Off-Page Optimization - SEO for WordPress: “How I hit page #1 of Google in 27 days!” (2016)

SEO for WordPress: “How I hit page #1 of Google in 27 days!”

Chapter 8 - Off-Page Optimization

After you optimize your homepage, blog posts, and articles; you’ll need to create backlinks to your website. A backlink is a link on another website that directs users back to your website. For example, I wrote an article about “WordPress Plugins”on my website, and I included a link toWordPress.org in my article. That counts as a backlink for the WordPress.org website.

There are a lot of ways to get backlinks to your site. The most popular ways are:

Blog Commenting

Article Marketing

Forum Posting

Social Bookmarking

User Profiles, etc.

Blog Commenting

When you leave a comment on someone’s blog, you’ll see an option to enter your website's URL too. When you enter your website's URL, your “display name” on the comment changes into a clickable hyperlink that points back to your website.

This is my LEAST favorite way to get backlinks for a few reasons:

You have to read the article first if you plan to leave a valid comment.

Most comments are held for moderation, so it’s up to the website's owner if your comment will show up or not.

The website owner can edit your comment and remove your link if he wants.

Posting comments all day takes too much time. Time is your most important asset.

I believe that commenting on blogs is better for branding your website. If you go to www.gravatar.com, you can upload a picture that you want to show up next to all your blog comments.

Some people recommend that you use a picture of your face, but I disagree. I think you should use a picture of your company logo because people will remember your logo faster than your face. So even if a moderator decides to remove your websites link, at least you’re still getting your brand out there!

Leaving blog comments is good, but I wouldn’t waste a lot of time leaving comments if you’re only trying to build backlinks. Most reputable bloggers that recommend “blog commenting” as a backlinking strategy never comment on other people's blogs. So what’s that all about?!

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a really great way to get backlinks to your website. The downside is that it can be time consuming to write 100 different articles and post them to 100 different article directories.

The truth is that nobody does this anyway. Most people write an article once and then pay someone to spin it and submit it to multiple article directories. When I say “spin” the article, I simply mean mixing the words around in an article to make it seem as if it’s a different article.

Spinning an article is “greyhat” SEO because a spun article is technically a “low quality” article. Even if the article is manually spun so it makes sense when someone reads it, it’s still a “grey area” because you’re essentially uploading the same article all over the internet for the sole purpose of getting backlinks.

You won’t get “penalized” for duplicate content unless you upload duplicate content on your actual website. Also, duplicate content is NOT actually “penalized” anyways.

Think about it, Google and article directories simply don’t need the same article 100 times. So Google won’t index duplicate content (because they already have that content) and article directories will reject an article with duplicate content because they already have the content too. So duplicate content isn’t actually penalized because it’s never accepted to begin with.

Now if an entire website is filled with duplicate content or spun articles, then the entire website might get penalized or de-indexed because the website doesn’t have anything unique for Google to index.

Google wants to provide users with unique results. It wouldn’t make sense if the first page of Google had the same article 10 times. That’s the only reason why Google and article websites do not like duplicate content. So if you submit the same exact article to 100 different article directories, then the directory might not approve your article.

If by luck your articles are approved by article directories, Google might not index your those article into their search results to keep their search engine free from duplicate content. Simple!

So you actually have three choices:

1) Write unique articles to submit to article directories (whitehat SEO)

2) Manually spin one of your current articles (greyhat SEO)

3) Pay article writers to write unique articles for you (whitehat + $$$)

You can use websites like Upwork.com or Fiverr.com to find article writers or people to help you spin articles.

Just be careful with Fiverr because you get what you pay for. A lot of users on Fiverr use automated/spammy techniques that are useless. You might want to give them a sample project first to check out their work. If it looks good, then you can give them your main project to work on.

You can actually outsource the entire article writing and submission process. Just don’t go overboard when outsourcing article marketing or any other backlinking services.

If you pay someone to submit 2,000 articles so you can get 2,000 backlinks within 24 hours, then you’re asking for trouble.

2,000 backlinks within 24 hours will not look natural to Google and they might penalize you...maybe. The way Google can penalize you is by pushing your website to the back of their search results, or just removing your website all together from their search engine.

You’re better off paying someone $20 to manually submit your article to 20 article directories rather than paying someone $5 to automatically submit to 2,000 directories. One of my favorite article directories is hubpages.com.

I recommend that you sign up for Hubpages and manually submit your articles there yourself. It’s good to know how these article directories work and what kind of articles they accept. When you write your articles, use the same SEO strategies that you used on your WordPress website.

Remember to use “anchor text” with your main keyword phrase when you post your links on article directories. Most article directories will make this easy for you by asking for your URL and then the Display text.

If an article directory requires HTML code for anchor text, just use the template below and replace the URL with your website, and the text “Wikipedia” with your keyword phrase:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>

Forum Posting

This is another of my least favorite options to get backlinks to your website. I personally don’t like forums because they’re usually infested with people passing along poor advice.

When you sign up for forums, you can set up a profile which allows you to add a link that points back to your website. Most forums will also allow you to set up a signature similar to an email signature. When you leave a comment on the forum, your website's link will show up under your posts. (See image below.)

You have to be an active user of forums to get multiple backlinks pointing back to your website. If you like forums, then this is perfect for you! If not, then outsource this project to someone else.

There are some outsourcers that’ll set up multiple forum profiles for you and leave a couple comments on the forums. You can use Upwork, Fiverr, or whatever other outsourcing website that you feel comfortable with. Just don’t use Freelancer.com because a lot of people have complaints against that website including me.

Social Bookmarking

This is my favorite way to get backlinks! Social Bookmarking websites allow you to share your favorite websites with everybody on the internet. Popular social bookmarking sites include:

www.stumbleupon.com

www.digg.com

www.delicious.com

www.diigo.com

www.reddit.com

www.folkd.com, and a lot more!

