The next steps In your link building efforts will again require you to do some writing. It also needs to be unique, and of decent quality. You are going to create your own free blog network to get links and traffic to your main website. This is powerful stuff so pay close attention to what I’m suggesting.

There are many sites on which you can create free blogs or websites. We are going to use some of the biggest of these that are well respected by Google and the other search engines to get high quality links to our main website.

Do you remember that I suggested you find a couple dozen keyword phrases related to your main phrase? You are going to use these keywords to optimize your free blogs and create a traffic and linking funnel that will magnify your search engine ranking efforts.

You will optimize these blogs the same way you optimized your main website. Instead of a domain name you will have a folder or sub-domain on the free site. You will want to create your blog name using your keywords just like you did in finding a good domain for your website.

As you create posts on your free blogs you will include keyword rich links to your main site and to some of the other free blogs you have created. The more of these blogs you crate the more powerful your network will be. Also the more different main domains your free blogs are on the better the linking effectiveness will be.

Now that you know how to create the network I’ll list some of the free sites you can use to build it. I will provide more information on theses site in my blog and in the newsletter. In fact, I have another free report that I’ll be sending you specifically about maximizing the use of one of the site.

Blogger | WordPress.com | HubPages
Squidoo | Today | Bravenet | LiveJournal

Golden Take-Away: Work at your own pace but if you can build a blog a day in 30 days you will have a very powerful link network. Keep adding blogs until you get the rankings you want.

There are two major approaches to getting links that you control. You can do it yourself for free or you can spend money on services that will help you do it or do it for you. Right now we are going to learn how to do it for free and once you start making money on your sites you can think about paying to reduce your workload and amplify your efforts.

Your first step is to get your newly optimized site listed in Google quickly. This will give you a confidence boost by seeing that your site is listed and will be the foundation for improving the ranking later. I’m focusing on Google because you can get a new site listed in Google in days or even hours. It can take many weeks with Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN), but once you are listed in Google you will eventually get listed in the other search engines.

Assuming you don’t already have websites that are listed in Google your fastest way to get listed it to do a little social bookmarking. That means listing your pages on sites that people use to share links and bookmarks. There are many of these but I’ll suggest a few that I have had good results with. Go to three or more of these sites and setup a free account then add at least one good quality page from your website using link text that contains the primary keyword for that page:

StumbleUpon | Digg | Delicious | Google Bookmarks
Diigo | Propeller | Yahoo Bookmarks

These links will get Google to visit your site and get it listed. They will also be a start in getting the links that will help you get good search engine rankings. There are many more social bookmarking sites. Listing your web pages in then is quick and easy especially once you setup a free account. I recommend that you register with one new social bookmarking site every time you have a new page to promote. For a nice list of social bookmarking sites visit any post on this  blog and click on the small icons at the end of the post.

Once you have your own websites that are listed in Google you can just add a link from them to your new site to get it listed. If you have a blog there is even a little trick I’ll share in a future newsletter message that can get you listed in Google in minutes.

Golden Take-Away: Use social bookmarking sites as one fast and easy link building tool.

• The visible text of the links contain relevant keyword phrases.
• The links are one way meaning the site links to you but you don’t link back.
• There is variety in the link text of the links.
• The links are from pages that rank highly.
• The links are from “authority sites” meaning the whole sites rank well.
• The links appear in text on the page that matches the topic of your page.
• The links come from sites that share similar topics as your site.
• The links come from a lot of different domains.
• The links don’t appear all at once and then no new links appear over time.
• The links don’t come from spam sites meaning sites with no original content.

Earlier I told you that you don’t normally have full control of the links to your web pages, but the more control you have of the above factors the better. It is possible to exert that control if you know how and are willing to do a little work. There are also services you can pay for to make the job much easier, but for the purposes of this guide we are only going to talk about ways to do it for free.

Starting on the next page I’m going to tell you how to get links with the characteristics listed above. Get ready to start seeing those fast and easy search engine rankings you have been hoping for.

Golden Take-Away: Print this page and post it in your workspace The ten points about powerful links are pure gold. Knowing those factors and learning how to influence them has made many people very rich – will you be next?

Author’s Note: If you have read this far and have paid attention to what you have read you now know more about getting good search engine rankings than 90% of the people that have a website. Those other 10% are your real competition – at least the ones that want to rank for the same keywords as you. That is why keeping up with my free newsletter course and with the blog is very important. There is always more to learn and new edges to gain over your competition. I want you to succeed and I’ll help you do it if you put your own effort to learn and put into practice what you being taught.

Title and Title Tag: Choose a title for the page that contains the keyword phrase and is no longer than seven words total if possible. The title should be set to a header font (H1, H2, or H3) so that it appears large and bold on the page.

The title tag is the part of your HTML code that is between the header tags and looks like this:

<title>You title tag text goes here</title>

You can make this text the same as your visible title but I like to rewrite it a little and repeat the keyword phrase a second time. Here is an example: If my keyword phrase was red summer onions my page title might be: Ten Uses for Red Summer Onions and my title tag might be: <title>Red Summer Onions – Ten Great Uses for Red Summer Onions</title>

If your site is a WordPress blog you can use a great free plug-in to easily take care of the title tag and many other SEO factors – All in One SEO Pack.

