Most people build their link building strategies around blog and forum postings. This makes sense and is certainly part of our plans as well. However, it stands to reason that Google also knows that most marketers who are using SEO tactics to rank their sites are doing this, and it makes sense that they will be looking for a much more diverse backlink pattern to award the highest rankings to.

With that in mind, I’m going to share the top 5 non-forum/blog backlink sources.

1. Squidoo Lists

Squidoo.com is a great place to get links back to your site. Type the following into a Google search:

“add+to+this+list”+site:squidoo.com

You will be presented with a huge list of Squidoo lenses where you can add your site, with custom anchor text. Many of these have very high PageRank as well!

For extra credit, append +”keyword phrase” onto the end of this query, and you can target your links for relevance. For example, if you were trying to rank a fitness site you could type:

“add+to+this+list”+”fitness”+site:squidoo.com

2. Web 2.0 Profiles

Many Web 2.0 sites that allow you to create profiles and interact with others provide high PageRank, “do follow” links to the website listed in your profile. Some examples include www.linkedin.com, www.flickr.com, www.twibs.com, and www.zoominfo.com.

When creating profiles on these sites (which you could do for every niche you’re in) you’re able to list your website, which becomes a high quality backlink to your site.

3. Article Marketing for Links

Most marketers are familiar with writing articles to get traffic, but we write most of our articles for backlinks. If you’ve put a link to your site within the article (and let’s certainly hope you’re doing that!), every article that gets posted becomes a backlink (or even 2 or 3). The more articles that get posted, the more links you can build.

To get started, you simply have to write the article and submit it to a few article directories. I recommend: www.Ezinearticles.com, www.goarticles.com, and www.articledashboard.com.

There is absolutely no problem or penalty with submitting the same article to all three places (submit to Ezinearticles first, though, as they are the strictest with regard to unique content), and if you are accepted by all three and have 2 links in each article, your article will result in 6 high quality backlinks!

4. Relevant Lists and Resource Directories

There are many websites that function as a resource for people interested in a particular topic. For example, one site may maintain a list of top weight loss sites to visit. A backlink from pages like these can provide high quality, highly relevant backlinks. The relevance of backlinks is being talked about much more by Google lately, and it is assumed that relevance will play a larger role in site ranking in the near future.

The trick is to find these sites quickly and efficiently. We’ve found the following Google search queries to work very well:

“Keyword phrase” + “add url”

“Keyword phrase” + “add site”

“Keyword phrase” +  “add website”

For example, if you’re looking to build backlinks to a fitness-related site, you can search for:

“fitness” + “add url”

Google will return a huge list of sites that will allow you to add your web site, creating a backlink to your site.

One thing to watch out for is that many of the sites you’ll come across will ask for a reciprocal link (i.e., we’ll link to you if you link to us). These should be avoided. It’s worth the effort to sift through these sites to find ones where you can add your link without having to place a reciprocal link on your site, because these links are less valuable for SEO purposes.

Make sure to keep a list or database of all of these great link building sites/resources that you find, so you don’t have to search for them again the next time!

5. Easy EDU Links

I’ve saved my favorite and most unique tip for last. It’s commonly accepted knowledge that .EDU and .GOV backlinks are valued very highly when Google decides on your search rank position. Some people also know the “trick” to finding blogs and forums on .EDU domains, where they can leave useful comments that link back to their sites. If you don’t, here’s a great Google query to find .EDU blogs:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in”

We’re after something more valuable, though. How about a whole page on an .EDU domain where you can put an article or a whole blog post, as opposed to just a comment? All you need is a willing college student!

At many schools, college students are given web space they can use for anything they like. Of course, this web space is hosted on the .EDU domain. All we need to do is to get this college student to allow us to post our material if they like it. But how do you go about finding these students?

If you really think about it, you can’t possibly be many degrees of separation away from knowing someone who’s in college right now. Think about your circle of friends and family, and branch out from there. For example, even though I’m “older” (I have teenage children… sigh), I still have 3 cousins that are attending college right now. If I expand my reach further, friends of my parents have children in college. I’m also getting to the age where my friends are starting to have kids in college. In short, I can’t throw a rock into my personal network without hitting a college student!

All you have to do is approach these students in your network and ask for their help, or give them something in exchange, for the privilege of putting some content on their site. It’s as simple as that.

I hope these tips help you improve your search engine rankings and make you a more successful Internet Marketer!

Those of us that are interested in increasing the amount of traffic that we get to certain areas online are all familiar with the concepts of social networking, social bookmarking, and even URL submission and link exchange. It is not very often, however, that we hear about Yahoo Answers being an effective place to generate traffic. This online community focuses on asking and answering questions from people all over the world! It would be ridiculous not to take advantage of this! The following lists the 10 simple steps to get free traffic from Yahoo Answers.