When you register with social bookmarking websites, you have to use those websites correctly or you could get banned. If you only bookmark pages from your website, then it’s considered “self promotion.” Self promotion is the fastest way to get your website banned from some social bookmarking communities.

Your social bookmarking accounts should look natural just like your bookmarks within your web browser. Every time you bookmark your articles, you should also bookmark 5-10 other websites as well.

You need to sign up for all the social bookmarking websites to see how they work. This is not a waste of time for multiple reasons:

Social Bookmarking websites have a very high page rank with Google.

When you set up your profile, you can add your URL for a backlink.

You can upload your logo to help people get familiar with your brand.

You need to know how these websites work if you decide to outsource this task. The only way you’ll know how these websites work is to sign up for them and use them.

It only takes about 10-15 minutes to bookmark your website to about 12 of these social bookmarking websites. That includes bookmarking additional websites to make your accounts look natural.

Each website has a toolbar that you can download to make the bookmarking process faster. I personally recommend using the “AddThis” toolbar which combines all the popular bookmarking sites into one easy to manage toolbar.

To find this toolbar for the Firefox Mozilla browser:

1) Go to https://addons.mozilla.org

2) Type “addthis” into the search box.

3) Look for the Orange Square with the (+) symbol inside of it, and click the “Add to Firefox” button.

4) Restart your browser and set up the social bookmarking websites that you’d like on the toolbar.

If you want to take Social Bookmarking to the next level, you should:

Bookmark any article that you left a blog comment on.

Bookmark all your articles that you posted to article directories.

Bookmark every forum page that you left a comment on.

Bookmark any and every page that displays your websites link!

When you bookmark a page that displays your link, Google will find your link faster and count it as a backlink. Also by bookmarking the page, you’re making that page more important in Google’s eyes which will also make your link on that page more important.

Profile Accounts

Profile Accounts are created at websites that allow you to upload a photo and a link to your website. This is a great way to get backlinks, and even better for branding.

If a website is considered important to Google, then you want to affiliate yourself with that website. The easiest way to do this is to set up a profile with these websites and upload your logo and your website's address. You can do this yourself, have someone in your office do it, or outsource this task to Upwork.com.

An example of a profile account that allows you to display your website is Twitter. Search engines will notice this backlink, and people that visit your Twitter profile will see your link and click it if they want to know more about you.

The goal is to create profile accounts at websites that are considered important by Google and that have a lot of authority. I found the easiest way to do this is to go to www.alexa.com, click the “Top Sites” tab, and scroll down the list to see which websites will allow you to create profile accounts. (See image below.) Obviously you don’t want to create a profile account on a porn website, but everything else should be fine.

Here’s a few websites that you can create profile accounts with:

1) https://profiles.google.com/me

2) http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php (Facebook Fanpage)

3) http://amazon.com

4) http://www.flickr.com

5) http://blogger.com

6) http://pinterest.com

7) https://www.tumblr.com

8) http://wordpress.com (Not to be confused with WordPress.org)

9) http://www.linkedin.com

10) http://digg.com

11) http://www.slideshare.net

12) http://www.myspace.com

13) http://www.stumbleupon.com

14) http://www.warriorforum.com

15) http://www.deviantart.com

16) http://youtube.com

17) http://www.nytimes.com

18) http://www.reddit.com

19) http://www.livejournal.com

20) http://vimeo.com

21) http://dailymotion.com

22) https://about.me

Most people don’t like to create profile accounts because they’re too lazy, but that’s their loss and your gain. Some people argue that some of these websites are “No-follow” which basically means that the backlink doesn’t count, but I beg to differ.

Google looks at all links pointing to your website and it’s supposed to be mixed with do-follow, no-follow, blog comments, links from articles, links from videos, and profile links especially from authority websites.

Like I said earlier, if you have links from multiple authority websites pointing back to your site, then Google will have no choice but to consider you an authority website as well.

On the other hand, if you have a lot of spammy links pointing back to your website, then Google will consider you a spammy website too and penalize you. It’s better to have 100 authority backlinks compared to 10,000 spammy backlinks.

I believe that you should create these profile accounts yourself to make sure it’s done right. You should also upload your company logo and actively use these websites once or twice a month.

The websites listed above get the most visitors in the world, so I think it’s a bad idea to put your website's reputation into someone else’s hands by outsourcing this task. You should either do this yourself or have someone in your office handle this assignment.

You’ll also notice a lot of Social Bookmarking websites in the Alexa list of “top sites.” That’s why I recommend that you handle your own social bookmarking too. It would be a shame if you got your website banned because someone from Fiverr spammed these authority websites with your links.

If you still want to outsource this task, then bookmark your website first, and then hire someone else to bookmark it as well. For example, when someone else bookmarks your website on Digg.com after you’ve already bookmarked it; any additional bookmarks will give your post an “up-vote.” An up-vote is considered a “DIGG” as if to say that they “Digged” your website too. That’s why it’s important to learn how certain things work before you just outsource it.

You should only outsource backlinks to save time, and not because you’re clueless and don’t know how the process works. If you don’t know how the process works, then how will you know if the person you hired knows what they’re doing?

After you create these profile accounts, don’t forget to use Social Bookmarking websites to bookmark the page that displays your websites link. This will help the search engines index your links faster and your profile pages will start to show up in Google search.

If you type “Kent Mauresmo” into Google, you’ll see profile accounts from plenty of authority websites on the first page.

be9cc74.jpg

Summary & Action Plan

Manually build backlinks to your website using:

Blog Commenting

Article Marketing

Forum Posting

Social Bookmarking

User Profiles, etc.

To get started, you can find quality websites to get backlinks from using http://www.alexa.com/topsites.