Make Money Online Without Investment Mini Course – Lesson #4
If you missed any of the previous lessons, catch yourself up here:
- Introduction
- How do People Really Make Money Online – Lesson #1
- Why You Should Build Your Own Website – Lesson #2
- Getting Traffic to Your Website – Lesson #3
SEO. Backlink. If you’ve been working online for any amount of time, you’ve heard those terms. So what exactly do they mean? In lesson 4, I will give you some basic understanding of each, and how you can implement them.
SEO
It’s a very simple concept. SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Basically, you are making it easy (optimizing) for the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) to know what your site is about, so when people search for things, the search engines will list your site.
The goal is to be #1 or #2 for the keywords you’ve chosen. For example, if I have a website about dog grooming, and the keywords I wanted to be ranked for was “how to groom a german shepard”, when someone typed that into the search box on Google, I would want my website to show up as #1 or #2. The higher up in rank you are, the more traffic you get.
Backlinking
Backlinks are just what they sound like…links pointing back to your site. This can be a text link (a link in the form of words), or a URL (the actual website address). The more quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the better off you are. The search engines use this as a way of measuring the “authority” of your site. The key point here though is quality. You want to make sure you’re not getting spammy back links. Stay away from buying “thousands of backlinks!” You’ll see it all over the internet…but it will usually only harm your hard work.
So How Do You Go About Getting Both?
SEO and Backlinking are basically one in the same. Backlinking is a method of SEO, but without backlinks, you stand no chance in ranking for your keywords.
It’s like this: You need backlinks to optimize your site for the search engines.
So how do you get backlinks?
There are actually many ways, and we covered them in the previous lesson about getting traffic.
- Sign up to forums and participate in the discussions. You can create a signature with a link back to your website. Every time you post something new, you’re signature with the link back to your site will be posted. (This also serves as 2 purposes – you’ll get free traffic to your website, but also you’ll get backlinks to your site. Backlinks are extremely important for SEO.)
- Post on other people’s blogs, with your website link. People WILL visit your website this way. Just make sure you’re not spamming the other blog. Post something valuable, and include your website link.
- Yahoo Answers. Very effective way to get traffic to your website. Again, just make sure that you are not spamming.
- Sign up for various Article directories, such as Go Articles, or EZine Articles. Every time you submit an article, make sure you have the link back to your website. When someone reads your article, if they are looking for more information, they will click on your link. Another reason this will get you traffic is because if someone else uses your article, they will publish your link on their site as well…giving you traffic, and also backlinks.
- Post your site/post on social bookmarking websites, such as Stumbleupon, Digg, or others.
Just remember, building links to your website can be tedious and can (and SHOULD take some time). It’s not an instant payoff. Continue to build as many links back to your site as you can, and in time, your hard work will pay off. Keep in mind, while you’re building back links to your website, you’re also getting traffic.
SEO is a very complex thing, and there is much more to it. In the interest of not overloading you with too much information at a time, I’ll leave it at that. You can Google SEO and backlinks and get a ton of information for free – and make sure you do. It’s an animal all of it’s own and it’s constantly changing as the internet changes. I will also post more complex and in depth articles about each in the future, so make sure you bookmark this website and subscribe to my feed.
Just remember, it’s not an instant result! SEO and backlinking are a constant effort that can take days to even months before you see results from it. Don’t give up. When you start seeing floods of traffic from being ranked #1 for your keyword, you’ll be glad you did! (You can read more on search engine optimization tips for the average Joe here.)
Whelp, you’ve finished the mini course! Hopefully you have a bunch of information that can get you started. Don’t wait – good things happen to those who don’t wait around for them to happen. Experience is something we needed one second before we got it, and success only comes with many failures before. Enjoy the ride!
If you’re looking for more ideas on how to get traffic to your website, here is a previous post I wrote that you will enjoy : How to Market Online – 8 Marketing Tips You Can Use Now
