Getting people to Voluntarily link back to your site.

A few days ago, I promised to continue the discussion on search engine optimization for network marketing.

Amongst the topics I promised to cover in the ongoing discussion were :

- How we get people to link back on the keywords that we need to rank highly for
- How one can subsequently get into the top 10 results, sometimes in as little as 7 days and
- How I have done it for two real clients in less than an hour.

Getting people to link back to you on your chosen keywords :

This is a extremely short discussion. They simply won’t do it.

Ha ha, why should they? To begin with, they don’t even know what keywords you value and to be truthful, until you do an indepth investigation of the competition and traffic – you don’t even know, so how can they?

Again, let me say, they won’t do it, even if you find the best keywords and ask people kindly from a web page.

But lets assume that I am wrong and 20 people during the year link back to your “Link-Bait” page using the keywords that you were interested in, would this make a difference?

Probably not, for four reasons good reasons that I can think of.

- 1) those links are probably coming to you from sites with a Google Page Rank of between 0 and 3
- 2) twenty of them are too few
- 3) Your keyword backlinking requirements probably won’t be the same? Oops, probably not.
- 4) Some, if not many of those links will come from blogs which by default contain the rel=nofollow tag

The nofollow tag gives you no link love with the search engines – at all. So, how much did those 20 annual backlinks really actually matter ? Not much.

The short point of this long story, is that you will really need to get pro-active and create those backlinks yourself.

The wonderful girls and guys over at Google say that if you create wonderful content people will naturally link back to it. I postulate that people are too busy re-washing their clean laundry and taking their cute dog for a walk to link back to you, so unless you think you have 3-4 years to wait, this is one time when you really don’t want listen to Google’s best practices advice.

You have four pretty obvious options to take and a few that are not so obvious.

To get these backlinks, you can …

1) Write and then syndicate quality articles about the need that your network marketing solution fills
( Try really hard not to be commercial – tease the user about solving some common problem and let the user click on your resource box to find out more ) Realistically you can get from 0 to 200 backlinks from each syndicated article.

2) Find related nofollow blogs and comment intelligently in them, and put your keywords in as your name. Note, do not put a link in your comment, that will increase the possibility of it being labeled as spam.
( Fully 60% of your comments may get rejected anyway, but the remaining 40% represent real links that help you )

3) Do an seo optimized Press release, which means you are going to pay $200 or more just for the release. How powerful it can be depends on a few factors but you can get both seo benefit and immediate traffic.

4) Forums, forums and more related ontopic forums. Become a real person in the forums first, answering and contributing to the forum. After a short while, put your link with your chosen keywords in your personal forum signature and continue being a good citizen of the forum.

Forums are powerful because some can send in excess of 500 people back to your site in a matter of days.

Most forums give you stronger immediate traffic benefit than seo benefit but pick and choose wisely and you may get both.

I have personally neglected this last forum option for no particular good reason that I can think of now, but my son has successfully hustled over 200 people in just a few hours from Google forums.

Note that these are all options that you can take control and do for yourself.
Creating more backlinks on your key terms puts your website higher in the search engine results for the exact term that you need. You will have to have that term in the title of the page that you want to be found for and your best bet is to use free blog software like wordpress instead of a free blogger account or a standard website.

Getting 200 to 500 qualified visitors daily from Google, Yahoo and MSN is the goal of most smaller websites.

It is achievable, but the build it and they will come philosophy will no longer achieve this. Billions of existing website pages means that mathematically, “Field of dreams” online is impossible. You must put the pennies in the bank today for the Gold Bullion to arrive tomorrow.

Options that were are not so obvious
I also mentioned that there were a few options which weren’t so obvious. I won’t go into huge detail here but suffice to say, they involve understanding some math.

Not all sites are regarded equally by Google, Yahoo or MSN. Some sites have credibility which is quite literally 1 million to 10 million times more powerful than our newly hatched pet project of last week.

Getting 20-30 keyword optimized backlinks from critical web2.0 sites like these that do NOT use the nofollow tag can be the equivalent of getting 1,000 backlinks from sites ranked as page Rank 1.

If you know how to do this, some would call it the low hanging fruit.

So, thats it for today, later this week, we will continue with the other two topics

- How one can subsequently get into the top 10 results, sometimes in as little as 7 days and
- How I have done it for two real clients in less than an hour.

Stay Tuned …