In terms of these requirements, blog networks may just be the perfect link-building tool. In this article, I explain what blog networks are, how they work and what their benefits and drawbacks tend to be.

Note: Among the Web2Mayhem videos, there’s also a brief explanation of blog networks.

What is a Blog Network?

As the name implies, it’s a network of blogs. These blogs are all connected to one central hub, your “blog network provider”, if you will. This is usually a fairly expensive paid service that you need to sign up for (more on that, later).

What the blog network does for you is that it allows you to publish articles to lots and lots of blogs.

It usually goes like this: You log in and submit a new article, after picking an appropriate category, entering some tags and inserting a few links into the article body. This article is then sent out to and published on lots of blogs that match the subject of your article (i.e. a health-related article is posted to health-related blogs).

Using a blog network for link building is a bit like article marketing using free article directories, then. Except that it’s way better.

Benefits of Blog Networks

Here are the major advantages that blog networks offer over other kinds of link-building and article marketing:

• Full Control Over Anchor Texts
  You get to choose the desired anchor text and link location and you can also set up different variations of the anchor text (using spinning syntax) to make your link profile look more natural.
• Fewer Restrictions
  Many article directories are very strict about what kind of content they allow. They also usually don’t let you place links within the article body and are restrictive about what you’re allowed to put in your author box, where links are allowed. On blog networks, there are also rules about what you are allowed to post, but it’s much easier to “get away” with salesy content and there are generally fewer restrictions.
• More Links
  Submit your article to an article directory and you get one, maybe two links from the resource box. Submit an article to a blog network and you will see your article published to dozens, if not hundreds of sites, receiving new backlinks every time.

The Receiving End

You might be wondering where all those blogs in the network are coming from. The answer is simple: Each blog network allows you to “plug in” your own sites as well, to receive content from others.

The benefit of doing this is that the sites you plug into the network will then have lots of new content posted to them, all of it relevant to the subject of the sites. In other words, it’s a form of auto-blogging. Of course, those posts contain links to other people’s sites, but you can still monetize the surroundings of the post contents (with AdSense, banners,…). This way, you can conceivably set up a few dozen auto-blogs that will eventually generate some passive income thanks to the constant influx of fresh content.

Downsides of this System?

There can be a few drawbacks to blog networks, but this depends greatly on the network in question. For example, poor moderation and quality control can lead to a network being spammed by very low-quality content with links to porn-sites, viagra-spam etc. This makes the network as a whole suffer, since the auto-blogging end of it only works as long as the content is decent.

Conversely, the quality of the backlinks can suffer if there is poor moderation going on. Links from a bunch of sites that have been flooded and bogged down with spam will likely not help your sites at all (especially if the sites get de-indexed because of the spam).

In short: For a good blog network, good moderation is crucial.

In Conclusion

Blog networks provide a very powerful way to build backlinks and as long as the quality of the network is good, this is definitely a top-notch SEO tool to make use of.

Cheers,

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Split-testing, sometimes also called A/B testing, is the process of testing two or more variations of a webpage against each other in order to determine which one performs better. The goal of split testing is simply to find out how to structure your page so that you can get more clicks, more conversions, more sign-ups or whatever else may be the purpose of the site.

Read on for to learn how and what to test.

How Split Testing Works

Lets begin with a very simple example: We take a hypothetical campaign where we try to get people to sign up to a mailing-list. To run an A/B test, we create two different versions of our squeeze page, one with a blue colour-scheme and the other with a pink colour-scheme.

We will now send our traffic either to a page that serves up one version of the page or the other via some type of script or we will send the to a script that will redirect to one variation of the page or the other. There are different ways to accomplish this on a technical level, but whatever the solution, the result is that 50% of our visitors get to see the pink-themed page and 50% get to see the blue-themed page.

Now, we want to find out which version of our squeeze page gets more sign-ups. To do this, there are again several possibilities, but it always comes down to tracking the source of all our sign-ups or conversions.

