But when it comes time to actually start building links to one’s website, people typically pick out the hardest way to accomplish the task and then they get to work.

Working Hard

People have been told about various ways to build links to one’s website, and they go through the process of picking out the method that they would prefer to use. It is kind of ironic that most people pick the method that they believe will be the easiest and least expensive to achieve, and when all is said and done, they will have picked out the hardest, least effective method of building links.

For example, most newcomers to online business choose:

* Reciprocal links;

* Directory submissions.

With Reciprocal Links, people buy a software package that helps them to search out websites that are supposedly “related” to theirs and then they send an email to the person who owns that website, proclaiming the benefits of trading links and asking for the link.

With directory submissions, webmasters can get software that is supposed to help with the process, but it takes hours just to submit one’s website to a few dozen directories. Fortunately, there are service providers who also provide submissions to web directories. Regardless of how you get links submitted to web directories, you generally have to pray that those web directories are approving submissions, since most owners have abandoned their directories.

Beyond the time required setting up links in this fashion, and the frustration of getting very few links for the amount of time spent, the worst part of the equation is that the search engines tend to ignore links gained through these methods, and few humans find and follow those links.

Internet newcomers using these methods frequently spend a lot of time trying to promote their websites, and in the end, they have accomplished nothing more than wasting a lot of their limited time and energy.

Working Smart

What if I could show you a better way? Would you be intrigued enough by my methods to try them for yourself?

My point in sharing this with you is not to annoy you, but to help you get better results in much less time.

When we launch new websites, we ignore reciprocal links and web directories altogether. We consider both to be a complete waste of time, effort and money.

Let me put this into perspective for you by giving you a real life example.

On November 18th, 2008, we bought and built a new niche domain: http://www.shoppingtraveldeals.com/blog/

Today is December 27th, so this site has only been active for just under six weeks.

We purchased the domain on the 18th, had it set up with content on the 19th, and then on the 20th, we started promoting this website. We released our first and second reprint articles, promoting this site on the 20th of November. We released our third article on the 24th and the fourth on the 25th. Then we released our fifth article promoting the website on December 15th.

We also set up bookmarks for the main page of the website in Stumbleupon, Digg and Propeller.

In the 39 days since we bought this domain, our website has seen 520 unique visitors. The site received 86 visitors in November and 434 so far in December.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

We have received traffic from 66 unique web pages, and we have received click-through traffic from Google and Windows Live, with 86% of our search traffic coming from Google.

On our search engine traffic, we have received traffic on 171 unique keyword phrases. In order to better understand this search engine traffic, we ran the top 25 search terms through Google to see where our website ranked in the search results, and this is what we came up with:

* Two #1 listings;

* Ten listings that were ranked from #2 to #4;

* Ten listings that were ranked from #5 to #10;

* Two listings on page two of Google’s search results (#11 to #20);

* One listing on page three of Google’s results (#21 to #30).

We built this website with the express intent of earning affiliate commissions in the travel industry. The prognosis is good, as we have already started earning money from this website, and in terms of our current earnings, we expect to be in the black against our initial investment into this website, within about three months.

More About Reprint Articles

The concept of the reprint article is to write an article and give it to other webmasters to use in their websites and newsletters, in exchange for a link back to your website.

Those articles that seek to teach something of value typically get published more frequently than those articles geared to sell a product or service. It is our fervent belief that the Author’s resource box - the paragraph that follows the article - is the only place where a writer should try to sell his or her wares. The goal of the resource box is to get a reader to your website, and your website is where the real selling should take place.

Reprint articles offer good value to the people who use them wisely. But the online marketer must first be willing to invest the required time or money to have appropriate articles written and/or distributed.

While it is true that I work for an article distribution company, it is important to note that our guiding principle is that each article distribution company will reach a different and unique audience. As such, we always use our own service to distribute articles and occasionally we use our competitors’ article distribution companies as well.

We distribute ALL of our own articles through our own company, because we know that our service does provide real value. But for some articles, we do go to some of our competitors to increase our reach and to reach new audiences.

