Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Let’s face it, most of the SEO strategies out there are 100% theory. For some reason, people like to make up random SEO strategies that sound super complex & effective; but in reality, they’ve never actually used them with much if any success themselves.
All the pyramids and link wheels out there won’t get the top rankings you desire unless you have set up Google Authorship. That’s the first step and you can read about it here: Setting Up Google Authorship 101
Once you have Google authorship set up, you’ve practically qualified yourself to get instant rankings. Me personally, I like fast results. I like to do things and see an instant result. If I do SEO on a post/page/website and it doesn’t rank within 3 days, I consider it a failure.
So step one is setting up authorship. Step two is having a quality authoritative website or blog. Without a high-quality site/blog, your site really doesn’t deserve rankings = plain and simple. If your site sucks, it will take a lot more effort to get its stuff ranked.
Once you have an authoritative looking site and lots of content along with the Google authorship hookup, Google should give you “the SEO ring of fire”: This is what I call the SEO ring of fire. When you search for your domain on Google, it brings it up rank #1 page one with a list of its popular content below. This means Google loves your site and it’s qualified to rank for big money keywords.
I really believe in qualifying yourself to Google via authorship, having A TON of content (50-1000+ pages) and an attractive site design. If you don’t have all of that, forget about backlinking and go work on your site. On-page SEO is pretty much bullshit, but having a large good looking website is crucial.
Once you have authority, it doesn’t matter what your keyword density or even what keywords you target – as you will rank for everything. Now, back to link building…
The best links in the world are derived from high page rank and relevancy. The higher the page rank of the backlinks, the more powerful. The same goes for relevance, but more importantly with high PR.
So how do you get high PR links?
You can either buy them or build them yourself. Building your own high PR network of sites is really the ultimate way to get ranked almost instantly for competitive terms. Remember the huge blog network shenanigan? Where Google went on a rampage and took down most of the biggest blog networks…
Well, that was because their high PR websites were all linking out to the same sites multiple times daily. It was out of control so Google penalized everyone involved. With your own network, you only link to your own sites.
Let’s take dog training for example. If you had a new dog training blog and you wanted to rank really fast for “dog training”, “training dogs” and “how to train dogs”. What you would do is go out and purchase high PR domains (preferably PR3 or above) and set up relevant mini sites on them linking to your main dog training blog.
Generally what SEO’s do is set up a static homepage with a long 800+ word piece of content linking to their main money site using their main keywords as anchor text. These links are gold. They are high page rank, relevant exact match anchor text backlinks – the best in the world.
Don’t worry about varying anchor text with your high PR domains, you can desaturate your anchor text profile via cheap/automated links. Plus, you can always build out the high PR sites adding more content and actually ranking them.
The only problem is these links cost a lot of money. a PR5+ (the best) domain will set you back $200-$300 and then it costs $1-5/month to host each domain on its own C class IP address. SEO hosting is essential!
If you want to instantly dominate a small niche, then 20, 10 or even 5 high PR relevant home page links is all it takes to electrify your entire site and all its pages. You can find high PR domains at Godaddy Auctions or forums like Digital Point.
On top of the “golden high pr links”, you need to constantly build a wide variety of other diverse links including wikis, PDF links, web2.0’s, article directory and directory links. Ultimately the relevant high PR links will allow you to rank for anything.
The other links, the ones all SEO’s are talking about – you need them to diversify your link profile and desaturate your anchor text profile. For example, to dominate a medium-sized niche, you could build 5 high PR relevant sites/month and use a daily link building schedule of:
- Monday: 10 Web2.0 Links
- Tuesday: 20 Blog Comments
- Wednesday: 10 PDF Links
- Thursday: 30 Wikis
- Friday: 20 Article Directory Links
- Sat: 20 Forum Links
- Sunday: 10 directory Links/Social Signals
Obviously you’ll want to start small with the link building and gradually increase the number of links you build as your site gains momentum. But that’s it; the futuristic link building strategies that kick ass in today’s SEO environment.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below.
Comments
TyronneRatcliff, November 21, 2012
Social backlinks justify the thousands of links you’re getting from article directories, blogs, and web 2.0’s. That’s why I think you can’t ignore social when building backlinks. If you’re getting thousands of backlinks from different sites but you aren’t getting likes, tweets, and Facebook shares it raises a red flag right away.
mombeams, November 21, 2012
Holy crap!! This stuff is gold!!!
Isabella Ramirez, November 22, 2012
This article provides such valuable insights! It’s important to be realistic about link building strategies and the investments needed. Thank you for the honesty, David!
Liam Chen, November 22, 2012
David, your perspective on SEO and link building is refreshing. It’s not just about quantity but quality and relevance. Great post!
Emily Gupta, November 22, 2012
I appreciate the clarity you bring to the link building strategies. Understanding the costs and time investment is crucial for success. Thanks for sharing this!
Jackson Lee, November 22, 2012
This post is a great reminder that success in SEO requires dedication and effort. Thanks for keeping it real, David!
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Come do the work with people who show up
Not another course you finish alone and forget. A community that is there the next morning, and the one after that. Free, forever. About a minute to join, then come do the first challenge with us.
Join the community, free →
What’s being described here — buy PR domains, build authority sites that link only to yourself — is a private blog network, just without that name attached. The bit about Google Authorship ‘qualifying’ you for rankings doesn’t match anything Google ever confirmed about authorship’s weight in the algorithm.
Small correction: Google killed Authorship not long after this, and PageRank hasn’t been public in years. That ‘$200-300 PR5 domain’ price tag is buying a number nobody can check anymore.
Sorry if this is obvious, but if Authorship’s gone and PageRank isn’t public anymore, does any of this still work?
I tried something close to the Monday-through-Sunday link schedule in this post years back — ten web2.0s, twenty blog comments, ten PDF links, then thirty wikis on Thursday alone. Week one was fine, mostly because I was running on adrenaline and had content stockpiled ahead of time. Week two the backlog ran out and I was writing article-directory pieces and forum posts same-day, which is exactly when quality starts dropping. Week three was where it fell over completely, because writing genuinely readable content on that volume — the kind that doesn’t read as spun, the kind the post itself says has to look natural over time — takes longer than the schedule allows for. I ended up doing about four days of the plan in a normal week and calling the other three ‘catching up,’ which is its own kind of admission.
Kelsey’s timeline matches what I saw running similar link schedules — the mechanical parts were doable, it was the ‘readable, natural-looking’ requirement that quietly ate all the time. That part of the post gets glossed over fast.
Kelsey, I think what’s being missed in your experience is that the post does say to start small and scale the schedule as the site gains momentum — the full week-one schedule you tried might have been the mismatch, not the underlying idea.