One of the hardest things to learn while trying to make money online is search engine optimization, frequently called SEO. SEO is the art of changing your site so that it appears in a better locations in search engines. If you can make your site appear in a higher location it will obviously be a lot more visible to people that are searching, creating a lot more visitors (hits).

SEO That Doesn’t Work

Many people spend countless hours obsessing over tiny details on their sites. They try to make sure that there are keywords stuffed everywhere. There are even some tools out there that will calculate keyword density for you. Many SEO professionals will tell you the you have to make sure that your keyword makes up exactly 3.5% of the page. The exact percentage is wildy debated by people in the industry. Some say 5%, some say 1%, some say 10%.

What’s funny to me is that I’ve never been able to see much correlation between keyword density and ranking. I don’t think that it has much correlation at all, and I can prove it.

For a closer examination, let’s closely examine the keyword ‘make money online’, and the sites that are ranked in the top 10 in Google for that keyword. In order to find the percentage of the page that is made up of the words ‘make money online’, I have used the keyword density tool at KeywordDensity.com. The tool not only takes into account what we see on the page, it reads all of the code for the page, so it counts Title Tags, Alt Tags, Meta Tags, and everything else that appears in the code for the page. To make sure that there isn’t a correlation between keyword density of the visible text and rankings I will also show the percentage for visible text only. The table will show Google ranking, site URL, percentage of the HTML code that is made up of the keyword ‘make money online’, and percentage of visible text that is made up of the keyword ‘make money online’.

Have a good look at those and see if one should be ranked in front of the other based on the keywords placed on the page. Let’s see we have Bidvertiser with a pretty low percentage and then we have John Chow with a middle of the road to high percentage and then we have Squidoo back down with a really low percentage and then we have MoneyMakerInfo with an even lower percentage and then we have ProBlogger with a microscopic percentage and then we jump back up to CanIMakeBigMoneyOnline that has a pretty high percentage and then we crash back down to RssToBlog with the smallest percentage and then we erupt back up to DoshDosh that has a quite high percentage and then we climb even higher to SuccessWithAuctions that has the highest percentage, which really isn’t much higher than John Chow who was number 2 and then we finish with Team-Schuman who is slightly lower than #9.

Why Did I Use That Ridiculous Run-On Sentence? Because I wanted you to get lost in the roller coaster that it is. You go up, down, back up, back down and in the end you see that the amount of times you put the keyword on the page isn’t a major factor that determines your ranking.

What Is A Major Factor Then? What Is The Major Factor?

We know that there are thousands of factors that determine your ranking. There isn’t any point in naming all of them because this article is about determining the biggest factor of SEO.

To illustrate what is the biggest factor of SEO, I want to examine with you one more keyword phrase, which is ‘click here’. If you search for that phrase in Google, you will get 1.3 billion results. Guess who ranks first? Adobe. Why Adobe?

What does Adobe have to do with ‘click here’? Go ahead, have a look at the page that ranks first, here it is. Look for the words ‘click here’ on the page. Are you having any luck finding them? If you are you’ve lost your mind because they’re not there.

Not only does that page not have the words ‘click here’ in the text that you can see, the code for the page doesn’t even have ‘click here’ in it. It’s not in the title of the page, it’s not in the URL of the page, it’s not anywhere.

Why Is That Page Ranked First Then?

How many times have you seen this?:

Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times on all different types of websites. Every time I see a .pdf file for download I see a link next to it. The sites say: Don’t have Acrobat Reader? Click here to download it. Think about it, you see it all over the place. If you haven’t seen it before here are 5 examples:

• http://www.massculturalcouncil.org/contracts/programs.html
• http://www.nccecojustice.org/EarthDay/index.html
• http://www.biausa.org/biam.htm
  
• http://www.education.uiowa.edu/jrel/spring02/contents.htm
• http://www.macgamut.com/DemoDL.html

Can you see what makes that page rank first out of 1.3 billion results? It’s links like this all over the place: Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. There are millions of links pointing to that page and most of them are made out of the keyword phrase ‘click here’. I just helped them out three times by making three links out of the words ‘click here’.