We actually learned to do this from some of our more successful customers, who suggest that there are certain publishers that only we can reach, while my competitors also have certain publishers that only they are able to reach. As a result, many of our customers use two or three article distribution companies, and we do too.

Working Smarter

While reprint articles is a tool that we consistently utilize to build links and to grow traffic to our websites, there remains a more long-term, yet more valuable approach to building links for our websites.

Link Bait is an idea where you create a resource that people find so useful that they feel compelled to link to it from their own websites.

Look at it this way. With reprint articles, we have to write the article, and then distribute it through the sources we choose to use to get it into circulation. All told, we will invest several hours into writing, and then we will invest another hour to distribute the article.

All told, we will have spent four to five hours to write and distribute this article. In turn, we will receive dozens or hundreds of links from related web pages (the links are from “related web pages”, because we designed the article content to look like what we are trying to promote). Writing and distributing articles typically creates a great return of value for our businesses.

But consider this. Last week, we created a resource page on one of our websites (http://www.techcentralpublishing.com/more-article-directories.php). This page is a list of the +1200 article directories we know to exist on the Internet. We were not the first website to offer such a list, but we may be the first to give the Internet community an easy method to add new sites and to flag bad sites, automatically from the page where the list is displayed.

If you are able to create a page such as this that people find extremely useful, then people are more inclined to link to your page, without you even asking them to do so. The beauty about building pages like this on the Internet is that all you have to do is to let people know it is there, and then the links will roll in steadily.

One Link Bait page we built on May 1st, 2004 has been used by the public more than 38,000 times according to its built-in counter. And according to a Yahoo search, it has more than 10,000 inbound links from third-party websites.

We built the page (http://www.thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl) in a day, wrote one article to let people know it was there, and then we left the page alone for more than four-and-a-half years.

Do you see how it is much easier to build one link bait, notify the world, and then to let people link to your web page for you? The time invested in our Text To Hyperlink Converter was less than 12 hours, yet it has attracted +10,000 links with almost no promotion on our part. And this article will generate +100 links in exchange for five hours of our time.

In Conclusion

We are working smart when we write and distribute articles to promote a website. The Shopping Travel Deals site attests to the value of reprint articles to build links and traffic to a new website quickly.

But we are working smarter, when we invest the additional time to build a link bait web page that people will appreciate and link to for us, without any additional effort on our part.

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Trey Pennewell is part of http://www.thephantomwriters.com and http://www.linksandtraffic.com support staff.

In the quest to bring more effective Internet promotion tools to their customers, The Phantom Writers is proud to announce that in conjunction with professional video editors and voice-over personalities, they now offer professional Video Creation Services. It has been made possible for online marketers to easily convert their promotional articles to Video Articles. Explore the unlimited possibilities of Video Marketing at: http://thephantomwriters.com/video-article-marketing.html

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This article was originally posted here.

If you don’t know Matt Cutts, he is a quality engineer at Google, who specialized in targeting spam websites and getting them out of the Google index by algorithm. Matt has a blog on his website where he shares tips and tricks for getting better rankings in Google. Interestingly, he often dissects websites who claimed they are being unfairly ignored by Google. When Matt does the dissection, it is very informative. People do some of the stupidest things on their websites and cry when they get the short end of the Google stick.

I have never felt a desire to complain, because I consistently get lots of Google Love (lots of Link Popularity and hundreds of Top Google Rankings).

Now, ole’ boy had suggested that the reason I should fear Matt was because he thought my flavor of SEO work was bad and would be condemned by Matt, and Ole’ Boys’ flavor of SEO was so much better than mine. Ole’ boy insisted that Matt would kill my website, because by Ole’ Boys’ assertion, I was one of the bad guys.

One of those things that I find to be so interesting about people like Ole’ Boy is that if they are such great SEO people, how come they have time to make thousands of posts to many different online forums? I try to participate in forums too, but my post numbers are still in the dozens or lower hundreds. I am simply too busy doing paid work to make thousands of forum posts, but Ole’ Boy who claims to be smarter than I and a better SEO than I, has time enough to spend almost all day every day in forums being incessantly irritating to anyone who dares enter his little world.

