Have you got a website? Yes? Many of us will have... Have you ever tried getting your site to the coveted first page of results on Google? I have and achieved it myself without paying a penny to any so called SEO 'experts'... And guess what... I’m going to tell you how to do it for FREE. The free information available on the internet... on how to get a decent placement in Google results is plenty and often contradictory and I have also found, quite often incorrect.
Many will try to sell you information about how to do it, I'm not going to try to sell you anything, BUT I will tell you however what I have done it with one of my retail sites for free and more importantly what I have found you should NOT do.
If you have a retail site, the first thing to accept is that you probably are not going to get a page rank from Google, Don’t worry with retail sites you don’t need it and your competitors also most likely wont have it.
Next, you need to accept it could take a couple of months to really see the benefit of any changes depending on how often Google crawls your site and the sites you will be using.
The last thing is you don’t need a flashy site with bells and whistles flashing and jumping around. Just a basic html website is all I have and on one set of very popular keywords Google now places my site at #4 on the first page - and that’s in just 3 months from knowing nothing at all about SEO.
There are many sites on the internet offering one way back links, link exchange, 3 way links and 4 way links.
With a few very rare exceptions the 3 & 4 way link 'farms' should be avoided. If you found it on a search engine, assume Google knows what they are and how they work regardless of what the blurb on the front page says about being Google friendly and bear in mind Google will very likely punish your site in the results for these links.
The most valuable links you can get are the precious quality one way back links. The 'experts' will tell you they are hard to get, the TRUTH is they are as easy to get as falling out of bed. Ok how and where?
This site, Qassia is one very good place to pick up multiple quality back links but it doesn’t end there and you will need more.
Next step, Download Google’s toolbar and enable page rank on it, then start searching for free to use forums.
NOTE: The page rank indicator has 3 states...
Greyed out = not ranked/indexed at all
All white = indexed but no page rank
Partially green = ranked (place your cursor on the indicator to find exact rank)
Forums:
Start with forums somehow related to your product/service but don’t just limit yourself to these. You are looking ideally for ranked sites with forums.. But don’t stop at related forums expand out. Whatever you do DONT blatantly advertise on the forums, simply post something relevant to the board or reply to a post and include your web address in smaller type at the bottom of your response/post, 99% of moderators seem to ignore it, search engines however don’t ignore it and will count it in your favour. Blatant advertising however will most likely get deleted by the forums moderator and you will only have achieved a wasted time.
Blogs:
In the same way Search engines love forums they also love blogs. There are dozens of free to use blogs sites out there... Sign up to a couple and write about anything.. current affairs, what you did at the weekend even your grans sisters bunion but be sure to put the link to your site at the bottom the search engines will find it even if the readers don’t.
Directories:
The next and slightly trickier step is which directories do you submit your URL to? There are many while some will be rewarding others will get you punished in the results. This is where the page rank facility of the Google tool bar will be invaluable.
Note: with directories, a free submission usually means a link exchange. Link exchanges while not as valuable as one way links are certainly not completely valueless. Just choose your directory carefully by sticking to ranked ones. All my submissions are free submissions.
If you talk to an 'expert' about directories the first words from them are usually 'submit to DMOZ' you can if you want, but personally I have not wasted my time with it, why? Because it takes 12-18 months for them to review your site, and then decide whether or not to include it in their directory. A better alternative is Dmegs.com and has a page rank of 5/10 which is pretty damned good for a directory and you will have your links in a day or so.
When looking at a directories home page, if your page rank indicator is greyed out, move on to the next one. If its white you can take a chance if your feeling brave.. White doesn’t always mean bad, BUT what you are really looking for is ranked free directories. The ones where there is a green element in the indicator - even if its only 1/10 it’s still good and there are many up to and in some cases beyond 5/10.
If you couple a strategy as above with good keywords there is no reason you should not climb the rankings and fast. My site climbed from page 56 to page 1 in about 3 months.
How did I find all this out?
I went to officelive.com and got two free domain/hosting packages with very similar domain names... Created one web site and uploaded it to both domains using identical content and keywords. One was used for the strategy detailed above and for the other I used so called SEO friendly link farms and just about any directory I stumbled across.
Both sites once indexed by Google appeared on page 56 or thereabouts of the Google results. The site using 'SEO friendly' link farms and random directories plummeted in the results and ultimately right out of the index in the end and the other site soared all the way to page 1 with a page rank of 0 (zero)
Conclusion:
Quality one way links from ranked sources is great. Quality reciprocal links from ranked sources are still better than no link.
Link farms equal bad news for your results as do random directory submissions.
Note:
there is a myth in some quarters that you need to submit your URL to google every month or so.. you dont! i have only ever submitted my URL once. I do however submit a new sitemap whenever i change the layout of the structure/page names.
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Contributor's Note
This article has been written based on many sunday afternoons sat in front of the PC trying to figure out SEO techniques. It is based on personal experience and is i'm sure not the only route to Googles page 1, but it is how i got one site there and there is still more to do yet to get all the keywords to page 1. I'm also now working on getting the next site there (the one linked below) Hopefully others reading this will have similar success.
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Thanks for the tips