1)  The first thing that you should consider when attempting to use Yahoo Answers for increasing the amount of traffic for your website is the topic for which those things surround. Let’s say that you are selling products that assist individuals in building an email list. Well, when seeking out questions to answer, you will want to focus on categories that house “email list”, “opt-in list”, “list building”, “SEO”, “marketing”, and similar terms. In order to drive traffic to your website, or other online endeavor, it is essential to keep everything on topic. Eventually, people will notice you and what you have to offer.

2)  It is important to understand that when you answer a question on Yahoo Answers, you must have a fairly decent knowledge of the topic that you are responding to. Here, we go back to tip number one – that is answering only those questions that are related to the area online where you want to drive traffic. Now, for tip number two, you will want to have some valuable knowledge to share with the individual that is asking the question. It is important to display your overall expertise, and professionalism when responding. You will want to bring something “unique” to the topic. This will help to brand you as an “expert” in your field.

3)  Now, when trying to drive traffic to your website, it is absolutely essential that you are “seen”. The best spot that you can be in when it comes to responding on Yahoo Answers is the very FIRST spot! That’s right – you need to be the very first person to respond! This ensures that everyone that looks at the question and responds, has to see your answer. As a result, you may draw the interest of these individuals.

4)  When answering on Yahoo, always use a relevant website link in the source box. While you can put more than one link in the source box, you should only aim to put one in each source box. In order to increase your search engine ranking, as well as the amount of traffic that swarms your website, you will want to make certain that the link that you include in the source box is somehow related to the website and other online area where you want to drive traffic.

5)  The next way that you can drive traffic to your online destination is to ensure that you invite all of your friends to join your network on Yahoo Answers. For each close friend that joins, politely ask them to provide you with addresses of their friends, or ask them to refer other individuals to your Yahoo Answers network. When they do this, offer some sort of incentive – a free report, a free article, or even a free eBook – the choice is yours!

6)  There is a point system that Yahoo Answers operates on. Your goal in all of this is to acquire as many points as possible. Yahoo gives you 2 points for answering and 10 points if voted as the “Best Answer.” If you are sitting at a high average as far as points, you will soon discover that more and more internet users find you to be quite reliable. They may even mark you as the “Best Answer” if they see that you have a high point set and a good reputation on the Yahoo Answers website. Remember, perception is reality. If they perceive you as an expert, then in the virtual world, you ARE an expert.

7)  Now, another important thing that you can do to drive intense traffic to your website is to ask questions. It currently costs 5 points to do this, but if you are stumped on the next article or blog that you are planning to do, this is a great way to drive traffic.

8)  When you ask questions on Yahoo Answers, you may find that you benefit by requesting assistance from a certain number of individuals in regards to your website. You will want to do it in a non-promotional manner, though. Let’s say that you have a website that focuses on providing pet products. Take the link to your online store, and then find a similar store online. Ask a question like “Which store do you find more appealing?” If your store wins, you may just win some traffic that may make a purchase! This little trick can drive massive traffic to your website!

9)  Do you run an article marketing campaign? How about a blog? Yahoo Answers can be extremely beneficial when it comes to developing ideas to write about. You have to remember that these are legitimate questions, and if they are asking them on Yahoo, then they are probably asking them within the search field of search engines as well. Create an article, or blog, and post it. Come back to the question, answer it, and then link to the blog that you just wrote for further information. This is a really tactful way of promoting your page without seeming as if you are spamming the system.

10)  If you want to save time, you can create a Yahoo swipe file of previously answered questions so that you can cut and paste it into your response. Make sure to modify the your answers whenever necessary so that the person posting the question believes you have answered it exclusively for them. Be careful not to simply copy and paste the same answer repeatedly. Every question is unique and you need to ensure that you modify your answer to tailor the question.

As you can see here, there are many different ways that you can increase your traffic with Yahoo Answers. If you follow the steps contained here, you are likely to see a large boost in your ranking in search engines, as well as total unique visits per day!

Getting people who matter to see one’s website is a difficult undertaking if he tries to consider the fact that there are rivals everywhere waiting to pin him down.  The immensity of the internet as well as the affiliate marketing world has given birth to the fierce competition between affiliate marketers, each of whom has his own great product to offer.  With all the websites piling on top of each other, how would one be able to stand out?  The seven best ways to drive laser-targeted traffic to one’s own website would help those who are bent on sticking it out with this business wherever it is bound to take them.

The first step in driving traffic to one’s website is by relying on search engines and what they can do for the affiliate marketer concerned.  Because they are popular for driving free targeted traffic, they should not be ignored by all means.  Having top search engine rankings is vital in building popularity links, and the use of the right keywords is important in attaining this goal.  Once a website is on top of the list, it is easily accessible to anyone who wants to see it for himself.