Now personally, I don’t believe I have anything to fear of Mr. Cutts (known in some forums as Google Guy). I think he is a good guy, looking out for you and I and everyone nice.

I am not presumptuous enough to suggest that I believe Matt Cutts ever reads anything that I write, but to be honest, I would not be surprised if he has read my stuff once or twice.

I do get quite a bit of ink in the SEO community with the articles that I write about Search Engine Optimization. I am certainly not one of the biggest names in SEO, but I do get quite a bit of publication with my SEO articles.

Now the reason I do not fear Matt Cutts is because I believe I do my SEO in ways that Google appreciates. I don’t believe I am a spammer, and my hundreds of Top Google Rankings would seem to indicate that Google doesn’t see me as a spammer either.

Could Ole’ Boy be wrong??? You betcha. At the very least, he is wrong about me and my SEO methods.

The only thing I think Ole’ Boy has right is that he needs to spend his energy knocking me down, because that is going to be the only way he could ever look good in comparison to me. {thumb on nose and tongue sticking out at Ole’ Boy, and making that “pfffft” sound.}

Yes. I should not fear Matt Cutts and neither should you. In fact, when Matt Cutts speaks, you should listen. And that is the reason for this post.

Cutts puts a lot of Google information on his blog, but more importantly, he creates a lot of videos to be placed online and when he speaks at conferences, people record his message for play on the Internet. I came across a video by Matt Cutts that I wanted to share with you. It is an old video, but it is as important today as it was in May of 2007 when it was initially recorded. The subject of this video is “Whitehat SEO Tips For Bloggers“. Click this link to watch the video.

This is a lengthy video, but it is worth watching from the beginning to the end. And when you are done, you owe it to yourself to look up Matt Cutts Videos and spend an afternoon consuming his words of wisdom.

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My name is Bill Platt. I am the owner of the following websites: The Phantom Writers, Article Marketing Meets SEO Blog, Links And Traffic, Karma SEO, and others. I also contribute to the Article Content Provider Blog.

If something feels like it would be a bad idea in the future, then we recommend that you should avoid doing such things.

Any technique used that creates short-term gains may be justifiable for most webmasters, but if that technique gets your website banned from Google, two years from now, recovery will be nearly impossible. Most websites that get banned by Google will never get unbanned.

The SEO game we all play as individual webmasters has some serious penalties behind it, if we screw up.

If we know that hidden text is something that draws Google’s ire, then why would we even consider hidden text on any of our web pages? Back in 1998, when I was just getting involved in the challenges of getting good rankings in search engines, even I had been guilty of keyword stuffing in image tags and meta tags. Fortunately, I saw the light and stopped that practice well before Google began to penalize sites for that kind of conduct.

I own nearly 20 websites that are live and operational. None of my websites are banned and they never have been banned by Google or any other search engine. I have top ten listings in Google for most of my websites, and I intend to keep my top rankings in as many of my websites as I can muster. In fact, none of my websites are dropping in the Google Sphere, but all are finding better rankings as we move forward.

One of my websites is a free dating site, and if you are not aware, this is a very competitive market. So far, I have moved about ten keywords into page one rankings at Google. For many of those keywords, my website sits at #2, outranked only by Penthouse’s dating website! Although it is still a small dating website, it sees a lot of traffic from the search engines, primarily Google, and the website’s member base is growing at a fairly nice clip.

We drive great search engine rankings using a three-prong approach:

1. Build web pages with a focus on making sure our web pages are “topic-oriented” rather than “keyword-oriented”. By focusing on a range of similar keywords, rather than focusing on a single or a few keywords, we believe the search engines see our pages as more honest and more on-topic.
2. We build inbound links to our web pages (not just the home page, but a variety of pages within a website), using article marketing, social bookmarks, and forum posts.
3. We add value to the pages that link to us, by linking to them, using article marketing, social bookmarks, and forum posts. Frequently, we build backwards two or three levels to ensure that the pages pointing at our web pages have real Link Popularity value with the search engines.