Your auto-responder system will almost certainly feature some kind of tracking for this purpose. If you’re measuring click-throughs (to a sales-page or offer), you can track the conversion rates with a tracking system like Tracking202 or similar. You can also set up two separate redirects, one for each of the page-variations, but both pointing to the same sales/offer-page, to see which one of the redirects is used more often.

Again, there’s no shortage of tracking options, but it all comes down to this: Split your traffic evenly between two variations of a page and keep track of which one gets more clicks, sign-ups, sales or whatever it is you’re after.

–

What to Test

There are three basic rules to follow when doing split-testing:

1. Test only one variable at a time
   If you change several things on a page and get better conversions as a result, you won’t know what exactly caused the increase in conversions. Was it the new font? The different headline? The new pictures? The only way to know for sure is to only change one thing at a time.
   –
2. Test big differences first
   Don’t test tiny details as they will rarely make a difference (e.g. exclamation mark vs. period in the headline). Test large, significant variations first.
   –
3. Keep testing
   Test two variations of a page against each other. When you’ve found the winner, make another variation of that page and test it again. Repeat this process until no change you can think of still produces better conversions. The worst thing you can do in online marketing is not to test. The second worst is to stop testing to early.

Here are some examples of what you can test:

• Text vs. Video
  Have a text-based squeeze-page and test that against one where you read the text and record a slide-show or some other type of video. You could also test video vs. video and text.
  –
• Long vs. Short
  This goes for text as well as video: Test a long, extensive sales-page against a short one. Test a two-minute video against a 30-minute video.
  –
• Bullet-Points vs. Paragraphs
  Write out a few paragraphs highlighting the main benefits that come with your product or offer. Then test that against a brief description and bullet-points listing the main benefits.
  –
• Different Incentives
  Most squeeze-pages offer some type of incentive for signing up, like a free report or something along those lines. If you have more than one incentive at your disposal, test them against each other as well as one against several (remember that too many incentives can make you seem desperate). Also try giving your incentive a more compelling name and/or description.
  –
• Colour-Themes and Design
  Test a “naked” squeeze-page against one with more graphical elements. Test different colour-schemes against each other. Even fonts and background-colours can make a difference. At the end of the day, you have to make sure that your page is visually appealing to your target demographic otherwise they’ll leave before taking a closer look at it.

Whatever you do, you should be testing your sales-pages and squeeze-pages. For a free solution to create split-tests, check out Google Website Optimizer. If you’re a WordPress user, I’ve got a very interesting for split-testing, a review of which will be published here shortly.

Now go forth, test and prosper.

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

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Market research is usually concerned with the demographics of a market, the amount and kind of competition you can expect, evaluation of what type of content and delivery the target demographic responds to etc.

For this article, I want to take the market research down a notch and present you a very simple, very basic research “method” that you should be applying on a regular basis as an online marketer. Especially if you are new to this game.

Competition “Spying”

To get a feeling for a market (or even Internet marketing in general), go and take a look at websites and sales-pages created by other Internet marketers.

How do you find those pages? If you are already selling products or affiliate offers yourself, simply find some more offers in your niche and run a search on the product names as well as some closely related keywords. Especially for the product names, most of the resulting pages will be pure marketing sites. For your “typical” money-makers like “weight loss”/”how to lose weight”, “dog training”, “make money online” etc. you’ll also find lots of pure money-sites.

If you haven’t decided on a niche yourself yet, just go to ClickBank or CBtrends and search through the product catalogue there. Not that ClickBank is the only or even the most important online marketplace, but it’s the most easily accessible and you can find lots of product names and keywords to search for within minutes.

If you’re a member of some CPA networks, apply the exact same method. Search for the product/offer names as well as closely related keywords and browse some of the results.

