Spying and intruding into other’s privacy is a very bad habit and punishable by law in many states… but it is vital as well as necessary for your online business.

What does it mean by spying your competitors?

As we all know that to reach at the top there are two ways. First one is to follow the basics, input your hard work and wait for the time when you come at the top. Second way is to spy on those who are already at the top, find out their strategy and implement the same for your business but using better tactics.

Hard work and persistence is no doubt a sure shot way to get success and patience is virtue we all know. But if you ask me which route I will take. I will surely take the second one because life is very short and I cannot give 3, 4 years to visualize my success.

For all of you who are interested in the latter one, today I will discuss some points on how to spy your competitor and reverse engineer their strategy and get to position number one on the organic search( especially Google), overthrowing them out of the game.

Can you think what would be the value of keyword “weight loss” or “car insurance” at the first position of Google?

Let’s check… for the purpose I am using www.semrush.com

Let us take two examples, fist one is “weight loss”, if we check Google the number 1 rank for this keyword goes to website www.webmd.com , now check it in Semrush.

We get the following data. The average CPC for keyword weight loss is $2.63 and the search volume is 450k. Now do the simple math 450k x $2.63. According to Semrush the website is getting search engine traffic worth $15584k.

Our second example is “car insurance”. While I was checking the ranking I got www.progressive.com on number 1, now checking it with Semrush, it is receiving organic traffic worth $24967k.

The data from Semrush may not be perfect, but if we assume only 10% of the figures, you can easily calculate what the worth of being number 1 on Google is.

So I am quite impressed with your argument… now which things I would like to spy on?

Basically you would like to spy on keywords they are ranking organically, keywords they are using for PPC, their daily ads budget, sites which are linking to your competitor,

Organic keywords: find out the keywords for which your competitor is ranking organically and the traffic those keywords attract. After analyzing these keywords you can plan your long time strategy for SEO, starting with the long tail keywords of main phrases and gradually using the short tails.

PPC Keywords: The basic idea behind finding the paid keywords is if they are paying consistently for some keywords to appear on paid result then those keywords must be converting for them. After you compile the list of their paid keywords, view their landing pages. Then plan your strategy using those converting keywords and their long tail phrases. Design your landing page better than them and you will surely hit a jackpot. Also look their daily PPC budget, the more the better.

Backlinks: Find out how many backlinks your competitor have, which sites are linking then and what the anchor texts are used in their backlinks. For this purpose you can use www.backlinkwatch.com and you will know the anchor text of the backlinks, their PR and whether they are follow or Nofollow. You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer for getting the backlinks data for any website. Never depend on the Google backlinks for a website, as Google displays numbers much less than the actual.

Other online tools you can use:

Keyword spy

Spyfu

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A website is nothing if it does not receives traffic, no matter how good it is or how valuable services and products it offer. So traffic is lifeline of any online business, not only online but off line business also need traffic, suppose you have a mega store but no visitors. So what’s the profit in it if there are no buyers?

Now back to our topic and that is traffic generation for your website.

The best way to generate targeted traffic to your website is search engine optimization and for that you need lot of relevant links.

Today we will discuss two easy and effective way to attract targeted traffic to your website, if done right.

Forums posting: Forum posting is an easy way to generate backlinks and traffic. My suggestion for all of you is to join at least 5 forums related to your niche and actively participate in discussions. Provide solution of the problems which members are discussing about.

Join 5 forums and use one forum for one hour a day. That means you visit each forum once a week.

If you will actively participate in forums you will be benefited in several ways.

You will get relevant Backlinks to your website, through signature links or links in the posts.

With time members will take you as an authority on the subject and will listen to your words. You can use your reputation for pre selling some offers, but please make sure you never try to hard sell, because people like to choose and not to be forced to buy some thing and never refer any poor quality product because it will diminish your authority

Forums act as a platform for people of single mental orientation who discuss a core subject. In this way you can get ideas for preparing content for your website. Pay attention to details and try to extract about the topics people are talking about and prepare your content for the same. In this way you can develop a lot of content for your website, which in turn will give you more authority over the subject, better rankings and traffic.

