On another blog I have, the majority of traffic came from a massive social media network I built up. I recently decided it was time to put some experimental link building into place to benefit from more search engine traffic. I decided to use 4 methods and so far the results have quickly landed a keyword-targeted blog entry into the top 2-3 pages of Google search results. This only took less than a week to do with a simple Blogspot blog post.
I'll use the example of a celebrity blog. Here's the four methods I used:
1) A Squidoo page - I used the Google Suggest Tool and Free Keyword tool by Workdtracker. With these tools you can enter a general keyword such as "britney spears" and see what related terms are being searched for a lot. So I used those two tools to figure out a good keyword phrase based on what has a high search volume and low competition (for PPC ad campaigns). Next, I did my own Google searches on these terms. I narrowed it down to keyword terms that had 300,000 pages of results or less and finally selected my phrase.
I created a Squidoo lens using the keyword phrase in both title and description. I also included my blog's URL and RSS feed on the Squidoo lens. Squidoo can help get you valuable backlinks, so I'm not sure why people downplay it's usefulness so much. If Squidoo's not making you money directly, it still provides you backlinks or a way for people to discover your blog entries. There's value in those as well so don't overlook Squidoo lenses as an option.
2) A series of blog entries - This involves creating a 10 part series of blog entries. For example, if you have a blog about Entertainment, you could do biography style entries on your top 10 favorite celebrities. You then create a post called "My 10 Favorite Celebs" and link back to each of the 10 individual biography posts. This is great for internal linking from what I've read and now from what I've seen. You can even set the date for those 10 posts back to an earlier day, making it link deeper into your blog archives. I also added the links for each of these posts onto my Squidoo page.
3) Article submission - I wrote a general article using my Keyword phrase in my article title, and within the article body itself. The article was 350-400 words long and far from anything I'd call outstanding writing. On some article directories I was able to use links in the article body, with my keyword phrase as the anchor text. Tread carefully with using too many links in your article, as it may be considered spammy. At the end of my article or in the resource box, I linked to my blog URL and the specific blog post I mentioned before ("Top 10 Celebrities"). I submitted to probably about 25 or so article directories using the free Article Submitter software. It seems that my article on searchwarp.com and ezinearticles.com got into the first few pages of Google search results for a few days.
4) Socialmarker.com - I used this to bookmark the example "My 10 Favorite Celebs" blog post which contains the other internal blog links. Socialmarker bookmarks your item to about 20-30 social bookmark sites (Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc), all of which you must register with. There's a few sites that may not relate to your content, for example they only want internet marketing, SEO, HTML, and technology story bookmarks. Use this method appropriately with your content. I've found that the site indianpad.com actually showed up on some early search results for Google which may warrant you to try submitting more content there. You may also consider bookmarking the Squidoo page and the article your write with Socialmarker.
This took work, but I believe these 4 methods helped my blog entry get into the first few pages of Google search results. I'm going to continue with the article submission, social bookmarking and some other ways to get backlinks to see if I can get to page 1 of the results. If you use the Google Suggest and Wordtracker, I think you can find some heavily searched terms with low competition related to your blog topic. Create a series of blog posts about the keyword phrase you select. Also create a Squidoo page, and the article all using your selected keyword phrase. Then start bookmarking your Squidoo page, blog post and article. You just might surprise yourself at how quick you can get into the first few pages of Google search results!
I know sometimes tech talk can go over my head or other's heads so let me know if anything seems confusing or you have questions.. The Monetizer is here to help.