–

What to Look Out For

As you are browsing these sites and pages, here are some things to take note of:

• Types of Sites
  Are you encountering many squeeze pages or sales pages? How are they set up? Is there an order-button right on the page or do they squeeze your e-mail address first? Or are you encountering blogs and blog-style pages?
  –
• Use of Media
  What are you finding on the resulting pages? Is it mostly text, test with images, audio or video? What’s the writing style like? How is the information in the video delivered?
  –
• Visuals
  Are the sites visually appealing? How are they making use of colours and fonts? Are they simple or graphically elaborate?
  –
• Incentives/Promises
  What is being offered on the pages? Are there free giveaways or other incentives? What’s being promised?

Once you’ve taken note of these things, simply ask yourself: Could you do the same? Or could you even do better?

Remember that many of the people behind those pages you’re looking at are making money from them. Of course, not every offer and every sales-page is profitable, but particularly the top listed pages in organic search results are almost guaranteed to turn some kind of a profit for the site owner.

The reason I mention this is because especially those new to online marketing can easily feel overwhelmed by it all and not know where to start. If you just take a close look at what other marketers are doing, you’ll soon realize that there’s no real magic to it. Many a successful sales-page is not particularly pretty and you don’t have to be a genius to create something similar, or superior, yourself.

Allright, now go forth and research! And once you’ve researched, build!

Cheers,

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There are countless ways of making money online and I cannot cover them all in this post. However, in terms of monetizing a website, there are four very common methods: Renting out ad-space, using AdSense or similar contextual advertising, promoting CPA offers and promoting products as an affiliate.

These four methods are arranged neatly along a sliding scale and understanding them makes for a good foundation of knowledge about website monetization in general.

So, let’s go right ahead and examine these four methods.

Qualification vs. Payout

The “sliding scale” mentioned in the title has to do with how much you get paid for each of the monetization methods in relation to how difficult it is to qualify for payment. Here’s an illustration:

On the x-axis you see the four major methods, renting out ad-space, AdSense, CPA offers and affiliate sales. The labels going from “minimal” to “high” along the y-axis have two meanings: On the one hand, they describe the potential payout and on the other hand, they describe how hard it is to make the payout happen.

If that doesn’t immediately make sense, don’t worry, I’ll go into a bit more detail on each method right away:

–

Renting out Ad-Space
If you visit a lot of blogs, you’ve probably come across several that have small 125×125 pixel boxes in the sidebar, displaying ads. Sometimes, some of the boxes read “Your Ad Here!” or something along those lines. That usually means that the owner of the blog is renting out this space on his site for advertisers. A product owner or company can call them up and arrange to have their ad placed in one of the boxes for a set amount of time and a monthly fee.

Once the ad is set up, the blog owner gets paid no matter how effective the advertisement is. The only pre-requisite for getting paid, is that the blog continues to be visited by many people, but the payment stays the same regardless of whether the blog’s visitors actually click on the ads and/or end up buying something from the advertiser.

In other words, there’s no obstacle that you need to get your visitors across, in order to make money. The downside is that you won’t get paid a lot for renting out ad-space and you need a hell of a lot of visitors to make this kind of monetization lucrative at all.

By the way: Not all banners are rented out ad-space. A banner could also contain an affiliate link to a sales-offer or a CPA offer.

–

AdSense
I’m sure you’ve seen many, many AdSense ads already. Whether you’ve clicked on any or not is a different story, but there’s no doubt that AdSense is a very popular way of monetizing a website. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s what AdSense ads usually look like:

Don’t bother clicking, by the way, it’s just an image.

AdSense is something you can plug into your site and it will automatically serve up these small text-ads that are relevant to your content. I.e. if you write something about cars, AdSense might display ads for car insurance offers.

Behind every AdSense ad, there’s a person or company paying for clicks. As an example, let’s say a visitor clicks on an insurace-related ad. The advertiser will pay Google a certain amount, for example $0.60 for that click. Google, in turn, will pay half of that to the person who’s site the ad was displayed on when it got the click.