Blog commenting: blog comments are another tool for getting backlinks and direct traffic. Find your niche relevant blogs, you can simply do it by Googling “your keywords” inurl:blog . Find a relevant post read it and try to extract the information it provides and then you can comment on the post. Remember never try to spam them, as the comments will never get approved

Think in this way, you have a blog with good traffic and authority and some one posts a comment like “hello nice information” with a link to his website, will you like to approve the comment… NO you won’t, so when you are not ready to approve someone’s creepy comment why would others do the same.

So contribute some valuable and useful content to the post and the chances of getting approved will be the maximum.

Many of you will be concerned that many blogs add nofollow tags to the links in comment. Do no worry, nofollow links are still crawled and counted but their link juice transfer power is less. You can read more about nofollow links here at: Off Page Elements: Alternative ways of link building

So starting using forum posting and blog comments today for your link building and traffic campaigns and if you will do it right, you will see good rankings and surge in traffic in coming weeks.

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Introduction: There are several ways to build one way and reciprocal links for your website, some of the methods we have discussed earlier. You can read the related post by visiting the links at the end of this post. The methods discussed are conventional methods of link building which SEO’s and link builders are using from a very long time.

For making good money online through pay per click programs or affiliate marketing you need traffic and you need a lot of it because without traffic no is going to click your ads or affiliate links. For attracting traffic either you have to spend money on paid traffic like Google AdWords or you can get free traffic from search engines by using search engine optimization.

The free traffic from the search engines is the best form as you do not need to spend money on it (though you have to spend considerable amount of time for bringing free traffic and time is money). Here comes the concept of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Ranking higher on a search engine especially Google can bring you a lot of quality traffic and it’s free.

For ranking higher for your keywords you need lot of links with relevant websites. Today we will discuss about the concept of link wheel or link loop.

What is a link wheel?

Link wheel is a collection of several web2.0 properties, ranging from 5 to 18, interlinked together and your website, just as shown in the figure.

Here you can see 5 web2.0 properties namely squidoo, weebly, quizilla, wordpress and blogger used to make a link wheel.

How to develop link wheel:

Choose 5 or 6 web2.0 sites to make a link wheel. Here is a list of some of them.

http://squidoo.com

http://wordpress.com

http://livejournal.com

http://blog.com

http://blog.co.uk

http://jimdo.com

http://blogger.com

http://weebly.com

http://blinkweb.com

http://blogsome.com

http://freewebs.com

Take articles of 400 to 500 words and related to your keywords. Start from blogger (or any other) starts posting your article. Make two links one linking to your neighbor (quizilla in this case) and another to your main website. Using two links is just an example and more links can be used as the situation demands.

In the last you can either close the loop or leave it open.

How to use content: Choose topics which are relevant to your main keyword. Let us have one example. Suppose the main keyword of your website is “India hotels”. And it has separate sections for hotels in all important metro cities in India. Then

Choose six keywords related to your main keyword. You can write articles on following topics for your link wheel

India Hotels – Hotels in New Delhi
India Hotels – Hotels in Mumbai
India Hotels – Hotels in Calcutta
India Hotels – Hotels in Chennai
India Hotels – Hotels in Jaipur
India Hotels – Hotels in Pune

These entire articles must be written around keyword India hotels and secondary keyword like Hotels in New Delhi, Hotels in Mumbai etc.

For best results I would like to suggest you to have article of minimum 500 words (for this example) and create three hyperlinks.

One link must link to the relevant section on your website, second link must be for main website and third one should be to the neighbor web2.0 property of your link wheel.

Like in this example (suppose your main website is www.abc.com with relevant sections like www.abc.com/hotels-new-delhi, www.abc.com/hotels-mumbai etc)

The article title “India Hotels- Hotels in New Delhi” shall have 3 links, first one linking to www.abc.com/hotels-new-delhi with anchor text Hotels in New Delhi, second link to the main website www.abc.com and the third link to its neighbor web2.0 page.

I hope this would have cleared the point.

Double Layer Link wheel or Extended Link wheel: Once your link wheel is ready, you can make a link wheel around every single page you used in your main link wheel, thus giving more link juice and power to the web2.0 pages of the main link wheel and in turn giving more boost to your main website.

