiliate programs on my niche”, “adwords keywords review” and “bleeding link juice” for example are terms I’m getting a little bit of traffic for each month, but they aren’t keywords I’m actively going after – YET. They are just terms I happen to be ranking for because I’m using them somewhere in my content already.

I keep a running list of these keywords and turn to it whenever I need new ideas for things to blog about. It would be pretty easy for me to write a post titled “Are You Bleeding Link Juice? Here’s How To Stop It” . In fact, I’m going to save it as a draft title right now and you can expect to see the post on this blog within the next few weeks.

By keeping an eye on the keywords you are already getting traffic from and either improving current rankings for the posts you’ve written around the phrase or by creating unique optimized content around them on a regular basis, you can easily increase your search engine traffic to your site or blog.

P.S. Here’s another post I wrote a while back about keyword research skills. It has quite a few additional tips for getting more traffic to your site through targeting the right kinds of keywords.

I put together a short report for you that walks you through setting up Google analytics and more importantly taking a look at the data and what it means for you and your site.

Google Analytics Made Easy (pdf)

To download the report, right-click on the link and choose “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” . You will need a pdf reader to open the file.

Enjoy!

P.S. You’re welcome to share this report with colleagues and friend. As always feel free to post any comments or questions below.

The Three Main Components Of Targeted Link Building

Here are the three things you want to make sure you are getting right to build strong incoming links to your site.

1) Where You Link Matters

The first question I ask myself whenever I actively build a link is where I should point the link. What makes the most sense from a strategic point of view as well as visitor conversion.

I like to build about 50% of my links to the home page and the other 50% to interior pages. I also like to focus on just a handful of pages at a time to make easier to keep track of keywords and rankings.

For example, if I’m writing and submitting an article to article directories to build links, I may send one link to the home page of this blog and the other one to this particular post.  Ideally the article will have something to do with affiliate marketing and/or link building.

2) Where The Link Is Coming From Matters

Where you are linking from matters as well for two reasons.

A. It Should Be On Topic

Search Engines are starting to put more and more emphasis on links that come from topically related pages.  In other words , if I’m building links for this site, a link from an internet marketing blog will be stronger than a link from a site all about dog training.

B. Page Rank Matters (sort of)

I’m not a big fan of the page rank button and keeping track of whether a site is a pr3 or a pr4. But the page rank of a site matters. Unfortunately what matters is what Google doesn’t share with us. It’s the various page ranks they are computing internally.

Generally speaking though, the more links point to the page that has your link on it, the stronger your link will get.

3) Anchor Text Matters

Last but not least let’s talk about anchor text. It’s the words you highlight to make the link. You want to use the keyword or keyphrase you are trying to rank for as part of the anchor text.

Let’s go back to the example of building links for this site.  My main keyword for my homepage is “affiliate marketing blog” so my anchor text link would be affiliate marketing blog. The anchor text for a link to this particular post would be “targeted link popularity.

Choosing your anchor text wisely and making sure you include the keyword you want to rank for will go a long way towards making this a strong link that will help improve your rankings.

P.S. Ready to learn more about building strong, targeted links to your site? Sign up for a 26 week advanced link building program at www.EasyLinkLove.com/adv

The Page Rank Bar

Most beginning webmasters when they build links still pay a lot of attention the the page rank bar that’s part of the Google toolbar. This used to be very good indicator of how strong a page was and thus how powerful of a link you could get from it.

The problem these days is that Google rarely updates the tool and that their search algorithm uses 7 different topical page rank calculations, none of which has anything to do with the page rank it displays in the tool bar.

Does this mean it’s pretty much useless? Not completely but think of it more as a way to get a first impression of a page at a quick glance. Yes, in most cases a PR 4 link will be stronger than a PR 1 link, particularly if both are on pages that are topically related to the page you are linking to.

