On September 4th I posted about an attempt to build links like crazy and keep track of the effects in the Google rankings for my moving to Sydney site. My plan was to build a variety of different types of links on quality websites and monitor the effect these new links had on my search engine results for the keywords ‘living in Sydney’. On September 4th, my site was ranked 18th and my goal was to attempt to bump the site to the first page.

Well 10 days in and it’s already there! Stuck in Sydney is currently sitting pretty at number nine on page one of Google’s search results. I’m not convinced it will stay there, but it’s a  step in the right direction after being relegated to page three shortly after my links building campaign began. That was a bit confusing but I stuck with my plan and I’m seeing the results now.

So far the main type of links I’ve gone for have been three-way exchanges. I have offered up links to people on this site or Travoholic.com in exchange for links back to my Sydney site. So since September 4th when I started this little experiment I have added 13 inbound links pointing to the site’s main page. While 13 doesn’t seem like that many, they’re all what I would consider to be pretty high quality and half have been from sites about Australia or Sydney so hopefully those links will bring some visitors.

In addition to link swaps, I have also added 3 articles so far on Info Barrel about various Sydney suburbs. In those I have included a link into the suburb-related content and also a link to my site’s main page. I’m going to keep these coming because I think that linking to your internal pages is key to bringing in targeted traffic.

There have been two things that have really helped me in getting one-way, high-quality inbound links reasonably easily. The first is the fact that I have lots of quality sites of my own to offer links from in return and enough of them to be able to offer people options. The second is that I have been making websites for eight years and have built relationships with other webmasters along the way which means I have lots of internet buddies with old, quality sites who will actually read my link exchange requests rather than just deleting the emails straight away. It’s been great reconnecting with people I’ve lost touch with and seeing how their sites are going and the link building process for me has actually been really fun.

Since I’ve done pretty well with the ‘living in Sydney’ angle, I am going to switch gears and start to target ‘moving to Sydney’ and the more popular and competetive ‘Sydney life’. For the former I am currently on page three of the results and for the latter I am nowhere to be seen so it will be interesting to see if and where I appear in Google’s search results for that term.

This has all been pretty eye-opening for me. Links certainly seem to be the ticket to Google’s front page and I’m going to keep at it with this little experiment to try to get some traffic finally flowing into my Sydney site.

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I know that inbound links are key to a site’s rise up the Google rankings and, since I am on a link building mission at the moment, I thought I would attempt to prove it. Or at least see what a bunch of new inbound links do to my rankings.

One of the sites I am trying desperatly to get ranked is my living in Sydney site. A few weeks ago it was nowhere to be seen on Google and now it is ranked at number eight on page two of the results for my target keywords ‘living in Sydney’.

So here’s my plan: I am going to link build for this site and keep track of everything I do. I will be building links anyways so it makes sense for me to track of the links I end up getting and reporting on how they effect my Google results. All of the links I go for will have the anchor text ‘living in Sydney’.

Here’s what I will do to get links:

• Link swaps
• Attempt to get one-way inbound links
• Article submissions
• Blog comments
• Leave comments on forums
• Add in-content links on my own related pages

My focus will be on the first three but I will throw a few more things in the mix as well just to spice things up a bit. Guest posts on other people’s blogs would be a smart way to build links but, unfortunately, they would probably be terrible posts since I don’t actually know much about living in Sydney (most of this site’s content has been contributed by other people who live there) so I’ve left that option off my list.

I have no idea how long it will take but it’s my goal to get to within the top five results for this search term. Will it work? There’s no reason why it shouldn’t, it’s just a matter of how long and how many links it’ll take, I think. So far I’ve been able to get two quality one-way inbound links so I’m off to a good start. It should be interesting!

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After a great weekend trip to Toronto, I’m back in my parent’s basement attempting to pump out as many articles as I can before my head explodes or I go insane. Writing articles for submission sites is probably one of my least favourite jobs, so my goal of writing 80 articles before the end of September seems a long way off at the moment, even though I’m off to a good start.

A few people have mentioned that article writing should be outsourced, not only to save one’s sanity but also because outsourcing allows for far more articles to be written than one person would be capable of. I think it’s a great idea, believe me. I would love to spend my time thinking of article topics and anchor text and let someone else fill in the gaps but unfortunately it’s not really in the budget at the moment.

That’s not to say I don’t already outsource, though. I currently pay writers to produce content for several sites because I’m not able to come up with the same quality of information without spending loads of time on research. At $15 for 800-1000 word articles, I think it’s a bargain, especially considering the quality of some of the submissions. Link building is important, but so is having actual content on my own sites to point the links to, so I feel like paying writers to make that content is worthwhile.

I have also outsourced the development of a custom Wordpress site for $500. According to comments on the post, it’s sort of been 50/50 on whether this has been a huge waste of money or not. I’m still up in the air until I see the final product but for the amount of time I have saved in not having to wrestle with Wordpress, so far so good. Getting the new site just the way I want it isn’t something I would have been able to do on my own so, once again, the outsourcing is to fill a gap in my own skills and knowledge.