The second way in driving traffic to one’s website is by contacting other webmasters for a possible link exchange partnership.  Locating websites that are related to one’s own website is the primary task.  Once there, he should be able to establish communication by personalizing everything as much as possible.  It is then possible to make reciprocal link exchanges between webmasters whichever way the affiliate marketer prefers.

The third way is through writing one’s own articles.  This is an effective way in promoting a website, because good content that are appreciated by readers will lead them to visit the writer’s very own website out of sheer interest.

The fourth way is through joint venture marketing.  This is one of the most effective ways of promoting a product or a service.  Having a partner through ad swap or link exchange is beneficial to both parties as it allows them to reach a wide customer base in a short amount of time.

The fifth is through joining affiliate programs.  Having affiliates to do the work means allowing them to bring tons of traffic to a website.  Skyrocketing sales would be realized as a result, and both the affiliate and the website owner will benefit from the situation.

The sixth is by having a list of subscribers that one can refer to every so often, because they are those which would prove to be valuable assets for the marketer concerned.  The use of autoresponders and personalized newsletters is one way of keeping track of them all, and holding on to them by letting them know about new products and services is an essential task that should be done by the affiliate marketer concerned.

The seventh is by knowing one’s market through and through.  It is important for traffic to be targeted to those who might have a special interest in the theme or topic of one’s website.  This way, a solid customer base is going to be created.  Once a potential customer shows an interest in a particular website by paying it a visit, one must not waste time in trying to show him that his effort is worth it.

Traffic generating strategies are important in trying to make one’s affiliate marketing career inch forward.  It is always advantageous to plan one’s moves in any business that he might undertake.  This is particularly so in affiliate marketing.  If one knows how to get people to see what he has to offer, then he is on the right track.

Although affiliate marketing is touted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it is not as easy as it sounds. The wise affiliate marketer plans every action and executes it the best way he can. He should also maximize the potential to earn by utilizing the right tools necessary for a successful Affiliate Marketing business. We have consulted some of the most successful affiliate marketers in the business and below are the top three necessary tools for a successful affiliate marketing business.

Important Tool #1: Your Own Website

The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.

The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.

Important Tool #2: Incentives

Competition is extremely tight in the internet world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free softwares, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.

Important Tool #3: Link Popularity

The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important entities in the internet world. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign.

One of the best ways to do this – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles, with your website’s link at the resource box, to e-zines and free article sites. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free, just include a link back to your site. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick it up and post it.

These are but three of the many tools that an affiliate marketer can use to maximize earning potential. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination, creativity, resourcefulness and determination. You can always explore other ideas and adapt other strategies, which you think might help you become a high rolling affiliate marketer.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or OpenOffice.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.

The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is crucial in search engine optimization.

Landing pages are simply web pages where visitors are directed to whenever they click a result in a web search or whenever they click a web ad.  For affiliate marketing, landing pages would refer to the web page where you, as a merchant, would want your potential customer to be directed after clicking your ad on your affiliate’s website.  Landing pages are, at most times, nothing really different from other web pages in a particular website, especially if the said website is an e-commerce site.  Some online businessmen would even use the homepage of their websites as the landing page for their ads.  Are these businessmen making a big mistake?  Or should you follow their method in creating landing pages for their ads?

Well, you can always follow what most online retailers do, directing their potential customers to the homepages of their websites.  But if you want to achieve something more from your online business, and if you want to earn a lot of profits, you better create a special landing page for your web ads.  Why?  Here are a few reasons why you need to use landing pages for your web ads.  And take note, it would do you a lot better if you create a great landing page than a so-so one.

Reason no. 1: It is the only way you earn conversions in an affiliate marketing program.

There are a variety of affiliate marketing programs today, but most of these programs let the merchant pay the affiliate in a pay per click basis.  Basically, all you have to do is sign up with the program and submit your ad.  The program owner would then distribute your ad to various affiliates who would then place your ad on their websites.  Whenever your ad is clicked, a visitor would be directed to your landing page and you would have to pay the affiliate for his service.

As a merchant, you earn in an affiliate program through conversions—that is whenever a visitor that is directed to your site actually buys a product on your site.  Without these conversions, you actually earn nothing from the program.  Also, the more visitors that your affiliates have directed to your site, the larger would your expense be.  And the only way that you can recover from these expenses is through conversions.

Now, you sure won’t get any conversion if you have posted an ad on your affiliate’s site without an actual landing page for the potential customer to be redirected into.  It’s just like advertising a product without actually having a store to sell your product.  Your advertisement may be enticing enough to encourage people to purchase a product, but without the landing page, how will they know how to purchase the product

It is therefore important to have landing pages for your ads because it is the only way for you to earn something in an affiliate program.  Without landing pages, all you do is spend money paying your affiliates without actually getting anything in return.