Depending on the subject, these clicks can cost more or less and in turn, the ads on your site will not always net the same amount per click. Usually, you’ll get only a few cents per click, however.

You can easily make a few dollars by using AdSense on your site, even if you don’t get tons of visitors. You can potentially earn more per visitor compared to renting out ad-space, but the visitors need to actually click on the ads, otherwise you don’t get paid. So, the threshold is a bit higher, but you get more in return.

–

Affiliate Sales
Selling products as an affiliate is a very simple concept: You send visitors to a sales-page with your special affiliate link, and every time one of those visitors makes a purchase, you get a cut of the price. This is basically your reward for sending the visitor to that product-page and making the sale possible.

What’s very attractive about affiliate sales is that the payouts can be very high. You will typically get paid between 50% and 75% of the purchase price (at least for info-products and downloads). If you are promoting an expensive info-product, you can earn up to hundreds of dollars every time someone buys through your affiliate link.

The downside is that you only get paid whenever someone makes a purchase. In other words, the threshold is very high and you’ll never see 100% of the people clicking on your affiliate links ending up buying the product (0.5% to 3% is more realistic).

–

CPA
CPA stands for Cost Per Action and the reason I saved this one for last is that, in a sense, CPA represents the “sweet spot” between AdSense and affiliate sales.

As the name implies, with CPA, you get paid whenever a visitor performs a certain action. The action required is specified by the advertiser. For example, for many offers you can make a CPA commission, by sending a visitor to a page where they have to enter their e-mail address (in other words, they sign up to a mailing list). Other offers require the visitors to fill out a survey-form.

As you can imagine, it’s easier to get someone to supply an e-mail address than it is to get someone to make a purchase. The payouts for CPA offers are typically quite a bit higher than what you get for AdSense clicks – usually in the range of a few dollars.

To get back to the above graph, with CPA, the threshold isn’t very high – visitors have to do more than just click, but they don’t have to spend actual money – and the potential payout is quite good.

–

So, Which Is Best?

You can’t really say that any one of these monetization methods is better than the others. That’s also something I wanted to illustrate in that graph: The two factors of potential payout and qualification for payout usually balance each other out fairly well.

Whether you get thousands of clicks for a few cents each or send thousands of visitors to a sales-page and only a small percentage of them buy the product, you’ll end up with similar profits.

You can optimize any of these methods to make you lots of money and I’m sure there are people making a full-time living on each one of them. Ultimately, it’s a question of what suits you best.

What monetization method do you prefer? Which ones have you tried and which ones would you like to try? Let me know down in the comments!

Cheers,

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Below, you find two short videos explaining everything you need to know about how to add affiliate banners to your WordPress blog. The first video covers the very basics and the second video goes into a little more detail, showing you how to cloak the banner-links, how to make your own banners (in case none are provided) and how to add a banner to the sidebar.

Part 1

I hope you find them useful.

All the best,

P.S.: For good measure, here’s a banner:

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This post covers the most important basics you need to know about backlinks. Getting backlinks to your web pages is an essential part of search engine optimization (particularly for Google). However, not all backlinks are equal. In this post, I describe the three things that matter most, in terms of backlinks. These three factors are: Amount, value and anchor text.

Note: If you prefer watching a video to reading, scroll down to see my video accompanying this post.

Here’s a short description explaining each of the three factors:

Amount

This first factor is the simplest. The higher the number of backlinks pointing to your site, the better this is for your ranking.

The thinking behind this is simply that every link to your site represents something like a “vote”. Someone linking to your site is basically saying: “Check this out, there’s something worth seeing there.”
And the more people are saying that there’s something worth seeing on your site, the better your site must be.

On a perfectly innocent Internet (what a weird concept), this would be all it takes to determine the rank of websites. But because there are many people with commercial interests online and it’s fairly easy to build links yourself, determining rank based solely on the amount of backlinks would just result in those pages whose owners have the most powerful link-spamming bots working for them to rank highest.

This is where the other two factors come in.