IP Diversity: do not use a single web2.0 website (like blogger, wordpress etc) twice in one link loop, so that it maintains a good IP diversity and more ranking power for the link wheel.

Promoting Link Wheel: For promoting your link wheel do some blog comments posting, social bookmarking and RSS submission.

You can do it in this manner:

1. 20 Blog comments for each web2.0 page used in the link wheel
2. 20 bookmarking for each web2.0 page used in the link wheel
3. Take the rss from each one of them and do 20 rss submission of each

You can also mix the rss from all of them by using free service like rssmix.com and then post to several rss directories.

So Apply this link wheel strategy and you will see good rankings for you main keywords in few weeks.

I think you would have enjoyed this post. I might have left some points; I would highly appreciate it if you all post it in comments.

You can also post your comments regarding which topics you all would like to read about and I will try my best to post it in coming days

Related Articles:

Off Page Elements: Link Building and Blog Comments

Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs

Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1

Off Page Elements: Alternative ways of link building

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If you are new here, you would like to read previous posts on link building here at: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1,Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs,Off Page Elements: Link Building and Blog Comments

We have discussed several traditional methods of link building, today we will continue with some more discussion on link building and increasing link popularity.

A note about Nofollow: if you are not aware about Nofollow attribute, let us have a little outlook in the background of Nofollow. Google allows you to make any link (both internal and external) un crawlable by using a special tag rel=”Nofollow”.

This tag is used for primarily three purposes.

1. Avoid leaking of link juice to less important pages. Web pages like contact us, privacy statement, shipping and order, cancellation policy have less value in terms of SEO, so Nofollow tags can be used for these pages to avoid leaking of link juice , which in turn will help you to achieve higher page rank for main pages.

2. To stop theme ambiguity. Nofollow tags are very useful in building a theme of a website, in other words its very useful in proper SILOING( discussion in coming posts) of a website. For an example if you are building a website related to wooden furniture and want to base all your keywords on it, you may want to Nofollow all the pages related to basic knowledge of the wooden furniture and all the pages related to fiber and steel furniture.

In this way you can establish a solid theme for your website. A special point to note here is Nofollow tags are only for search engines and not for human visitors these links are still clickable and can funnel traffic.

3. While linking to websites for whom you are not sure about the correctness and authenticity of their information and authority.

What does No follow tags inform to search engines and are they counted in backlinks?

The answers is yes , the links having Nofollow attribute are still crawled by search engines and help in increasing link popularity.

The Nofollow attribute only tells the search engines that the reference, in which the link is used, is not sure. This means if any webpage is linking to another webpage with reference green bags and uses Nofollow attribute, then it marks the search engines that although I am linking this webpage about green bags but I am not sure about the content and authority of the webpage. In other it can be taken as voting a webpage whose authority is not confirmed.

So do not be over concerned about no follow tags in various web2.0 websites and forums. They might not transfer as much link juice but they will help you in increasing your web visibility which will gradually establish your authority in your area.

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This post is in continuation with my previous posts on off page search engine optimization. If you are new here you can read those posts here at: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1, Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs

Today in this post we will talk about benefits of link building, blog comments and the various ways to accomplish the task.

First we shall have a little discussion about various types of links we can have for our website and easy tips and tricks, both manual and automated to build them.

Types of Links:

Basically links are categorized on the basis how they propagate link juice to a web page in consideration. Links or backlinks are mainly of three types one way, two way or reciprocal and three way links.

One way Link:

One way link, commonly known as backlinks is a link which is pointed to web page with out the page linking back to it. For an example if there are two web pages A and B, and if A links to webpage B but it does not links back to it. These types of links are known as one way link. These links are most powerful and beneficial for boosting search engine rankings and page rank.

Two Way or Reciprocal Links:

When two web pages link each other mutually, these types of links are called two way or reciprocal backlinks and the process is known as link exchange. There are many automated ways by which this process can be done but the quality of the link they provide are of very less importance. High quality two way links can be made by finding useful websites related to your website topic and calling or emailing the webmasters for mutual link exchange.