Article writing, on the other hand, is something I am fully capable of doing myself, probably to a higher standard than if I were to pay someone else to do it for me. Sure, my time might be better spent elsewhere but writing articles, while annoying, is easy. It might drive me crazy if I do it for long enough but I think writing a few for myself is important so I can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and do a bit of experimentation. I think it would be silly to pay money to outsource right now since I have very little experience with this. I want to do some testing and have a good plan in place before I start paying other people to do it for me.

Curious about what outsourcing article writing would cost, I took a look over at Elance to see what people charge for article writing but it’s difficult to tell because the bids always seem to be sealed. The only information I have is that the budget for the jobs is almost always ‘Less than $500′ which tells me nothing, especially since the number of articles being asked for will vary. I did browse through completed jobs though, it looks like this service goes for around $8-12 per article which is a bit too rich for me right now.

So I am a bit fan of outsourcing but I’m not yet in a financial position to throw money at article writers. I would rather use the few outsourcing funds I have towards things I can’t easily do myself. Once I get more of a feel for article writing and get a bit more money behind me I will experiment with outsourcing but, for the moment, I am content writing them myself.

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Part of my plan to push my earnings up to the next level and to start treating this gig more like a business is to build links to my already exisitng sites. For my newest sites I have researched my keywords, created some quality content and put a lot of effort into my on-site SEO but so far that isn’t cutting it and I need to get a lot of inbound links in order to make these sites pay off the way I am hoping they will.

Article writing is something I had signed up for ages ago and gave up on without even really giving it a chance. The idea is simple: write an article, submit it to an article submission site and put a couple of links back to your own site in the ‘author bio’ section. I don’t even remember which website I was registered with a few years ago but I decided that if I were putting in the effort to write an article, I would prefer to have it on my own website rather than an article site. I failed to realise the potential of those inbound links.

One of the reasons I didn’t have a lot of faith in article sites was because there are so many out there and I didn’t know which, if any, would really help me out. Nomadic Matt’s ebook suggested a couple of article sites including Ezine Articles and I decided to check them out. Knowing that other people have had success using them goes a long way towards motivating me to write submissions. I also know that Lissie is making money with HubPages after a lot of perseverance and my friend Mike has recently started to submit to articles sites including InfoBarrel and has seen an increase in Adsense earnings already (InfoBarrel allows the you to keep 70% of any Adsense revenue generated).

Seeing other people doing well is something that motivates me and knowing that these guys feel like making contributions to each of these sites is worthwhile makes me feel a lot more confident about spending time on posting articles. I have even joined Mike in an article writing challenge. He is aiming to have 50 InfoBarrel (of at least 450 words each), 80 articles on HubPages (he already has 50) and 10 articles published on Ezine Articles by the end of September. I love a good challenge and am going to attempt to produce 50 InfoBarrel articles of my own, 30 Hubs and I need one more article to get to 10 on Ezine Articles. With just over a month to do it in, it will be hard but this is the sort of stuff that gets me motivated and I’m curious to see how I do.

I’m even more curious to see what sort of impact writing these articles will have. I have a rough strategy in place for what type of articles I will write and where I will link them to and I will go through that in another post. But I am very new to all of this so if any of you are experienced in this sort of thing, I would love to hear your advice!

Ok… back to work. Three articles down, 78 to go. Yikes.

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It’s early days and the traffic I’m seeing on my London 2012 Games site is super small, but yesterday I got my first visitors from Google using my targeted keywords and a few long tail terms to boot.

I’m currently on page two of both Google.com and Google.co.uk for ‘london 2012 games’ and it has come about 3 months sooner than expected which is great. I’m also at number one (ahead of the official site) for a couple of long tail search terms to do with specific sports so that’s pretty great too.

I only launched the site a couple of weeks ago so this might just be one of those flash in the pan promising starts that will fizzle out later on (a la Microsoft’s search engine) but I am definitely encouraged and motivated to get my site to the first page for my main search terms and to continue to add content.

I just wanted to give a quick update. I will be paying close attention to this site’s rankings and SEO stuff, tweaking some things and reporting what I think works and doesn’t work. Having my site indexed and ranking in two weeks is a promising start but there’s a lot more to do if I’m going to turn the site into a moneymaking machine before the 2012 Olympics.

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As I finish up a couple of new small sites, I’ve noticed that there are certain things I always make sure I do to give my site the best chance as possible to climb up the SERPs. This time around I have paid a lot of attention to optimizing each page for the search engines and I thought a little checklist might be helpful.