Everything we do is based on creating value for our web pages in the eyes of the search engines and the humans visiting our web pages. We provide value content on our web pages. We provide value content on the pages that link to us. And we provide value to the web pages that point to us.

In the end, this is a long-term strategy that employs strictly Whitehat SEO principles.

We did not just think of this search ranking strategy yesterday. We have used this philosophy going back several years, but we did not put a definition to it until late 2006. We registered this website (KarmaSEO.com) in 2007, so that we could help people learn the techniques we have used to be successful in the search engine ranking game.

Maybe I should not call it a “game”, because for you and I, this can be a extremely serious business marketing strategy. But in a lot of ways, this is like a football game, where we get to play against some of the best footballers in the country, to see how good we really are as a Search Engine Optimization company.

In my years of helping online marketers promote their businesses, I have seen business models that seemed to have all of the elements necessary to ensure great success. And unfortunately, I have seen many of these perfect business models fail miserably, because their owners failed to honor their business with a realistic promotional plan.

Putting The Cart Before The Horse

When people begin to promote their new business, this is where most people begin to err.

Just recently, I spoke with an individual who started a business in a pretty competitive field. I don’t view heavy competition as being a bad thing. In fact, I find that there are often enough customers in any niche to support the additional competitors, especially when a new competitor answers a need not served by the current players.

The individual to whom I refer made his mistake by focusing 95% of his advertising budget on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), before he even knew what keywords would help him to be profitable in his business! He has so far blown $9,500 of his $10,000 to optimize his website for the search engines, and he still does not know what keywords will drive traffic to his website, leading to sales conversions for his website.

His “backwards” approach has left him with only $500 in his budget, with little hope for his future. He now emails me 4-5 times a week, always in a state of utter panic for the prospect of his future. All I can tell him is to be patient, since he has to learn how to “bootstrap” his way to success, now that he has no budget left to build strong and fast.

Test Your Copy First

Search Engine Optimization should “never” be a business’ first step in the promotion process. Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement. Look at it this way. What good is search optimization if you have optimized for the wrong keywords?

The first step in the promotion of any business should be focused on attracting potential customers to one’s website.

The marketer needs to put human eyeballs on the website, so that they can test and tweak their sales copy for greater sales conversion.

Until a website has seen several hundred visitors, the sales copy should not be changed or tweaked. Sales copy should always be tested against a large statistical group of visitors, in order to ensure that the copy is given a fair and realistic test.

If the online marketer has a bit more money to start the process, often the best spent money will be to hire a professional copywriter to write the sales copy for the website. Professional copywriters have a skill, and that skill is to create the words that will drive people to buy what you are selling.

Test Traffic Is Important To The Process

Most Internet Marketing newbies are still focused on getting those first few hundred visitors to their websites.

At this point, there are systems like Link Referral and Traffic Swarm that can help the new business owner bring in a bit of traffic to their website. In a test with Link Referral, I am seeing 250 visitors per month. The neat thing about systems like these is that other members will review your website and offer good advice on how to improve your website, if necessary. Membership is free for both systems, with an option for paid upgrades.

The Law Of Attraction

While the traffic exchange systems mentioned above can send some traffic to your website, you are not going to get rich participating in those systems.

Once you have positioned your website to convert visitors to buyers, it is time to start attracting a larger number of visitors (potential customers) to your website.

There are a number of ways to do this, but two of the most effective are: Article Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Article Marketing

Mark Silver recently produced an exceptional home study course about writing articles that will help you be much more successful in your article marketing activities.

Just last week, a friend of mine told me that he has not promoted his website in over a year, yet he noticed that his website has a steady stream of traffic to it, from the three-dozen articles that he wrote and distributed in 2006 and 2007. He said that his ebook continues to produce new sales each and every month, and the only thing he can really attribute those continuing sales to is the articles that are available on the Internet that are promoting his website and ebook.

