relevant or not they dont want to look like a directory to their customers. TIP If you decide to manually look for link partners one way of rankmaniac 2012 assessing a sites importance is to look at their rankmaniac 2012 Google PageRank PR. PR is how Google scores importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. Any site with a PR of 4 or above is generally considered a worthy link partner. By downloading rankmaniac 2012 the Google Toolbar from httptoolbar.google.com you can view the PR of any site you visit. How long will it take A long time Its impossible to say how much time youll need to spend generating links but you can be sure itll be a while no matter which method of link generation you use. You just have to rankmaniac 2012 keep at it until you have achieved a high ranking. Even then youll still need to dedicate some ongoing time to the task rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 otherwise your ranking will drop. Is it possible to generate links too fast Yes its possible. But using the methods outlined above its extremely unlikely. The search engines dont like to see links generated too fast. For instance if you had 100 links to your site yesterday but you have 2100 today the search engines will assume youve done something a little shady and sandbox your links i.e. delay their full impact until it establishes their validity. You may even be penalized more harshly than this. Thats why its not a good idea to set up multiple independent websites all containing dozens of links back to your main site. This would get you lots of links very quickly but it might also see you blacklisted Paying an SEO company to generate links for you Generating links takes a long time and involves rankmaniac 2012 a lot of work. Like any other form of promotion it requires investment either in time or money. If you decide to outsource the task of generating links be careful. There are some companies which generate links to a domain of their own and pass the rankmaniac 2012 value of these links on to your site. This does NOT result in a permanent increase in the ranking of your site. These companies charge a monthly fee and rankmaniac 2012 so long as you pay the fee your site may rank highly. But as soon as you stop paying their fee e.g. you find another SEO company that you prefer rankmaniac 2012 your site's ranking will drop back to where it was when you started out. Effectively rankmaniac 2012 they hold you to ransom. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 35 Step 5 Generate links back to your site 35 Don't get caught out When you're researching SEO companies to generate links for you ALWAYS ask them how they will do it. If they can't or won't tell you DO NOT engage them. If they tell you but you are unable to completely understand DO NOT engage them there are no link generation methods rankmaniac 2012 which are too complex for the layperson to understand when explained properly. Also always be clear in your own mind on exactly what you're rankmaniac 2012 paying for. Remember that there are two parts to obtaining a high ranking optimizing your site and generating links back to your site. Always get your SEO company to explain exactly which parts they will do for you and how they plan to do it. Chapter Summary Generally speaking rankmaniac 2012 the more links you have back to your site the higher your ranking will be. Some links are better than others. Dont use autolinkgeneration software Dont set up websites simply to host links to your main site Add your site to DMOZ Yahoo Directories Check where your competitors links are coming from Write and submit articles for Internet publication Submit your site to local and industry directories Look for link partners but dont spend too much time on it Link generation takes a long time no matter how you do it SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 36 Step 6 Monitor your progress 36 Step 6 Monitor your progress Now that rankmaniac 2012 youve done the lions share of the hard work you can sit back and observe the results of your handiwork. Its very important that you monitor your progress. Keep an eye on how many links youre generating where theyre coming from and the overall impact on your ranking. Monitor how many links youre generating Its important to monitor how many links youre generating because you can crossreference that information against improvements in ranking to estimate how much effort your SEO push is going to take. e.g. If you generate 300 links and your site goes from number 150 to number 15 you know that you should be rankmaniac 2012 topping the rankings before too long. If on the other hand your ranking has only marginally increased you know you need to work a lot harder. You can monitor how many rankmaniac 2012 links youre generating in a number of ways Search Google for www.yourdomainname.com. Google will then display a screen which says Google can show you the following information for this URL At
the bottom of the list of option is Find web pages that contain the term www.yourdomainname.com. rankmaniac 2012 Click on this option. Google will display all the pages it can find that have www.yourdomainname.com on one of their pages. Normally this indicates a link to your site. TIP Bookmark the search results page so you can perform this search quickly and easily as you will probably find yourself doing it quite often. Go to httpwww.marketleap.compublinkpop and type in your domain name. This tool itemizes your links by search engine i.e. tells you how many links each search engine has found and also provides graphical trends. Go to httpwww.alexa.com and type in your domain name then click Sites Linking in from the left of the page. TIP Alexa can also be used to track your ranking metrics. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 37 Step 6 Monitor your progress 37 TIP Youll notice that each of these tools return different figures. Dont worry about this. Just pick a tool and stick with it this way youre always comparing apples with apples. Monitor whos linking to your site Always keep track of whos linking to your site. Apart from simply being interesting it will give you some idea of who is interested in your site and your material you can assess their importance PR and also rankmaniac 2012 more accurately target their needs with future link generation tactics. Probably the easiest way to track whos linking to your site is to set up a Google Monitor at httpwww.google.comalerts. Google alerts notify you when your URL has been published on a web page. Google doesn't pick them all
up but it picks up a lot. TIP Whenever you receive an alert you can visit the page to make sure
the article in unchanged and the link back to your site is functioning. Monitor your ranking Obviously
you should be monitoring your ranking to ensure that your hard rankmaniac 2012 work is not wasted and to adapt your SEO and link generation strategy as needed. Manually You can check your ranking manually simply by doing a search for your keyword at the appropriate search engine. TIP If you prefer to check manually make sure you bookmark the search results page as youll probably find yourself performing this search fairly frequently. Dont rankmaniac 2012 perform it too frequently though as this can impact the perceived desirability of your keywords and it is argued that Google takes exception to repeated searches of this type. Automatically You can check all the major search engines AOL Google HotBot MSN Netscape YahooFastAltaVista at once using MarketLeaps verification tool httpwww.marketleap.comverifydefault.htm. NOTE This tool returns a page number e.g. it will tell you your site appears on page 2 of Yahoo. There are plenty of other tools out there that you can use to monitor your ranking such as CleverStats Free Monitor for rankmaniac 2012 Google see httpwww.cleverstat.comgooglemonitor query.htm. Shop around until you find the tool that suits you best. The important thing to SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 38 Step 6 Monitor your progress 38 remember is that you dont have to pay anything for a rank monitoring tool as there are plenty of free ones on offer. Chapter Summary Monitor how many links you have and crossreference that information against improvements in ranking to estimate how much effort your SEO push is going to take. Monitor who is linking to your rankmaniac 2012 site to more accurately adapt future link rankmaniac 2012 generation tactics. Monitor your ranking and adapt your SEO and link generation strategy as needed. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 39 Conclusion 39 Conclusion Search Engine Optimization is not a black art its a science. There are defined rules rankmaniac 2012 and proven methodologies. And although theres a lot more to it than can be contained in a book of this size you shouldnt need any more than what youve just read to obtain a high ranking in rankmaniac 2012 the search engines. But theres no denying that its hard work and takes a long time. Whatever you do dont rush into it. Make sure you understand the fundamentals then take some time to plan your approach. In other words SEO strategy must be part of your rankmaniac 2012 marketing plan rankmaniac 2012 alongside traditional promotional activities such as print radio and TV. Just as importantly it must be part of your marketing budget. Dont fall into the trap of thinking that the search engines are free advertising. Theyre not Companies like Google and Yahoo may not accept payment for a high ranking but that doesnt mean it comes for rankmaniac 2012 free. Someone has to do the work to get you there. Whether you spend the time to do it yourself or you engage an expert to do it for you SEO requires a serious investment. rankmaniac 2012 But the spoils are well worth it. Research suggests that being number 1 in Google means twice as much traffic as being number 2. Imagine how much difference it would make to your web traffic SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 40 F