Yearly Archives: 2008

Incoming links to your website are arguably one of the main contributers to your website rising up the rankings in the search engines. There are many ways that you can get links to your website or blog. However, it is important that you don’t fall into the trap of buying them from link farms. These type of links don’t carry any weight anymore and could DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD for your website.

I prefer much more natural methods. Actually putting content on your website that people find useful. (What? I here you shout). Yep, you might off heard of the terms link baiting or link magnets. These are all terms that basically mean the same thing, which is getting people to link to your website because the content is of good quality. Hell, this is how the search engines started back in the day and this technique now still widely used to rank webpages.

Over the coming weeks i’m going to post a series of articles were I reveal my top ten strategies that I use to generate one way incoming links. So lets get started with the first….

1. Writing Product/Service Reviews

Like the many millions of people who buy goods on the internet every day I, like them, like to read up on what people I saying about the product or service that i’m interested in. This is a major factor for me as to whether i’m going to get out my credit card and purchase the product or not.

Whatever it is your purchasing; web hosting, seo software, keyword research software etc. There is always an huge array of options to choose from. People want help from others who know more than themselves. They want help to sort through the mulitude of options that are available online.

They need the euiquavelant of an honest store assistant (if one exists hehe) that is going to guide them to the best product that will solve their problem or need. That person should be you! This technique has been around in affiliate marketing for years and it’s still used for one reason – It Works!

Now obviously you can’t own all the products that you may want to promote through your site.

If you don’t own the product: here are a few pointers to get you started writing your reviews:

- focus on the relevancy and potential benefits of the product to the market.
- set up a Google Alert “<product name> review” to get a feel for what other people are saying about it.
- look at the reputation of the product owner/designer.
- gather information from the product sales page.
- search forums and discussion boards.
- follow up on the testimonials for the product.

If you do own the product then think:

- what was my first impression of the product?
- what is my impression now that I’ve bought it?
- what one thing did I find most useful?
- which type of person is that product right for?
- what are the top five things that I’ve learned from the product?
- did the product deliver on its sales letter?
- can I recommend it?

I personally think the last point is very important indeed! You must try to give an honest opinion here as this could affect the trust your potential customers have in you. If you don’t think its any good, you could tell them this and then use this point to recommend another product you’re promoting in the same market.

I’ll cover this more in the article on product comparison tables.

When you start to craft yor review, it must be well balanced. It’s good practice to start with a major weakness of the product. For example, it could be something like, Product X has a major weakness in that it’s too full of detail. I know that might be a little cheesy but you get my point.

Other important points to think about when writing your review:

- speak directly to your audience, use a conversational tone of writing.
- create a good balance of pros and cons.
- try to spread out the main benefits across the article so that you keep things interesting.
- try to phrase your benefits into real world examples.

To summarise product/service reviews are an excellent way to get incoming links. People need social proof to help them make their decision whether to buy or not and product reviews provide this. Also if you don’t like writing, (me included) then just outsource it to a site like elance.com or getafreelancer.com and use the points above in your job description that i’ve listed in the if you don’t own the product section.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series – Generating 1000′s of incoming links through Blogs

Over the past 12 months my online ventures have really took off. Due to building my businesses and trawling through the masses of Internet Marketing information that’s available online, I’ve neglected my blog. Bad, I know but things are about to change.

In the past 12 months as well as growing my business i’ve learned tonnes of stuff. There is a lot of crap out there on Internet Marketing, SEO, Affiliate Marketing etc and it’s a job on its own seprating the wheat from the chaff.

Well you’ll be pleased to know though that i’ve made in my number one priority for 2009 to transfer all that knowledge to you, via my blog here at http://koreinternet.com.

So lets get started with my first article.

All SEO work for a website should start off with keyword research. You need to find out what keywords people in your industry/niche are actually typing into the search engines to find a solution to their problem. What you think people are typing in and what they are actually typing in might be completely different.

Now there’s a few paid services out there like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, but there’s also a great little free utility you can get from http://www.goodkeywords.com. Install and run the tool, enter your main keyword phrase like Search Engine Marketing. This is referred to as your seed phrase or seed keyword. GoodKeywords will now bring you back multiple suggestions that contain or are related to your seed keyword.

Along with keyword suggestions, GoodKeywords will also show you how many people are typing that keyword phrase into Overture (now know as Yahoo Search Marketing) on a monthly basis. This will give you an idea of the search volume for that particular keyword(s). For example if you was to type Search Engine Marketing into Google you would get around 53,000,000 results. As you can see this isn’t something you would want to optimize for due to the amount of competition. So as well as looking for volume, make sure you enter the values into Google to see how much competition there is. These higher volume keywords are not out of reach, but I would recommend going for the long tail keywords. By this I mean phrases that contain 3, 4 or more keywords. These results can then be recorded in a spreadsheet.

There are tools that will do this for you, like Wordtracker, but you will have to pay for these. Personally I do use Wordtracker but that’s because I can offset the cost against what I’m earning through my various Internet Marketing Ventures. Plus I tend to use a mixture of keyword resources from various sources to maximise my exposure. And you’ll be pleased to know that I’ll be revealing them all to you in this blog.

Another very useful technique used in keyword research is misspelled words. These can be little nuggets of traffic as a huge amount of people often mistype when entering their search phrase into search engines. However, you have to be careful when using these in your website content. I’ll come onto how you can use these more in future postings. GoodKeywords has a facility within it that will give you common misspellings of any search phrase you enter.

Once you’ve decided on what keywords have good search volume and a reasonable amount of competition save these in a document as your master keyword list. These will be used throughout your site and will be the basis of you SEO efforts. This is very basic keyword research but i’ll be going a lot more in depth looking at techniques like LSI in future posts. Bye for now..

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