Article marketing, in and of itself, is a promotional tool that will allow a marketer to bring regular visitors to his or her website, and if the website does its job well, then the website will be able to convert those visitors to buyers. This is important, because all businesses need money coming into a website early, to ensure that the business can survive financially, until the long-term “recipe for profit” can be found and duplicated reliably.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a process where you bid on keywords in the major search engines, through Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc. You tell the search engine companies what words you desire to bid on and how much you are willing to pay for a visitor, and the highest bidders for that keyword phrase will be shown above and to the right of the free results in the search engine results pages.

Keyword research, utilizing systems like Word Tracker, or my favorite, NicheBot will enable you to brainstorm keywords and get a good idea of which keywords might be more profitable for your business.

By utilizing Google Analytics or Yahoo’s Panama Full Analytics (traffic analysis), an online marketer can follow a visitor from the search engine to the marketer’s sales page. Where this is important is it enables an online marketer to uncover the essential business knowledge of which “keywords” will bring people into a website and help convert those visitors into customers.

Essential SEO Knowledge

What one must keep in mind is that some keywords will deliver visitors who will never buy, while other keywords will deliver visitors who are extremely likely to buy. This one paragraph holds within it the secret to a successful SEO strategy. This is the essential knowledge that a marketer should have, before engaging in any Search Engine Optimization campaign.

Like I said previously in this article, “Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement.”

If you are going to spend a lot of money to optimize your website for the search engines, doesn’t it make much more sense to target the keywords that will actually help you to earn back your investment?

The Backwards Thinking

The backwards thinking I referred to in the beginning of this article was the idea that many people put SEO in front of their keyword research, keyword tracking and keyword conversion statistics.

An industry I like to pick on is the travel industry. In order to rank well for the solitary keyword “travel” in the search engines will require an astronomical SEO budget. But most people seeking travel information are looking for something just a bit more specific, like: Disney vacations, Hawaii vacations, and European travel.

So long as a keyword has been proven to convert visitors and sales, then it makes sense to optimize for that keyword. But you will never truly know which keywords will convert visitors and sales, until you have invested some of your budget into pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.

Once the necessary “keyword” knowledge is in hand, then the marketer can make an investment into search engine optimization for those keywords that can actually make them money, and with good SEO deployment, the marketer can find that they can actually capture a lot of the search engine traffic for specific keywords through the search engines’ free listings.

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Bill Platt has offered article marketing services on the Internet since 2001 at http://www.thePhantomWriters.com - As an extension of his article marketing service, he has developed a process he refers to as Karma SEO. After two years of testing his Karma SEO philosophy, Bill has reached an understanding of how he can finally offer Pay-For-Performance SEO Services. Learn more at: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com/seo-services/search-marketing.html

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Consider also his blogs: Marketing Tips blog, Article Marketing blog, and another he contributes to on occasion.

You might note that this post is dated September 5th, 2008. That means that our sales page has been live for just four days.

Now, it must be noted that as soon as we turned the web page on - live to the public - we started the process of implementing Karma SEO to promote this web page.

It took Google roughly 36 hours for Google to actually crawl and cache the web page. And within another 36 hours, our web page started breaking into Page One of Google’s results for many of our target keywords!

Without telling you are targeted keywords, I will show you how we rank for those target search terms.

It is always a challenge to do this, because if I tell you the exact keywords that we use, then our competitors could find this page and force us to compete more aggressively for the search phrases we are currently ranking well.

We made that mistake one time. We gave up one targeted search phrase with which we comfortably held the number one spot in Google for six years. We gave it up, in order to prove to people that we were actually targeting strongly competitive keywords, so that they would have a better appreciation of our ability to do this for others.

Within only two months, our competitors aggressively targeted the search term we exposed. As a result, we dropped to page two of Google’s search results. Since then, we have managed to aggressively pursue that search term again and elevate ourselves back to #5.

As you can probably imagine, that experience taught us never to expose our targeted keyword phrases in a public forum.

So, for this new page we built for our website, where we actually advertise our Karma SEO Service, we have reached Page One of Google’s search rankings on competitive keyword phrases in only 3 days (as of yesterday).