It’s The Words Other Sites Use When They Link To You

This is it, the biggest factor that affects where you’re ranked. Do you know what would happen if I got 1,000,000 pages on the internet to link to me with the keyword ‘make money online’? I would take over the number 1 position in Google for ‘make money online’. In reality it wouldn’t take anywhere near that many links. I wouldn’t have to make a single change to my site. It wouldn’t matter that my site is only 2 months old. Older pages rank better in Google, but it wouldn’t matter because that many links out of the text ‘ make money online’ would trump every other factor.

Need More Proof?

Let’s examine what happened over the last few months with John Chow. John runs a promotion on his site where he will link back to you if you do a review of his site. In the beginning he required you to just link to his homepage and the page where he explains the promotion.

About 2 months ago, he changed the way he did the promotion. He started to require you to link to him with the text ‘make money online’. Now to get the link back from him you have to make a link that looks like this: make money online. (I’m happy to link to John with that phrase because he’s a cool cat and I respect his work.)

What happened after he started running the promotion? Hundreds of people started linking to him with the keywords he wanted to get ranked for. The end result? John crashed the ‘make money online’ party out of nowhere and got ranked #2 in Google. A short 2 months ago he wasn’t even on the map for that keyword.

What This Means For You

If you’re starting from scratch, you need to get people to link to you with the keywords you want to get ranked for. If you don’t know what keywords you want to get ranked for, you should read this lesson on selecting keywords.

How To Get Sites To Link To You With Keywords

The best way to accomplish this is to submit to directories. There are thousands of directories out there that you can get your site into. If you don’t know where to start, have a look at this lesson, “An Oldie But A Goodie - Directory Listings.” The lesson shows you where you can find a list of almost 1,000 directories that you can submit to for free.

When you’re submitting to a directory, you will typically see a screen that looks something like this:

In the spot where it’s asking for the Site Name/Title, type in your keywords instead of your name. When they say Site Name/Title, they’re saying ‘either your site name or title’. I would use ‘make money online free’ instead of ‘Courtney Tuttle’ if I submitted to this directory. You’ll then add in your URL; I would type in http://courtneytuttle.com/. If I used ‘Make Money Online Free’ for the Site Name/Title, the link in that directory would appear like this:

Make Money Online Free

This link in a directory would help me to get ranked more highly for that phrase. I would then repeat the process and submit to a lot of other directories.

Tip: When submitting to directories I would recommend varying your keywords slightly. Instead of submitting to 1,000 directories with ‘make money online free’, I would submit to say 25% of them like that. I would submit to another 25% with ‘make free money online’ and another 25% with ‘make money free online’ and the last 25% with ‘free make money online’. Varying the keywords will help you get ranked for variations of the way people search, and help you to not get filtered by Google for all of your links having the same text.

Other Methods Of Getting Links With Keywords

• Ask. When you do link trades with other bloggers or webmasters, ask them to use your keywords to link to you. It doesn’t make any difference for them and it will help you. Offer to link back to them using their keywords.
• Write posts using keywords in the title. If anyone links to a post of yours, they will probably use the title to make the link. If you want to see an example of how this worked for me, visit the Last Blogger, who linked to one of my posts. He used my article title which got me a link with the keyword phrase ’starting a blog’ in it. You can find the article here: Titles, The Most Important Part Of A Blog Post. What do you know, I just returned the favor!
• Leave keyword links in your signature when posting in forums and discussion boards. Make sure that you contribute to the discussions or this method might get you banned from the forum.
• Write articles for Free Article Directories. They will allow you to put HTML in your author-bio box. Make sure you add the code to create a link out of your keyword. Since I haven’t written about this yet, let me refer you to a great article on the subject that I read a few weeks ago: Driving Traffic With Free Article Services.

If there is one thing you should be working on for your site, it’s getting links with your keywords from other sites.

Healthy Discussion

If you don’t understand any of the points in the lesson, please comment! I would love to clarify anything that isn’t clear!

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