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One of the most common questions that our readers ask us is how to increase traffic to their website. To make this as simple as possible I would tell you that there are 2 things you should always be doing: Adding unique useful content and building your link popularity.

Adding Content – When I say you should add unique useful content to your site I really mean the content needs to be 100% original and useful to other people. Writing content just for content sake is a big waste of time, especially if you are the one writing all of the content. When you write useful content people will have a reason to come and read it. People will show it to other people, and people will link to it.

Let me give you a great example of how by writing one good post I increased the traffic to my website by 1000%. I came across a new product a couple of months ago and saw that the product was in my same industry so I looked at the site for a minute or two and then went on with my day. The next day I found a site that was almost exactly the same making the same claims and showing the same pictures of checks and sportscars.

I quickly realized that this new product was a scam. I decided to write an very in depth post about this scam and warning people what to look out for. Little did I realize that this scam was so widespread that thousands of people a month were searching for the name of this new product to find out if it was legit or not.

Because I took the time to write a very detailed post about the product we jumped to the top of the rankings for the product name. The result of this one post was going from a couple of thousand visitors a month to over 20,000 visitors a month. Imagine what your business could do with 10 times the amount of traffic it gets now.

Building Links – Because this is such a hard thing to do people will try to tell you that this is not that important in getting more traffic to your site. In reality, link building has proven to be the most influential factor in the rankings and traffic I have achieved with the internet. Nothing sways rankings more powerfully than good quality one way links that point to your website. (Read more about how to link build here) I achieved #1 rankings in Google with my old SEO website for the term “SEO services” when my site had much less content and far fewer pages than all of my competitors. How did I do it? A consistent flow of good links.

If you want to know my secret to success I just gave it to you. Good quality content and relevent quality links. If it sounds too simple then try it another more complicated way. All I can give you is what has helped me become successful online.

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Don’t forget to check out my guide to buying and selling websites online here.

One of the most common questions I get from our readers is how to specifically do link building. The biggest thing to realize with link building is that you need to have a purpose in mind. You need to be targeting specific key phrases that you want to rank for.

For example, let’s say you own a website in the hunting industry and you are really looking to rank for the term “archery targets”. You need to go out and get links that point to your website where the clickable text (aka ‘anchor text’) is the term “archery targets”.  If that is your #1 term you want to rank for then you need to get most of your links with the anchor text “archery targets”.

In order to keep your link building looking natural to search engines you need to also get links that have a different mix of anchor texts but similar to your main term.

For example if you were going to get 50 links pointing to your website, an effective link building program to target “archery targets” would be something like this:

30 links with “archery targets” as anchor text pointing to your main page where you want to rank for this term

5 links with “3d archery targets” as the anchor text

5 links with “archery target” as anchor

5 links with “buy archery targets” as anchor.

1 link with “discount archery products” as anchor text

1 link with “archery website” as anchor text

1 link with “archery targets site” as anchor text

1 link with “online archery store” as anchor text

1 link with “hunting targets” as anchor text

As you can see from the example above I used about 60% of the links for the main phrase and then spread out the other 30% of the links to other similar phrases and used the main term inside some but not all of the similar phrases. The more natural the link appears to the search engines the more effective the links will be.

You really want a good mix of phrases but the majority of the links should point to your site using your main phrase.

This is how you will start to see an increase in rankings for key phrases you are targeting.

People always ask me how often they should add content to their site to maximize their SEO efforts. So I don’t have to answer this question anymore I have decided to write the definitive answer that I can point anyone to in the future.

Let’s say you have 20 articles to add to your site. Here is the secret to SEO:

Add 1 article the first week and then 3 more articles spread out through the next week. Then the following week add 2 articles in one day and then add 1 article the next week. Then add 1 each day for 4 days and on day 5 take one off. Then the next week add 2. Replace the one you took off and then add 3 the next week. Then add 2 a week for 2 weeks. If you follow this pattern exactly you will crack the Google code.

The truth is I don’t know the answer. In fact I don’t think there is an answer. Do what makes sense for your website. If you have 500 articles that can be written and add new unique content to your genre then write the content and add it to your site. If you are adding nothing new to the content in your genre that is already out there then adding a ton won’t do much for you.

I have also been asked, once the articles are on the site how quickly should I point links to them.

As far as links go, it doesn’t matter when you add them, Google will find them when they find them and so you can add them now or in a week and they still might not find them for 3 weeks. Just add them.

The point is, don’t get too wrapped up in the details of SEO. Add good unique content to your site and get good quality relevant links to point to your content and you will do well in the search engines.

People new to link building always ask me to explain how to you use Sponsoredreviews.com so I decided to create this tutorial. I hope you like it.

Hopefully this will help you in your link building  process. For those of you who don’t know link building is one of the key components to getting high rankings in the search engines.

Let me know what you think of the tutorial.

As I have worked as an SEO consultant over the last few years it always amazes me how caught up people get with their competitors. It seems that some times they spend more time looking at their competition to see what they are doing than they do building their own business.

What is the benefit of knowing what your competition is doing? Do you just believe that everything they do is the right way to do things and you want to copy them? You have absolutely no control over what they are doing.

Spend time worrying about what YOU are doing. Look at your own site. Ask yourself, what can I be testing to increase conversion? How can I increase traffic? What new product can I create? What article can I write to add good content to my site?

Go back and read my guide to SEO and make sure you are doing everything you need to be doing on your site to increase your rankings.

The focus needs to be on what YOU are doing to YOUR site. Don’t worry about your competitors. Do the right things and you will eventually beat out your competitors, or at least steal a large piece of the pie. Don’t worry, there is enough to go around.