#1 NoFollow is B.S.
"NoFollow" was an attribute introduced by Google to combat spam links and clean up the search engine
index. The NoFollow attribute is supposed to mean "I do not want to vouch for this website, but I want
to link to them." Google urged website owners to use the tag to prevent spam and abuse but it quickly
took over the internet and now most links are NoFollow.
This is a major problem for Google because they have a much smaller data set to work with. Because of
this problem, Google HAS to count NoFollow links, otherwise there wouldn't be enough out there to
effectively rank most keywords - especially obscure and long tail ones.
Don't buy into the "only use DoFollow links" mindset - go for any links you can get and see what works
for YOU.
This is what a NoFollow tag looks like in HTML:
rel="nofollow"
#2 Video Sitemaps
Video sitemaps let you tell Google what your videos are about which in turn helps you rank for related
keywords. If you don't have a video sitemap for your videos you're making Google guess what your
videos are about by pulling bits and pieces from your page. If you want maximum search engine traffic
you have to hold their hand sometimes and show them that you should be ranking for more keywords.
If you don't have a video sitemap you're going to pass up on a lot of free traffic. The process for creating
them is very simple and everyone should do it if they have videos on their website. By submitting a
video sitemap you can rank in search engine for the "universal search results" which will let your videos
rank on the first page for keywords.
Google has a very comprehensive tutorial on making video sitemaps
here
. Once your video sitemap is
ready you can upload it to
Google Webmaster Tools
by following
these instructions
.
#3 Authority Link Network + Expired Domains
Authority Link Network
is a network of blogs between PR2-PR6 that you can join by submitting old
websites you don't use anymore or buying some expired domains with PageRank. For every PR2 website
you add to the network you can post on 15 blogs with PageRank with 3 links back to any website you
want.
The beauty in a blog network is that the links are extremely natural in appearance because the blogs are
owned by the users in the network and not the network itself. ALN is free - you just have to submit your
own blogs to post to others.
If you don't have any old domains laying around with PageRank you can use a tool called
GoDaddy
Auctions PR Checker
. This plugin lets you browse through GoDaddy auctions and see which expired/old
domains they have for sale with PageRank. You can easily find lots of PR2 websites using this plugin and
sometimes you'll find PR3 and PR4 sites for under $20. Without this plugin checking all of the domains
manually would take forever, so use it if you want to join ALN and need domains!
Once you have your domains sign up for
Authority Link Network
- it's free, you just have to add the
domains you bought to the network. ALN offers comprehensive instructions and guidelines on
adding blogs and submitting articles so be sure to read them when you sign up. You can use this
link building method exclusively and do very well in search engines.
#4 Search Operators for Blog Commenting
You may have heard of blog commenting, but if you're currently doing it you can probably do it more
efficiently. Most people don't know that on Google you can use special search phrases called operators
that let you find exactly what you want with pinpoint precision.
This is an example of a search operator for finding blogs to comment on:
site:.com inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “keyword here”
This is a lot less complicated than it looks - it's really a matter of copying/pasting. I'll break down each
piece to give you an idea of how it all works.
site:.com - This operator tells Google to only return websites with .com as the domain extension. You
can use this to find specific types of websites like .edu or .gov sites with backlinking opportunities.
inurl:blog - This operator tells Google to only return websites that have blog somewhere in the URL. So
for example it could be http://blog.website.com or http://website.com/blog and so on.
“post a comment” - This tells Google to only return websites that have the words "post a comment"
somewhere on it. By including this we won't waste any time trying to leave comments on websites that
won't let you.
-”comments closed” - This tells Google to not return any websites that have the words "comments
closed" on the page. By adding this to the search operator we won't be shown any websites that are no
longer open for comments.
-”you must be logged in” - This tells Google to not return any websites that you have to be logged in to
leave a comment. This is a great addition to this search operator because we will only be shown
websites where we can leave a comment without making an account. This one addition will save you
loads of time because you won't ever have to make an account on a website to leave a blog comment.
“keyword here” - This is where you enter one of your target keywords. Adding this part into the
operator will help return niche relevant blogs to give your website a higher level of relevancy.
By combining all of these search operators into one search we can find the perfect blogs to comment on
without having to do any digging. All you have to do is copy/paste the entire operator and replace
keyword here with your keyword. If you have trouble getting lots of results try removing the site: and
inurl: operators to get a larger amount of results.
#5 YouTube Link Wheels
There's a huge opportunity on YouTube to build up your website and your YouTube channel. You can
leverage popular/inactive channels with high PageRank to make YOUR channel, videos, and websites
rank better in search engines.
To do this you need to do an advanced search on Google by going to Google.com and clicking this button
on the top right that says "Advanced Search":
Once the advanced search page loads we need to fill it out. This is what it will look like once it's ready to
go:
"All these words" field - will only show YouTube channels that have the words "year-ago?" on them.
This will only return YouTube channels that are both old AND most likely inactive - which means our link
will be at the top for a very long time or permanently.