Keyword Phrase #1 - two words - #3 in Google of 22 million results

Keyword Phrase #2 - four words - #3 in Google of 56,000  results

Keyword Phrase #3 - four words - #3 in Google of 57,000 results

Keyword Phrase #4 - four words - #6 in Google of 83,000 results

Keyword Phrase #5 - two words - #3 in Google of 28,000 results

Keyword Phrase #6 - three words - #9 in Google of 373,000 results

Keyword Phrase #7 - five words - #3 in Google of 457,000 results

Keyword Phrase #8 - three words - #3 in Google of 511,000 results

Keyword Phrase #9 - three words - #1 in Google of 725,000 results

Keyword Phrase #10 - two words - #3 in Google of 2 million results

This is a decent range of keywords with good rankings, after only three days playing the field. But this is a new program. The question most people will have is whether we can maintain those high rankings for these specific search terms after 30 days, 60 days, or one year.

We already know the answer to that question, and in 30 days, 60 days, and one year, you will know too.

On June 10th, 2008, we entered the most recent SEO Contest for the search phrase “blackhat fish“. We had gone up against more than 200,000 pages aimed at qualifying as winners in that contest. At the close of the 30-day contest, challenging some of the greatest minds in SEO, we finished the contest 25 days after we started in the #11 spot of Google’s search results for the target search term. Three days after the contest had ended, we reached #5 and continued to bounce between #3 and #5 for the next 60 days.

But, on a check just now, our web page was in the #1 for both “blackhat fish” and “black hat fish“. Of course, it was my intention to target both the two-word and three-word version of the search phrase. I tried to think ahead as to how people would “remember” the target search term and type it into Google for checking. I figured most would remember the proper “blackhat fish”, but others might remember it as “black hat fish”, so I made sure we ranked for both.

So here we are, 90 days out from the start of our attempt to rank for the challenged keyword phrase “blackhat fish”, and we are firmly sitting in the #1 spot in Google. Therefore, I am confident that in 90 days time, we will retain the high rankings we have already achieved for the afore referenced search terms, or perhaps even improve upon what we have already accomplished.

One year from now, we will still own “blackhat fish” and the unnamed keywords that we are now on Page One of Google for. I know this, without any hesitation, because I own #1 on lots of search terms, and some of those #1’s, I have held firmly for years.

We can do the same for you, if you order our Karma SEO Service. While our service may not be for everyone, it is a service that many will be able to appreciate and use.

It is like I say on our sales page…

We don’t have to pay Google for traffic…

They give it to US for FREE!

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My name is Bill Platt, and I am the creator of the Karma SEO Concept and the owner of the Karma SEO Service, housed on my other website, LinksAndTraffic.com.

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In essence, Karma SEO is a principle based on the concept of Karma, which is defined as “what comes around, goes around”.

People have always said that the point of Link Building is to build Link Popularity to the web pages on ones’ website. But, unless you are buying links, Link Popularity is hard to predict or replicate.

When one uses a Link Building Method such as Article Marketing, all articles on placed on new web pages, which because they are new web pages, they have no Link Popularity and no Google PageRank.

For several years, we have known that the best way to ensure that our websites gain the Link Popularity that we desire, then we need to ensure that the web pages linking to our web pages gain their own Link Popularity and PageRank. On this realization, we started a campaign to make sure that most every page that links to our web pages will gain its own Link Popularity for the sake of the search engines.

Many people find this an undesirable approach, because it means that they are spending some of their limited marketing budget to build Link Popularity for their online friends.

But the beauty in this concept is that when you are helping your friends, you are helping yourself. By taking pro-active measures to ensure that your friends have Link Popularity, you are ensuring that they will have more Link Popularity to share with you.

We have been using this technique for our own websites for several years. And as of September 2, 2008, we now offer the same service to our customers, under a Pay-For-Performance SEO Service that enables our customers to pay us according to how successful we are at getting our customers ranked in the Google Search Results. Learn more about our Karma SEO Pay-For-Performance Service here.

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Bill Platt - Stillwater, Oklahoma