SEO

Yesterday I was telling you how dominating the SERP's was the easiest and fastest way to make money online, also the most cost effective. I also told you a little story on how I got started and how I spent thousands of dollars learning everything I know now, even though my education was very expensive my plan is to teach you everything I know because I want to get back at all the so called guru's and internet marketing teachers that got away with my money. Even though my education was very expensive I want to give it all away for free just to make them mad as I put them out of business.

Basically what i'm trying to do is keep you and other people just like you that are trying to earn money online from being scammed, i'm not saying that I will not try to make money from my visitors, but only if I find something that actually works then I will encourage you to try it and I will make a few bucks if any sale is made. You have to think about me as a filter, a filter of information.

Think of Google.com as the girl that you want to marry, Yahoo.com and Msn (Bing.con) will be your girls on the side. If you want to be happy you must have them, and your goal is to get on top of them, literally. If you manage to get on top of Msn (Bing.com) you will get a few visitors to your page each day, getting on top of bing is somewhat easier than the other two. If you get on top of Yahoo then you can expect dozens of visitors or hundreds each day, getting on top of Yahoo is kind of hard but it is actually possible. Google is a whole different story, this is the hardest one to climb, too many people want to have her, so getting her attention is nearly impossible. If you do get on top of Google then you can expect thousands of hits each day, the amount of traffic will depend on the keywords that you choose, if your keyword is "Make Money" then you most likely will become rich, if you keyword is "credit cards" then you can expect to become very rich, on the other hand if your keyword is "making balloons" then you should try to find a better business opportunity.

I don't remember if I talked about how writing articles for article directories was the best way to get free traffic to your sites. When you write an article you get to leave a link pointing to your site at the bottom of the article therefore you are creating a new back link for your site, so people that read your article will usually click on your link and they will land on your page. Another good reason for writing articles is that if your article is good most of the time other webmasters looking for content will take that article and they will use it on their sites, therefore you'll be getting even more backlinks.

So why the hell am I talking so much about back links? A few years ago people tried to alter their rankings by using techniques that could make you rank for any keyword even if that keyword was not on your site's same topic/niche. You could make a recipe site rank for "making money" if you placed those keywords in the Meta Tags. If you don't know what meta tags are then you can google it. Meta tags lost their value very fast as Google soon recognized how this affected their effectiveness when providing searchers with the real "stuff" that they were looking for. If you wanted to make a site that ranked for the keyword "earn money on the internet" all you had to do was create a site and fill it with a lot of worthless content that talked about earning money and then the search engines would just come crawling your site for it's lousy content, and you would easily rank for your chosen keywords on all three of them.

Before going any further I should tell you that Google handles nearly all the web traffic in the world, about 60% to 80% of the traffic. Yahoo gets about 20% and Msn now known as bing.com gets about 10%, these are rough estimates though, remember that there are other search engines like altavista, they get traffic as well.

Now Meta tags are a thing of the past, since people got to game Google by using meta tags they got rid of them as a ranking factor for good, and they decided that they would value a site and rank it depending on their Page Rank (PR) and back links. So to get page rank you need backlinks, and before getting some PR of your own you have to wait to some time until you get out of the Google Sandbox. The PR algorithm and the Google's ranking system is still a mystery for webmasters, SEO's, engineers, etc. No one knows why do they really rank a website for, because every now and then you can find sites with PR 0 ranking for the most competitive keywords on the internet, and sometimes you can find high PR sites not ranking at all. Google has recently announced that PR will no longer be an important factor when ranking for a keyword, they have even been telling everyone to remove the PR bar from their browsers.


Page Rank

Page Rank is the system that Google invented to determine the importance that each page has. If you get backlinks from sites with high Page Rank then you will probably rank number 1 for your keyword, especially if they are relevant back links. Thousands of backlinks from PR 0 sites could get your pages up to a PR 1 maybe even a PR 2, if you just have a 10 to 20 back links but they all come from pages with PR 5 up to PR 8 then you could probably get a PR 4, 5 or even higher because Google will see your site as a very important site with a lot of important votes. If you manage to get .edu and .gov relevant back links with high PR then your rankings will improve even more because these links have a lot of importance in Google's eyes, and if you ever get to find a PR 8 back link then you have to know that you will probably get to page one in most of the SERP's for your keyword. According to many experts if you get a few hundred back links with on PR 3 sites or higher then you will get page one ranking without any doubt.

Back Links

Finally, Backlinks are the most important factor when it comes to ranking well, if you don't have them you won't rank, as simple as that. You better learn this fast because as a beginner most people choose not to follow this advice, and this is the most important thing to get ranked and to get on top of the three major search engines. But there are things that you have to know so you don't waste a lot of you time pursuing links that will not do any good to your site, although a link is a link there are links that have way more value for your site, depending on the topic of your site and the topic of the site linking to you the link will increase or decrease in value accordingly.

Google sees back links as votes for your site, if you have a lot of backlinks then google will rank you. This used to be the case at the beginning, if you had a site and the subject or keyword was "make money on the internet" and you had thousands of sites linking to your page and your competitors did not have as many backlinks then you would get a page one ranking very fast, and you would easily become the number one ranked site. As soon as this technique became obvious keyword stuffers now known as black hat marketers started to create thousands of crappy sites that had links back (back links) to their main site. Again gaming Google was something that would not last long, as the Google engineers noticed black hat activities they decided to rank sites according to relevant back links, this meant that back links from sites within the same subject or niche would be given more value, thereofore they would provide you with higher rankings.

As usual people just have a way of finding out about things, evilll people! So when the black hat community discovered this new ranking factor, they just went on to create thousands of blogs or mini sites full of worthless information, they would stuff their keyword on these worthless blogs, and they would create relevant back links for their main pages, these back links where coming supposedly from relevant sites. They even used a lot of different softwares designed to spam forums, guest books, and create thousands of blogs by doing one simple click. Now getting thousands of backlinks was easier than ever, relevant quality back links by just making a few clicks. What happened was that webmasters from forums, blogs and websites implemented the word verification system in order to be able to reply or leave a comment at their sites, you know that little box that you have to fill out everywhere before commenting, the one that asks you to write some letters or numbers.

Once more Google decided to alter the ranking algorithm to prevent more evil people from gaming them, so they decided to value back links which are relevant to your subject, back links that come from a lot of different IP addresses, back links with high PR, back links from sites that have great content that have already been highly valued by Google, and you have to wait some time until you get out of the Sandbox. If you get all of these things right then you will rank in the first page for your keyword, and when that happens you will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Back links may be the most important thing when it comes to SEO, but they are just one part of a good SEO campaign, come back as I will be posting more detailed information on search engine optimization techniques, I will be using as a resource google's SEO starter guide, and I will also make my own mini course which will earn you a degree in SEO. .