This exact wording or phrase field - Will only show YouTube channels that have the words channel
comments on them. This means that we won't be wasting our time trying to leave links on channels that
don't allow you to.
Any of these unwanted words field - This is important. This is where we're telling Google we don't want
to see any active channels, in fact we only want to see channels that haven't been commented on in at
least 2 months. This will make sure that our link stays at the top and we don't have to keep building new
channel links because someone pushed ours off the front page of the channel.
Enter this exactly in the unwanted words field:
day-ago days-ago week-ago weeks-ago hour-ago hours-ago month-ago
Result per page - I set this to 100 so I can export the data later and don't have to keep going to a new
page after every 10 channels.
Search within a site or domain field - Enter youtube.com/user/ in this field because we only want to
see YouTube channels, not other websites or parts of YouTube.
When you have it all filled out hit the Advanced Search button.
Once your results are returned you'll see A LOT of YouTube channels.
Now to make things as effective as possible we need to sort them by PageRank. For this I use a free
plugin called
SEOQuake
. It's super simple to use, once it's installed there will be an icon in the bottom
right of your browser like this:
All you have to do is click that button and it'll become color filled - this means SEOQuake is on. Now we
just have to refresh the search results page.
If SEOQuake is working the results should now have additional information once you refresh the page
like this:
Where the first result is click the arrow pointing downwards - this will sort the YouTube channels by
PageRank.
Now the highest PageRank channels will be at the top of the search results and we can work our way
down.
To leave a comment just visit the YouTube channel while you're logged in and scroll down to the
"comments" section, type in a comment and hit Post!
Once your comment is posted it will show up at the top of the channel comments like this:
Now I have a DoFollow PR6 link going to my YouTube channel. The reason we looked for these "dated"
channels is because the last comment was over a YEAR ago. The odds of my comment getting knocked
off the channel from other user activity is very low.
Another little trick you can use SEOQuake for is saving all of the URLs with PageRank to an excel file.
While you're on the search results page and SEOQuake is activated you can save all of the SEOQuake
data to an excel file by clicking this button:
Now you have all of those channels sorted by PageRank in a csv you can send to your outsource worker,
VA, or whoever does your SEO tasks if you want to outsource them.
#6 SocialMonkee
Social Bookmarking is a simple way to store your favorite websites and bookmarks online so you can
access them from anywhere. The great thing about them is that they also give you a public link back to
your website.
It's a huge pain to manually add your website, articles, or properties to all of the social bookmarking
sites and take forever.
Social Monkee
automatically submits your website to social bookmarking sites -
you just provide the details. It's free for up to 25 submissions per day and the paid version offers 100
submissions 3 times a day. It's a great tool for quick and easy link building that I use very often.
Make sure you're not sending tons of social bookmarks to a brand new website - spread it out and make
it look like the website is gaining more and more over time.
#7 Exact Match Domains
The fact remains that search engines are crazy about relevancy. Having an exact match domain is as
relevant as you can possibly get, and for that reason they're a powerful tool for any SEO campaign.
An exact match domain is any domain (.com/.net/.org) that contains only the target keyword. If one of
my target keywords was "low carb bread recipe" the domain name http://lowcarbbreadrecipe.net
would be considered an exact match domain.
Another thing I want to mention is that I don't consider domains with dashes exact match. For example
http://low-carb-bread-recipe.net wouldn't be an exact match domain for the keyword low carb bread
recipe. I avoid domains with dashes whenever I can (if I'm going for the exact match benefit) because
they've been much harder to rank for us in comparison to domains without dashes.
You can use these websites to funnel traffic into your money site or use them to monetize from affiliate
sales or programs like Google AdSense. Exact match domains are so powerful they can rank on the first
page with a few articles and some basic on site SEO. The reasoning all goes back to relevance - you can't
be more relevant than 100% match.
There are a few tools we recommend for finding exact match domains:
Exact Domain Tool
- Free
Position Sniper
- $27/month but higher quality
BONUS: #8 Market Samurai
Market Samurai
is the leader in keyword/competitive research software for internet marketers, which is
exactly why if you don't have it you need to get it. David and I use this tool CONSTANTLY in our
businesses and it's been a lifesaver in terms of time (and money) doing research on potential keywords.
With Market Samurai you can look at keywords in depth to decide if they're worth targeting or not. You
can find a goldmine of useful data that would take hours of compiling to put together manually. Here
are some screenshots of cool features in Market Samurai:
The Keyword Research module lets you find exactly what you're looking for with loads of useful metrics
and stats to help make the RIGHT decisions - this alone can make or break your SEO.
This is the SEO Competition tab in Market Samurai. I probably use this feature more than anything else
because it's SO useful. It compiles a list of different metrics that you choose to determine the level of
competition and viability of the keyword. My favorite part of this module is that you can easily just look
at the top 10 and get an idea of how competitive the keyword is without digging into each metric one by
one.
There are a lot more modules and training inside of
Market Samurai
- these are just 2 of the features
that I use every day that helps me automate/cut down the time it takes to do SEO tasks.