–

Value

This is the most debated and most elusive factor determining website ranks. The value of any given backlink is dependent on many different variables and no one, apart from a few engineers at Google, knows exactly how link value is determined.

Here are some factors we can be pretty certain about:

• Page Authority
  A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. How the authority of the website is determined, is an entire subject of its own. You can assume that the more traffic a website is getting, the more people are participating on that website and the higher the Google PR of that website is, the more valuable a link from it will be.
  –
  As example, a link coming from a blog with thousands of subscribers and many people participating in the comments is more valuable than a link coming from a blog that hasn’t been updated in months and sees hardly any traffic.
  –
• Link Location
  Another important factor is where on the page the link is located. For example, a link placed in the footer of a website is less valuable than a link that is part of the main text on the page. The context, and number of other links on the same page also play a part.
  –
  For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable. However, if the link is one of only a few integrated in the text flow, then it carries a lot of value.
  –
• Link Distribution
  In a greater context, it also matters where your links are coming from. Hundreds of backlinks, all coming from the same domain are probably less valuable than just a handful of backlinks coming from many different sites.

–

Anchor Text

Finally, the anchor text of your links is what determines which keywords you will rank for. For those who don’t know, the anchor text is the text you click on, to follow a link. As an example, here is a link with the anchor text reading “Killer Bunnies”: Killer Bunnies

The anchor text of your backlinks help the search engine spiders decide which keywords to rank your page for. Ideally, you want to get many backlinks that have your targeted keyword as their anchor text. However, you should avoid getting many backlinks that all have the identical anchor text, because this looks unnatural.

For the links you build yourself, I recommend using your keywords in the anchor text in most cases, related keywords in some cases, and something completely unrelated (e.g. “Click here”) in a few cases.

–

Rule of Thumb

The rule of thumb for good backlink building is this: the more natural your backlink-profile looks, the better.

In other words, aim for diversity when you build backlinks. You can’t go wrong with links from different sites, using variations of anchor text and placed in different contexts on the sites.
Also, don’t shy away from getting links from low-authority sites. As long as it doesn’t take you too much time to get those links, even low value links are useful and make your overall link profile look more natural.

–

Video

Here’s the video, where I say the same stuff I wrote in this post:

If you have any more questions about link-building, ask away in the comments section below!

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

• anchor text backlinks
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Today’s post features the most simple, easy to understand and straight-forward explanation of Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match you’ll ever find. Plus, it’s presented in text as well as in a video. This post will clear up any questions about this important subject you may have.

Throughout the text, I will be using “blue vintage car” as an example for a search term. I picked this at random and you can choose any search term if you want to follow along and experiment with some Google searches. I recommend using a search term with three or four words to get results that best illustrate what the match types are all about.

Broad Match

The broad match is the most common type of search result. It is what you get when you type in a search term into Google as you normally would.

What does it do?
Broad match results are any websites that contain the words you typed in, in any order and any distribution.

So, while a site that contains the exact sequence of words “blue vintage car” is likely to show up in the results, other possibilities include:

• Vintage car: blue
• Vintage car with blue leather interior
• Blue skies, vintage comics and car models.

Of course, a page featuring the words in the exact order you typed them in is likely to show up first in the results. If you take a look at pages ten and beyond in the results, you’ll see the words you typed spread ever further apart on the resulting pages. Here’s an example:

As you can see, the words are not in sequence and neither are they next to each other in this resulting page. But since all the words are present on the page, it’s still a broad match result.

Phrase Match

To see phrase match results, type in your search term in quotes:

What does this one do?
Phrase match results display websites that feature those exact words you typed, in the order you typed them in. As you can see on the picture above, this returns drastically fewer results than the broad search (almost 5 million results broad and fewer than 30’000 results phrase).

There can still be punctuation marks or symbols like brackets or slashes in between the words in the results-pages. Here’s an example result:

As you can see, even though there is a hyphen before the word “blue” and a comma afterwards, this is still a valid phrase match result for our search term.

