Choosing your keywords and writing your articles is only a percentage of what you need to do to make money.  If you’re serious about making money online you need to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  This blog post will cover the basics of what is known as off page SEO.

Basically in order to prove to the search engines that your website is legit and full of great content that would be useful to it’s searchers you need to have other websites link to you.  Basically it’s like getting votes in an election but the difference is that not all votes are equal.

Now before you go getting as many sites to link to you as possible you need to understand a little thing called anchor text.  Anchor text is simply the text used when one website links to another.  Most people who don’t understand anchor text for off page SEO purposes will simply use things like “click here”, “visit Bob’s blog” and such like. 

However if you are wanting to rank for specific keywords this won’t help you much at all. Instead you want to make sure that you use the keywords you are wanting to rank for.  For example, here is the prefect anchor text for linking to the home page of this blog:  how to make money online.

However be careful because if we suddenly got hundreds of links with the above anchor text we could get into a bit of trouble with the search engines who would penalize us.  It simply looks a bit fishy.  Instead we would request people use a variety of different anchors such as:

Making money online
How to make money with a website
Earn money from the internet
Make money
Ways to make online money

OK, so for the sake of example, let’s say you have an article titled “How to Stop Your Dog Barking,” you would want to think of other things that people would search for or you could even do a bit of keyword research.  So here are a few examples:-

stop dog barking
stop dog from barking
how do I stop my dog from barking
dog training barking advice

You want to vary the anchor text because it look more natural to the search engines and also because it will help you to rank for these keywords too.

Not wanting to get too bogged down by this aspect what you need to know at this stage where you are able to get these links.  You will get some ideas here:-

Article Directories

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of article directories on the internet.  One of the most highly-regarded is ezinearticles.com as they receive loads of submissions every day and many of their articles rank very highly for some competitive keywords.

It shouldn’t cost you anything to submit to these directories however with so many to submit to you could take days creating accounts and submitting your articles.  This just doesn’t make financial sense as time is money.

So in order to speed up the process you will find that there are many companies who offer software and membership services.  The prices all vary greatly depending on what features they offer

Web Directories

These are simply sites that list websites in different categories with a description.  They don’t hold an awful lot of weight in terms of SEO but they are pretty simple to acquire and add a bit of variety to your incoming links.  Again, there are a number of software applications out there that offer to make things much easier for you.

Social Bookmarking

There are lots of sites that allow people to create account and submit sites that they like.  The idea is that people can see your bookmarks and find sites that could be of interest to them.  Also, if a sites gets lots of people bookmarking it, it will possibly appear on the home page providing extra exposure.

We’re not really interested in having people find our sites via social bookmarking, we simply want the back links.  Again, there are some companies who have created software to make this really fast and easy.  Probably the most popular is Bookmarking Demon.  It’s not all that cheap but you’ll get upgrades for life and it’s very quick and easy to use once you get to grips with it.

Often you if you read blogs and websites about SEO, you will come away thinking that it must be really difficult.  The truth is that often people make it seem more complicated than it really is.  If you stick to the basics as described above you should be able to do pretty well.  Also, bear in mind that it can take the search engines a while to rank your website well.  So the work that you do today could take weeks or even months to take effect.  Don’t let that put you off, just be patient and have faith.