• Minimal code – This is the first time I’ve built a site using only CSS and without any HTML tables to keep everything in place. The sites are ultra simple and very light on code which will hopefully allow Google to concentrate on the content.
• One level deep – The entire site is only one level deep meaning that there are no folders besides the main one. This is just based on a hunch but I think that the closer a page is to the main folder, the better it will rank.
• Linking between the pages on the site – You can access each page of the site from a menu that links to them all plus inside the content wherever applicable.
• Keyword phrases as each page’s title – Each page’s title is made up of the keywords I’m targeting.
• Keyword phrases as my H1 titles – Rather than having the site name as my H1 tag across the entire site, I put each page’s title into the H1 tag so it is targeted for each page.
• Having the URL Match the Page’s Title - The URL for each page is exactly the same as the page’s title (and the phrase I’m targeting) with each word separated b ya hyphen. This makes for a somewhat long page name but I think this is hugely important.
• Using meta tags – Who knows if these things do anything but I find that having a list of my keywords in the meta tags helps remind me what sorts of things I should be writing in the content.
• Content – In the past I’ve never really made a huge effort to pack my content with keywords, it sort of just happens although there’s always room for improvement. I’ve made more of an effort on these new sites to get keywords in there , without being too spammy about it though.
• Strong tags - I’m not sure if I’ll do this or not but adding STRONG tags around key terms is meant to help a bit with SEO.
• ALT tag your images - Using the ALT tag to put a short title onto your images will help a bit with SEO and also allow them to be found by Google images searches which could bring in some visitors.
• Name your image files using keywords - Try to cram just a few more keywords into your page by naming your actual image files using keywords.

There are so many elements to SEO, many out of my control, so it makes sense to me to put as much effort as possible into the parts of it that I have control over. Having your site perfectly optimised for SEO isn’t going to get you to the top of Google by itself, but it’s one important piece to the puzzle and deserves a lot of attention when you’re building a site.

Anyone have any other tips that I’ve missed?

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A while ago I bought the domain name http://www.london-2012-games.com with the hopes of starting up a simple site about the London Olympics. Yes… the domain name is kind of lame. It’s spammy and I know it but it has the keywords I want without using the term ‘Olympics’ which might get me into trouble down the road.

As you can see, I haven’t done a thing with the site beyond a couple of lame posts. Despite looking neglected, the site is high on my agenda for development. So far, according to Google UK, there doesn’t seem to be too much competition for my target keywords ‘london 2012 olympics’. There are some obvious sites on the main page including the official sites, official blog, Wikepedia and some unofficial sites too. There are also two BBC news story pages which I am pretty sure could be bumped if I build a good site and am smart about my SEO.

I tend to be able to rank on the first page of Google, often at number one, for terms I specifically target so I’m pretty confident in my SEO abilities. Of course, those terms probably aren’t nearly as competetive as the ones I’ll be targetting for the London Olympics, so I might be in for a nasty surprise.

I plan to keep people updated on the progress of this site and what I will be doing to sneak it up the SERPs. I’m still not sure if a blog or a static site is the way to go, though. I’ve never had much success ranking with blogs, but there are many advantages and the interactivity of a blog is attractive. On the other hand, I have done well with ranking static sites and, given that I won’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time interacting with people on this topic, maybe throwing up a static site will be the way to go.

I plan on getting started this week so feel free to check in on the site and explore. I will be using this site as an SEO case study type thing and will tell all in an effort to see what works and what doesn’t and to share ideas with you all.

It’ll be my first time attempting to play with the big boys and target what will become a mega popular search term in three years but I think getting in early and being smart about SEO will pay off in the end.

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The importance of inbound links never seems to stop confusing me. SEO types will tell you that it’s one of the most important thing Google looks for when ranking your sites. I’m not going to argue with this, but I have a couple sites that seem to be bucking the trend and it’s strange.

My new Beijing site hasn’t even been finished yet. All of the pages work but there are huge gaps where there should be content and it’s pretty messy in general. I haven’t done any meta tags at all for any pages and haven’t put links to it from any site besides this one. So when I opened my 103 Bees account to check on my other sites I was surprised to see my Beijing site ranking on the first page of Google for several competitivesearch terms.

Then I’ve got another site that exists purely to push affiliate links and it has miraculously found itself as a PR5! I’ve always thought inbound links were the key to getting a good Page Rank so I’m baffled again. This site doesn’t have any inbound links that I know of besides the usual connection to the rest of my websites. I’ve certainly never gone on a link building mission. Plus the content is crap at best.

Looking at two of my best sites, things become even more confusing. Stuck in London had a PR4 at the beginning of the year but has since fallen to PR0 for reasons unknown. It’s always done well with Google as far as rankings are concerned, but has been forgotten when it comes to PR. I know this site has some good inbound links and has been Stumbled a few times too which probably means there are links out there that I don’t even know about. Then there’s my working holidays site. That one has a decent PR and currently does well in the SERPS, but it took about six months to even show up in Google, despite putting a lot of effort into link building.

I am as confused as ever but one thing I am kind of, sort of, sure of is that the quality of inbound links is far more important than the quantity. I think a few links from some old, trusted sites that Google ranks well in th SERPS is better than hundreds of link swaps, submissions to article sites, forum signatures, blog comments and whatever other ways people use to build links.

What do you think? Do you have any sites that do well in the SERPS or PR worlds without having put any effort at all into building links?

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