One great use for typing your search term in quotes is when you remember part of a text but you can’t remember where you read it. If you can remember the exact sequence of five or more words you read on that page, a phrase match search will very likely return the page you are looking for.

Keyword Research/Advertiser Perspective

Here’s where most people seem to get confused with the whole match-type thing: The meaning of the match types differs depending on whether you are looking at them from the perspective of a regular search engine user or that of a keyword researcher or AdWords advertiser.

In this next section, let’s look at the significance of the match types have to you as an Internet marketer.

To follow along, fire up Google’s keyword research tool.
A very crucial factor in keyword research (and online marketing in general) is how often your chosen keyword is actually searched for. After all, it’s not much use to rank well for a term no one ever looks for. This is where the keyword tool can help us out. Let’s take a look at the search volume we get for our example term “blue vintage car” as well as the more popular term “vintage car”:

As we can see, there are roughly 320 broad searches for “blue vintage car” and over 200’000 monthly searches for “vintage car”.

Now, these are broad match results. This means that among those 320 searches could be examples like:

• bright blue vintage car
• vintage model car, blue
• where to buy vintage models of a blue car

In other words, any search containing the three words “blue”, “vintage” and “car” is included in this count.

Now, let’s look at the phrase match results for the searches:

As you can see, there are now significantly less results listed. This is because the phrase match count only includes searches that contain the exact sequence of words typed in. There can still be additional words in a search, however. The following example searches would be included in the phrase match count:

• buy blue vintage car
• blue vintage car picture
• more information about a blue vintage car

Finally, we have the option to search for exact matches:

Now, the numbers have shrunk even further. The reason is that the exact match only counts searches that are exactly, word for word, what you signify. So, in the above example, 18’100 is an estimate of the amount of times the exact words “vintage car” are typed into Google, each month. If someone types the words in a different order or ads another word (e.g. “bright blue vintage car”) that search is not counted.

As an advertiser, this can be very significant, since you might want your ads to display only when very specific terms are searched for. I don’t want to get into the whole AdWords research thing in this article.

Instead, I want to clarify a very common cause for confusion when it comes to keyword research:

Evaluating Competition Strength

I’m sure you’ve seen this as a simple piece of advice on how to find out how much competition you are up against: Type the keyword you want to target in quotation marks, i.e. do a phrase match search for it. This will return a number of results pages that is significantly lower than for the broad match term (see above).

“But,” the argument goes, “nobody searches for anything with quotes!”
True. Most searches are broad searches with the search term just typed in without any quotes or brackets. However, looking at the number phrase match results really is an indicator of competition strength. Why? Because the pages excluded from the phrase match results will be very, very easy to outrank with an optimized page.

If you make a page that features “blue vintage car” in the title and that exact combination again in the text, you’re already outranking all of those pages that have the three words spread all over the place.

That’s it. There’s the explanation for the whole “why phrase match?” question.

Having said that, the argument can be made that it doesn’t bloody well matter how many pages are listed in the results. What really matters is how strong the actual pages showing up on the first page for a broad search are. Lest I digress, I will write about this in a separate article.

For all your audio-visual learners, here’s a short video where I explain the concept of using phrase match for competition evaluation:

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Check out the video right here:

See how easy it is to maximize your results in article marketing? With just those tweaks, you can get more traffic, get more exposure for your articles and continually improve your resource boxes to get the maximum amount of click-throughs. And with the software I listed in my last post, you can do all of this for free.

Because of the YouTube time-limit, I couldn’t explain each method in very much detail. If you already have some experience with article spinning and submission, then the above video contains all you need to know. If you aren’t quite sure how exactly to incorporate my tips, fear not: I’ll be posting more detailed explanations for each technique shortly.

Cheers,

I hope you enjoyed this clip. Let me know what you think down in the comments!

