1. Don't Throw Away Your Links
A very common problem for many webmasters is that 70% of their incoming links point to www.yourwebsite.com and 30% of their incoming links point to yourwebsite.com, without the 'www.' part. Search engines think these are 2 completely different pages of your website, and therefore the content on www.yourwebsite.com only gets 70% of the "link juice" it actually deserves. How to fix that? You need to make a 301 Redirect from one page to the other and your problems are gone. Look into the folder with index.htm, index.php or whatever index page your website is using. There should be a .htaccess file - if there isn't one, simply create it with the text editor of your choice. Once you have the .htaccess file, add these lines to it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This will effectively redirect all traffic AND all link juice from yourwebsite.com to www.yourwebsite.com.
2. Deep Linking
Don't spend all your efforts on building links to your homepage (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com). Having lots of links pointing to other pages of your website tells search engines that there is good content to be found all over your website. Pointing all your links to your homepage is a sign for search engines that your website is shallow and doesn't provide as much value to the visitor as it should. It also appears quite unnatural.
3. Secret: A Great Way to Get Free High-PR Links!!!
This is an idea we haven't shared with anyone so far, but our registered members really deserve to know about it. There is a way for you to obtain highly relevant High-PR links for free! How to do that? Take a look at some quality, trusted directories (such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva) and find the category that is closely related to your niche. Click on the websites listed there and you will see that quite many of them are dead!
Now use a query on Google such as "link:www.somedeadwebsite.com" to see who is linking to those websites. Contact the administrators of all these websites that are linking to dead pages and tell them that they have a broken link on their website. In a large majority of cases they will be happy to replace their broken link with a free link to your website. Yes, it's as easy as that!
4. Use Smart Anchor Text
Linking to your website with the words "Click here!" isn't nearly as helpful as linking to it with something related to your niche, e.g. "used car parts" if you are in that particular business. However, you should get the correct natural-looking mixture of the anchor text throughout all of your incoming links! Rule of thumb: use various keyword phrases in 70% of your incoming links, your URL in 20% and various "click here" variations in the remaining 10%.
5. It's Not Just About the Anchor Text
Having said that, it's not all about the anchor text. You need to make sure the text around the links to your website is highly relevant to your website's content as well! This is one of the major pluses of our own in-house article distribution service - Spin Distribute - your article is distributed to hundreds of websites and it serves as a highly relevant context to the links pointing to your website, rendering them much more valuable!
6. How About a Blog?
If the content of your website is pretty much static and you don't really need to update it on a regular basis, then you really should think about adding a blog to your website (e.g. blog.yourwebsite.com). Search engines (yes, especially Google!) love fresh content and blogging is the perfect way of telling Google that something is going on with your website all the time and that it's far from being dead. You don't need to work your ass off with writing blog posts however, two posts a week will do just fine. Take an hour of your time, write 30 short posts with strategic links to parts of your website and you can schedule them for months in advance.
7. Use a Decent Server
We have unforunately learned this the hard way with one of our previous projects. We were using a cheap shared server and with some solid SEO we quickly got 8,000 visitors a day to that website. The server couldn't handle it, so it kept on crashing - and the website was unavailable for 20% of the time. This really annoyed Google and after 5 days it started sending us 300 daily visitors instead of the former 6,000 (we got 2,000 from other sources). So, make sure your servers are easily handling the traffic you're getting!
8. How About Some Quality Links From .edu Sites?
This is not as important for your website's position in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as it used to be a couple of years ago, but it's still a useful approach that will place you ahead of your competition. So, how do you find related .edu websites? You can use Google again - just type in "inurl:.edu your keywords", send a nice friendly message to administrators of those pages and more often than you think you'll get a valuable backlink (disclaimer: you will only get these links if your website is high quality!).
9. Optimize One Keyword Phrase Per Page
It doesn't make much sense to optimize one page of your website for numerous different keyword phrases. It will definitely make the optimization for each of those keyword phrases less effective AND it's really easy to simply add another page to your website to cover another keyword phrase. It's a no-brainer, really. So, instead of one page that shows up on the 3rd page of Google's search results for keyword phrases »used ford carburetors« and »used ford fuel injectors« you can simply create two optimized pages, one for each keyword phrase. These two optimized new pages will probably show up on the 1st page of search engine results.
10. Secret: Turn Off Google's Personalized Search
It can be very useful to be able to see how your website ranks in Google's Result Pages to some random potential visitor who is looking for something related to your niche. To disable Google's personalized search that keeps on serving you results that are tailored especially for you, append "&pws=0" at the end of the URL in the search bar.
11. Patience is a Virtue
Whatever you do, keep in mind that Search Engine Optimization is a long-term investment and you will almost never see any positive effects right away. But with the correct approach and a consistent plan of action (this means you stick to your plan and execute it!) you should be able to see some great results in a month or so. For example, the majority of Spin Distribute users who distributed 2 articles every week, reported very satisfactory results in 1 to 2 months (first position in Google search results, 1500% traffic growth, 2500% income growth).
12. Turn Your Visitors Into Assets
This might be the most important part of making a living with a website and while it's not really a part of SEO, we just can't stress the importance of this part enough. Remember that website we had that went from 8,000 daily visitors to 2,300 in a single day because of our server issues? If we hadn't done our best to satisfy the needs of those visitors and made sure they trusted us enough to give us their email addresses, we would have lost 75% of that website's revenue in one day. What if that happened to you and your family depended on it?
Always keep in mind that you need to make the most of every visitor that comes to your website, because you just might stop getting all those visitors one day and you need to be able to provide your products or services to your existing list of potential customers (leads).
I sincerely wish you all the best in your business,