Keyword Density and Location: The search engines determine what you web page is about by analyzing the words and phrases on the page. A big part of that analysis for a particular keyword is how many times a keyword phrase appears and where it appears.

When you are writing (or re-writing) your content try to include your primary keyword phrase in the first paragraph, in the last paragraph, and enough times in between to amount to about three percent of the text. Do not over do it and stuff your article with keywords – that will not only make the article boring for readers it will also throw up flags to the search engines that you are trying to cheat the system.

There is a great free tool you will want to get that makes it very easy to measure the keyword density of your pages. It does a whole lot more, but it is worth getting just for quickly determining your keyword density. SeoQuake is a free browser plug-in with versions for both Internet Explorer and FireFox.

Golden Take-Away: Print this page and post it in your workspace There are more things you can do to optimize your pages but if you do just these you are 90% there and that is good enough until you learn more from my free newsletter course.

The keywords you target will have a big impact on the search engine rankings you obtain and the traffic you get. Your keywords must be relevant to the content of your pages. If you have a page on your site about green widgets you don’t want to try to optimize that page for the term red widgets.

There are two important aspects of keyword research you need to consider. Once you have in your mind the kind of keywords that are relevant to your page, you need to consider how many people search for the keywords and how much competition there is for the keywords.

It is useless to optimize for keywords that no one searches for. You need a way to get an idea of how many searches per month are done for your selected keyword phrase. Fortunately, there is a great free tool from Google AdWords that you can use. You can even enter the URL of the page you want to target and the tool will suggest keywords.

The other side of the keyword selection coin will determine how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keyword phrase. You can get and estimate of how many Web sites are competing for the same keywords.

The easiest free way to gauge competition is to do a search on Google for your phrase and place quotes around it to specify the exact phrase. If there are hundreds of thousands of pages found you will want to choose a less competitive keyword phrase. If there are 10,000 or less results you will probably be able to rank for it.

There is actually a more accurate way to gauge competition. I’ll save that for the newsletter lessons and a future blog post. I’m keeping this to simpler, but still very effective methods.

Golden Take-Away: Keywords are very important. You should spend time learning to do good keyword research. I will be teaching the details of doing fast but thorough keyword research in the newsletter. For now the information above will get you a good start.

If you want a real powerhouse site for search engine ranking then choose a primary keyword phrase that has a high search volume but reasonable competition. Then use the Google Keyword Tool to find a couple dozen related keywords and start building your site targeting one of those keywords for each page.

Try to get a domain name that contains your main keyword phrase. This will help greatly in your SEO efforts.

There are two distinct functions in search engine optimization. The first function is often called on-page optimization and it is something you have complete control of because it is your website. It is important to take full advantage of that fact to boost your search engine rankings. I’ll tell you how to do this shortly.

The second function is sometimes called off-page optimization, but more often it is just called link building. You will have varying amounts of control of this aspect of SEO from none at all to sometimes having full control. I’ll be telling you how you can control many of the links to your site and why you should.

These two parts of SEO are essential to getting good search engine rankings. If you just optimize your website but get no links to it you will not rank well in the search engines. If you have a poorly optimized site but have a lot of the right kind of links you may get some decent rankings, but not nearly as high as you would with both factors working together.

Search engine ranking is very much a popularity contest. The search engines base the biggest part of their ranking logic on how many sites link to your site and especially, how many high ranking sites link to it. The assumption is that if good sites are linking to your site they must consider your site to be a high quality useful site. This all fits well with the desire of the search engines to provide useful and relevant search results.

Golden Take-Away: You should optimize your site before you start link building. You will be learning some very easy and effective things you can do to make your site search engine friendly. Once you have optimized your site you must start getting the right kind of links to it to get good rankings. I’ll be telling you what the right kinds of links are and how you can get them.

The search engines, especially Google, work very hard to make sure when a user does a search they find something of value that is relevant to their search. Search results are their product and they will do everything they can to provide a quality product. If you provide useful, original content and follow the suggestions in this guide the search engines will reward you with high rankings and the traffic that is the result of those rankings.

This does not mean you have to be an expert and prolific writer. You just need to have something to say that users want to hear. I have many small one to five page sites that rank very well. They have unique information that is of value to the target audience. It is true that you will usually get better rankings and more traffic with bigger sites, but it is OK to start small and build more pages when you start seeing some results.

Golden Take-Away: Try to find a problem that users need a solution to. The greater and more urgent the need the more anxious users will be to read what you write and perhaps buy whatever you are selling. If your content is original and useful the users will be happy, the search engines will be happy, and you will be happy.

I have tried to only cover one major topic per page in this site. Feel free to print the pages and take notes and jot down ideas. When you subscribe to the free newsletter you will get a free report that contains most of the information on this site.

For a more thorough explanation of the topics covered in this site, especially link building, be sure to visit one of my other blogs on one way links.

You will also want to read the One Way Links Newsletter which you probably registered for when you requested this guide. It will be packed with even more valuable information on getting top search engine rankings. You can subscribe here (see the form on the right side) or on my other blog.

Now on to the next page and the meat of this site …