Reason no. 2: Other web pages may just not be enough.

Many people make the mistake of making their website’s homepage as the landing page for their ads.  The same is true for those who make use of other pages like a “contact us” page or a product page.  Homepages are often designed to serve multiple users and contains a lot of links to other pages or to other websites.  The same is with the other two pages mentioned.  If you want to be successful in an affiliate program, we’re sure that you don’t want your landing page to cater to the needs of various people, most of which may not be really interested with your product.

When choosing a landing page, you must always have the customer directed into that page in mind.  Therefore, your landing page must be relevant to the keywords and the contents you placed on your ad.  It is also important that the landing page can induce your visitor to take action—that is to purchase your product or at least provide leads for potential customers.

Final Word

You probably entered into an affiliate marketing program with these things in mind: to save on advertising expenses and to gain more profit.  But if you get into an affiliate marketing program without actually having a landing page, you’ll end up paying too much without getting anything in return.  So if you still don’t have a landing page for your ads, you better start creating one now.  And don’t get us wrong; it isn’t enough for you to have just a landing page—it should be a great landing page!

1. Get a number of related PLR articles and combine them to form an eBook, report, or autoresponder e-course that you can offer as a free bonus when people join your list or newsletter.

2. Combine PLR material to form bonus products that you can add to your own product or an affiliate product.

3. Re-written PLR articles can make excellent content for your website. The research has already been done and if the original PLR content is readable then making 30% of the material unique should not be all that time consuming or difficult.

4. Blog posts are another excellent way to use PLR. Hosted Web 2.0 properties such as Wordpress are easy to use and by utilizing your PLR on these types of sites, you can strategically place contextual links in the content to point back to your money sites. Also, PLR content can be used as blog posts on your own hosted blogs. It makes a great “tips of the day” section.

5. Sell your re-written PLR to other internet entrepreneurs. You can do this through membership sites, from a non-membership salespage, or though an affiliate program such as PayDotCom.

6. Written PLR content such as articles and eBooks convert readily into audio. Then the audio can be used as a podcast and distributed widely for great backlinks. You can also turn a series of podcasts into an audio course in order to sell it.

7. PLR content makes great physical items. Take the eBook that you made previously and turn it into a physical book by using print-on-demand services now readily available. Another less-used physical product is to produce a CD/DVD version of your book. These can then be sold at a higher price due to the fact that physical items are perceived to have more value than digital products. You can also then sell the CD/DVD on E-bay.

8. If you have a newsletter, re-written PLR that shows your style and flair can be used to help develop a growing relationship with your readers. Just make sure that the edited PLR sounds like you and this will go over well.

9. Print mailings are another rarely-used way to get the most out of PLR. A lot of online marketers forget that direct mailing can have a huge impact on their internet marketing business. Bundle up that PLR that you have re-written into those reports and mail it to your list of postal mailing addresses. This can be done fairly cheaply if you use bulk mailing with cheaper rates.

Until next time.

- Keep a unique theme for a website and publish information that’s original and of interest to many. Make sure the content of your website is delivered in a manner that’s attractive and makes viewers want to read more, keeps them entertained and makes them respond. You can include a quiz or an entertaining “amazing facts” trivia section to attract viewers.

- Make sure the website’s content is updated at regular intervals and viewers are informed of the intervals in which they can revisit to get new information. For instance if your website’s updated every week, add a line to inform viewers to visit again the next week to read about whatever you’re planning to add. Some search engines crawl on the basis of frequency of site updates.

- Search Engine Optimization – SEO has gained importance in the last few years. Determine your key words and make sure your website content and metatags have these keywords. Metatags are not usually seen by visitors; they are codes recognized by search engines. It has also been found that keyword phrases are more effective than single keywords. For instance, it’s better to use the keyword phrase “How to make eggless cakes” instead of just “eggless cakes”.

- Link building is another useful technique in bringing in traffic where you exchange links with other websites or place your website’s link at prominent sites that get a lot of traffic. You could write articles, submit them to articles directories and give a footnote with the link to your website. This is very effective because not only does it increase website traffic, it also gets people interested enough in your work to make them repeat visitors. Take part in forums and add your website link as a signature line.

- Build a site map in your website. Search engines give preference to sites with site maps. These are also very helpful to visitors.

- Keep your website’s design simple and easy to use. Offer options of html pages if your website’s designed in flash since html is easier to use when the network connection’s poor.

- Submit your website to search engine lists and make sure it’s indexed properly. Get to know all popular search engines and submit your websites. There are many free directories to which you could submit details of your websites. If you have a specific theme, submit to niche directories. These are frequented by people who want a specific website and not just a keyword specific search.

The above tips should help generate a significant volume of clicks to your website. Just maintain your site carefully and update regularly so that you retain all these visitors to get repeated hits.