Cheers,

In this article, you’ll find all the basic information concerning SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If you are new to this subject, you might have noticed that there is a huge wealth of information of SEO available online and it can be quite overwhelming. In this article, I explain only the most essential, bare-bones factors for optimizing web-pages. In other words: Everything you need to know to start out and nothing more.

What’s All The Fuss About?

SEO is such a hot topic for one simple reason: More visitors means more money for almost every online business. And many, many visitors find online businesses and websites in general via search engines. This is why everyone who is selling something (even if it’s just ad-space on a blog) is scrambling to rank well in search engine results. If you have ads on a website, being on the first page of results for a popular search term or being on the second page can mean the difference between making good money and making nothing at all. [Google Dilemma, link coming soon]

Search engine optimization is the term used to describe all methods that you can use for your website to make sure it gets better rankings in SERP (search engine results pages).

How Does Google Decide What Websites to List First?

Google, and every other search engine for that matter, works with a complex algorithm to determine what sites to show and in which order. The exact algorithm is kept under wraps to minimize abuse, but many important factors in search engine ranking are known.

When reading about SEO, just make sure you don’t lose sight of the most fundamental principle underlying every search-engine: The goal of every search engine is to serve up the most relevant and interesting results, matching what the user is looking for as perfectly as possible.

For this reason, SEO lesson number one is: Real content always has the best chances with search engines. If you have a hollow shell of a site, offering nothing of interest, you can SEO the crap out of it, but you’ll never get many visitors and the visitors you do get won’t stay.

With that out of the way, here are the most important SEO factors to consider:

• Keywords
  If your site contains text that matches the search term entered by the user, then that’s a good basis for getting listed in the results. You can optimize your site for this factor by using descriptive titles and clearly stating what each page or article is about. For example, on a movie review blog, call your new post “Citizen Kane Movie Review” instead of just “Citizen Kane” and title the summary within the article “Citizen Kane – Summary” rather than just “Summary”. You get the idea. You want to give the search engine something to clearly recognize what the article is about. Obviously, neither should you overdo it. Don’t write “Citizen Kane review” twice in every sentence, this will be noticed as keyword spamming by the search engines and readers will leave your site in a hurry because it’s unreadable.
• Backlinks
  One of the most important SEO factors is the amount of links pointing to your domain and each of the individual websites. If your content is interesting and relevant, many people will link to it, recommending it to others via social bookmarking sites, on forums, on their own blogs etc. If your content is original, it might be mentioned (and linked to) as a reference by others. Many incoming links indicate good content and search engines pay attention to that.
  You can optimize for this by submitting your pages to social bookmarking sites yourself, linking to your pages from fora etc. In other words, you can try to do all the link-building by yourself. If your content is any good, it will soon be picked up by others and they will add to your backlink count by recommending your site.
• Page Title and Meta Description
  What you see in the SERP are the page title and the meta description. A good content management system should always make it easy for you to add a title and meta description for each of your pages, so that you can make sure what shows up in the SERP is interesting, descriptive and representative of your page contents.
• Domain Age
  Another important factor, one that is often overlooked, is the age of your website. It’s reasonable to assume that a website that has been around for years must be offering something or other of value. For this reason, search engines prefer pages from websites that have been online for several years over pages from websites that were created yesterday.
  There’s nothing you can do to actively optimize for this, other than build a good website and stick with it for years.

Where To Learn More

Admittedly, the above list is barely scratching the surface of all the SEO possibilities open to you. There are many more factors playing into search engine ranking and there is much more to learn. However, the four factors listed are, broadly, the most important that you need to consider if you want to give your website a chance to get listed near the front of any results-page.

I will be addressing many of the further details of SEO in future posts. Until then, check out these useful resources on SEO:

SEObook – The classic. Check out their Firefox toolbar.
Matt Cutts – Google info straight from the horse’s mouth.
SEO 2.0 – Lot’s of SEO info from all angles. Entertaining read, too.
Wolf-Howl – My other favourite, next to SEO 2.0.

Happy researching!

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