Three way Backlinks:

Many a times when we contact any webmaster for link exchange, they give us a proposal of three way link exchange in reply. Suppose we have two websites one related to jewelry and second to mobile phones and the webmaster in consideration also has the same situation, he has one related to diamonds and other with electronic gadgets. So he links us from his diamond website to our jewelry website and we link from our mobile phones website to his electronic gadget website or vice versa, in this way making a triangular linking pattern. This way of links is known as three way linking. If the websites involved in the link exchange are hosted on different IP addresses, the links are treated as one way links in the eyes in the eyes of search engines, thus giving ranking boost in the search engine result pages.

Contacting Webmasters for Link exchanges:

The right way of doing link exchange starts with doing emails to the webmasters of relevant websites. For finding relevant websites you can use Google. Just type “your keywords” add your link, “your keywords” add your url. In this way you can find relevant web pages for doing link exchanges.

How to write emails:

Start with a right salutation and write a personalized note. While finding the contact details, try to find out the names, so that you can personalize the note to them. Explain them the reason of contacting them, many of them do not know the profit of doing link exchange, so explain them a little about the profits of doing link exchange not only regarding search engine but also in reference of the website visitors. Explain to them how their visitors will be benefited by visiting your website. In this way, you will increase your chances of positive response and successful link exchange.

Spying your competitors:

Find the backlinks your competitors have. Google does not show all the backlinks of a website. So use yahoo for this purpose.

Try to find out all the websites which are linking to your competitors and find ways to get links from same website. Just do the same they are doing but do better than them. If they are getting good rankings, it shows that they are doing the things right, so copy their strategy and you will get good return on your investment, in the form of good rankings and traffic.

Using Blog Commenting:

Blog commenting is an easy and effective way of building one way backlinks to your website. Find relevant blogs using Google either using Google blog search or doing the following query:

“your keywords” inurl:blog

Find relevant blogs and contribute valuable comments, but keep in mind DO NOT SPAM. Read the post and collect some idea to write comment, most of the people just write “great post” and similar garbage. Please do not use such things, contribute value to the post. This will not only help in adding value to the post but also increase the chances of your post to be published.

Some more posts about off page optimization in coming posts. See you soon. Until then implement the strategies taught in this blog and you will see good rankings for your keywords in the search engines.

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This blog is in continuation with the post about Off Page Optimization which can be found here: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach

Article Submission: Article submissions are done basically for two purposes (there might be some more but I submit articles for these two) one for traffic and second one is for one way backlinks. Ideally I like to submit 10 articles for each keyword I am targeting on my website. Many article directories like ezinearticles and articlesbase allow content syndication, which allows website owners to publish content on their websites. In this way you get more backlinks to your websites. If the article is interesting and your resource box is spicy it will get good click through rate sending a lot of visitors to your website.

While submitting article keep some points in mind. Write article with around 300 to 350 words as the article with more than 350 words loose theme and users lose their interest in them. Give a little time to your author’s bio box, use specific call to action words.

For reading more about submitting articles and scaling your article submission campaigns refer to the following posts about article submission.

Maximizing Benefits of Article Submissions

Scaling Article Submission Campaigns

Blogs Posting: For the purpose of link building free blog platforms (the blogs on these website is called hosted blog) are great resource. There are millions of free blog platforms available and you can choose one or several of them. Blogger.com and wordpress.com are most commonly used blog platforms. Here is the list of most common blog websites.

Aeonity.com

Blog.com

blogates.com

blogetery.com

blogger.com

blogr.com

blogsome.com

blogster.com

bravenet.com/webtools/journal/

clearblogs.com

ehow.com

googlepages.com

hubpages.com

iseekblog.com

myspace.com

pbwiki.com

quazen.com

rticlz.com

sampa.com

squarespace.com

squidoo.com

stikipad.com

thoughts.com

tumblr.com

wikispaces.com

wordpress.com

When using free blog websites chose wisely because some hosted blog platforms, wordpress.com for an example does not like blog with commercial intent and they delete such blogs. So in your blog posting provide information to the users and do not make your blog posting as sales pitch. My strategy is to make one blog for each keywords and I post at least 5 blog post on each blog of 250 words

IP Diversity: Try to use different blog platforms. Suppose you want to target 40 keywords, target each keyword using one blog having 5, 250 words articles. Do not make more than two on one website. For an example make 2 blogs on blogger, 2 blogs on wordpress, 2 on typepad, 2 on xanga and so on. In this way you will get backlinks with diverse IPs which would be more beneficial than having links from 10 blogs on a same account from blogger.com.

