Dominating SERPS

January 2nd, 2009 by Scot, under Link Building. No Comments

When you’re marketing your product, whatever that may be, it’s important to rank highly in the SERPS for obvious reasons.

Having a #1 ranking vs #2 ranking for whatever your keyword may be could be  the difference in thousands of dollars of profit every month. A recent Cornell study paints an interesting picture about engine rankings.

As you can see the #1 result gets over 40% more click-through than the #2, and it drops significantly from there. This is the easiest way to improve your revenues… Since you have the possibility to double your traffic/income by putting the little extra effort it takes in to beating out the top dog.

Most People Stop at One
But what if you were not only ranked #1, but you dominated the first page of Google with every, or nearly every result leading back some way to your website? You would then be not only taking the first 50% of traffic by being #1, but also the next 15, next 5, etc. for every result.

For instance… search for “Problogger” and see what you find. Darren has done an outstanding job of using social media to dominate the first page with all sites that lead back to him. Try Shoemoney.

Although those two are both fairly specific inquiries, you can see how social media can really direct organic (free) targeted traffic to your landing pages from a multitude of outlets.

I’ve been doing some work building links for specific pages on my blog one being the Free Landing Page Templates post I did a few weeks back. Right now my post on Digg is just barely outranking the actual website (probably to do with this blog being relatively new).

I outsourced a few hundred blog comments to the page to get it indexed fairly quickly (Pinging w/in Wordpress does a great job of this as it is but I wanted to give it a bit more juice), used OnlyWire to post the story to most of the major bookmarking sites, and also put about 100 links from other smaller bookmarking pages. Within 2 days I was ranked #10/11 right behind landingpagetemplates.net and I will continue to build this particular page to the top of the SERPS. Digg has brought me roughly 100 organic visitors (about 25% of my traffic for this keyword this month) just from being ranked right below me.

So, go out and get the most social real estate allowed for your keywords. Take advantage of Wordpress.com, Edublogs, Hubpages, Squidoo, etc. The usual. If it’s free why not use it to put more outlets to your landing page in the SERPS? Don’t put the hope of all of your organic traffic in one basket.

Free .EDU & .GOV Backlinks

November 19th, 2008 by Scot, under Link Building. 30 Comments

Obtaining high-quality backlinks is obviously the undisputed king in any SEO campaign. You need targeted backlinks with good anchors to really drive your rankings in the SERPS.

Everyone knows about spamming around do-follow blog comments on Wordpress blogs but what about getting links on coveted EDU or GOV domains?

EDU and GOV links have authority. The problem with gaining backlinks on GOV and EDU domains is the work it involves and is generally impossible to search out any webmaster on those domains for a link exchange opportunity.

Fortunately there are tons of EDU and GOV domains out there– we just need to find them, and Google makes this process faily simple.

Running the Google command site:.gov or site:.edu will tell Google to only show results from those two type of domain extensions. So, if I wanted to find Wordpress blogs on .edu or .gov URL’s I would run something like site:.gov wp-admin or site:.edu wp-admin. That will give you a few thousands Wordpress blogs to check out, but also try site:.edu blog or site:.gov blog or site:.edu comment.php, etc. for other blogs that may have comment forms enabled. Those searches bring up a few million results.

Ever wonder how blackhatters compete on the most competitive terms in the world (like Viagra)? EDU backlinks of course! (And lots of other techniques)

So I’ve located a blog on the Harvard school site, actually a student blog hosted by Wordpress MU. Wordpress MU is great and I will discuss it further in a later post but regardless I have successfully placed a link on an EDU domain — Harvard Law at that. (and a note to everyone, thay have the MU blog creation turned off unless you own a Harvard domain e-mail address.)

And that concludes this tutorial. Getting quality EDU and GOV backlinks just takes a little bit of imagination, and with patience you will soon get in to the groove. It may take a bit of frustration starting out but once you hit the jackpot you’ll be thankful you took the time!