When I look at it, I don’t focus very much on the number it displays, instead I use it to make sure the page is indexed by Google. If the bar is grayed out, it’s usually not a good sign. If there is 0 page rank, I usually take a closer look. The page may be rather new and could accumulate some page rank in the future (or may already have some that hasn’t been updated yet on the toolbar).

It’s The Page, Not The Site

Since we’re on the topic, let me clear up a common misconception. Folks get all excited about getting a PR 8 links from big sites. What they fail to realize is that the page rank on the actual page that you’re getting the link from is what counts, not the page rank from the home page.

Often the argument is that if you have a high PR domain name, that PR juice will eventually flow down to the profile page on an obscure forum that you were able to stick a link on. There are a couple of problems with this.

1) The more clicks you are removed from the home page, the harder it will be for your page to every end up getting any link juice at all or even get indexed for that matter. If it takes you more than 4 clicks to get to your profile page from the home page, don’t count on a lot of PR.

2) As these methods become more and more popular, hundreds, if not thousands of other link builders will go and set up a profile page just like you did. This means that any link juice that does trickle down now has to be split between all these new profile pages. Your page will end up getting no more than a little drop of this big jug of PR link juice.

3) Google is pretty good at noticing these spammy links and in the best case scenario will simple ignore those links in their search algorithm. Worst scenario would be that they may punish you for them and not rank you anywhere in the first 100 results.

My advice is never to build a link just for the PR. Instead focus on traffic first. Build links that you now will bring you at least a small stream of traffic and aim for pages that relate to your site when you can.

Variety Is The Spice Of Backlinks

Last but not least, it’s important to get links from a large variety of sites. You don’t want to focus on just high-pr option. To create a natural looking backlink profile, you you want the occasional PR4 or even PR5 links, with a few PR3′s and a bunch of low PR links.

If you stop focusing so much on that little Google page rank bar, this will happen naturally. Instead just go out there and build links in a variety of different ways from social bookmarking and forum posts to article marketing and guest blogging.

Not only will you build a link profile that looks natural, you’ll also see quite a bit of traffic in addition to improving your seo rankings. And that’s what link building is all about.

P.S. Ready to learn more about backlinks? Take a look at my link building program at EasyLinkLove.com

Today I want to briefly share the 3o minutes a day strategy I use to get more traffic to my sites. I recommend you pick one site and implement it there fully before moving on to your other sites.

I’m going to assume that you have at least 30 minutes per day to spend on this. Depending on how fast you write and do the other tasks, it may take you a little more than 30 minutes. If all this seems a bit much, spread it out and take 2 days for each tasks. You’ll still benefit from this approach.

Step 1 – Content Creation

Write a keyword rich blog post that’s at least 250 to 300 words long.  Find a keyword that gets at least a few searches per day but doesn’t have a whole lot of competition.

If you are using wordtracker, look for a keyword that has 30 or less competitors.

Use your keyword in the title and once or twice throughout the content of your post or webpage for your site.  If you have a static website, make sure you also link to this new page with the keyword as part of the anchor text.

If you are using a wordpress to run your site (like I am doing here and on most of my content sites), the software will take care of this and use the title of your post as the link text.

In the beginning it may take you the full 30 minutes to do the keyword research and write the post, but as you get faster, it should only take you 15 to 20 minutes to write.

Step 2 – Link Building

The next step that many people forget about is building links. Spend some time that same day to build at least a few links to your new post or web page. Some things you may want to do are:

• Use social bookmarking sites to bookmark the new page.
• Write an article, submit it to article directories and link in the resource box to your new post.
• Write a guest post and link from it.
• Post a few comments on popular blogs or forums and include a link to your new post or page.
• Invite others to link to it.

This is just a quick overview. I’d love to teach you a lot more about link building over the coming weeks. Take a look at my beginning link building class and my advanced link building program. Each week of these courses I share a new link building strategy with you and give you some simple “homework” tasks. At the end of the course you will not only have a good understanding of effective link building, but also hundreds of quality links pointing to your site, resulting in an increase of traffic, subscribers and customers.