During your link exchange campaigns also do not exchange more than two links from website on same C Class IP.

Using Squidoo and Hub Pages : Squidoo and Hubpages get a lot of love from Google and I have experienced that they are easily ranked. So use these two in your link and traffic building campaigns. Take two or more long tail keywords for your niche and make lenses on Squidoo and hubs on Hubpages. Use at least 600 words articles for making lenses and hubs.

For reading more about choosing long tail keywords, read my previous posts on keyword research here at :

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path Part 2

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In some of our previous post we had discussed about several on page elements which influence the rankings of the webpage in the search engines.

If you are new here you can read the posts about on page optimization here at:  On Page SEO elements Part 1, On Page SEO elements Part 2 and On Page SEO elements Part 3.

In these posts I have pointed some very crucial points which must be taken care of for proper optimization of a webpage.

Some webmasters say that on page optimization accounts for 20% and off page 80% of overall optimization process, but in my opinion on page accounts for 60% of the overall optimization process and I am saying this from my experience. I have tested many of my websites, which ranked highly only by doing on page optimization in very competitive niches. Opinions may differ on this topic, but the heart of the matter is both factors must be taken care of and done wisely.

In coming posts we will discuss several topics related to off page optimization and traffic generation and if you follow each step there is no reason, you do not achieve higher rankings in search engines.

Achieving higher rankings takes time and work. So just follow the main points below and over time you will see good rankings of your website.

What is off page optimization?

First of all let us take a look on off page optimization. All those work done excluding website is known as off page optimization work. Commonly it is taken as link building through different sources and increasing web visibility.

Links can be made through different sources like directory submissions, articles etc. Below given some very common ways to build links for your website, use these in your off page optimization campaigns and you will get good return on your investment, in form of good rankings and traffic.

Submitting to Directories: Directory submission is one of the most common ways to build links to websites. Directories are of basically three types, free, reciprocal and paid.

Free Directories: Free directories or Free for All (FFA) directories are those which accept all kind of links and do not need any reciprocal link. You do not need to pay any fee for being accepted in it. The submission in these directories is easy and can be done in bulk, but the quality of links is of poor quality (save some exceptions). So shall we submit to these directories?, the answer is YES. Although the quality is poor but they help a lot in increasing the web visibility of your website.

There are some exceptions, like DMOZ.ORG, Dmoz is the largest open directory project on the web and the best part is, it’s free. But it is very hard to get listed in this directory. So while submitting to this directory please follow each and every instruction of submission.

Paid Directories: These directories either take one time fee for inclusion or an annual fee for being listed. The quality of the links from these directories are high. The reason behind the quality factor is the manual review of the links submitted to them. The search engines give good weightage to these links. If you have some budget you must go for these. The best of the paid directories is Yahoo Directory. Look Smart, Ezilion and Best of the Web to name a few.

Reciprocal Directories: These types of directories need reciprocal links from the websites which are submitted to them. That means you need to link back to them from your website. These links are also good in quality. But always choose good reciprocal directories to submit.

Free directories get expired as the owners do not renew their domains and hosting( because either they fail to make money from these ventures or they are too busy to maintain them) . So in the case of reciprocal links, always keep check on the links and make sure you are not linking to any expired domain.

List of Directories:

Free and Reciprocal Directories:

1. Directory Critic
2. VM Options
3. One Way Text Link
4. VileSilencer
5. Web Directories
6. Links Admin
7.Dmegs

Paid Directories:

1. Paid Directory List
2. Web Directories
3.Best Web Directories
4.Paid Directories
5. Directory Critic
6. Cheap Paid Directory List
7. Paid Directories

More posts on off page optimization coming soon

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