Day 9 - Backlinks And Indexing

The videos are getting shorter and shorter so maybe I will catch up at some point in time. I’m only 10 videos behind as it’s currently August 19th and I’m only on Day 9.

Today we talk about creating backlinks and how to check if we’ve been indexed in Google. One thing to remember is when creating backlinks through comment marketing make sure you are adding to the conversation. Don’t just add a silly one liner like “Great Article”. If you don’t have anything meaningful to add move on until you find an article or forum post where you can make a contribution.

We need to start being a part of our communities. Use ethical ways to be an active contributing member of your business community.

Day 8 is approximately ~20 minutes

How To Get More Backlinks

(video length ~14 minutes)

MAKE SURE YOU CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMMUNITY! Don’t go out and just spam a blog or forum. As Ed says you need to get along with the neighbors by contributing to the conversation.

Ed takes a look at where he’s showing up in Google search for his keyword phrase. Similar to what I talked about in my last article Day 8.5 - A Little Bit Of Statistical Analysis.

Google Groups

The second place Ed goes is to the Google Groups. Through Google Groups you want to try and find good groups that fit your niche. You can do a search by your keyword.

There are heaps of groups and places where you can add links and contribute to the community. Add your link to your signature along with your keyword.

Make sure you check on any rules associated with the group.

Google will rank these forums by order of authority. It’s best to get your backlink in the highest authority forums. Don’t worry about no-follow…a link is a link right now.

Unfortunately, Ed didn’t go into detail on commenting in groups we’ll figure it out on our own.

Squidoo

• Go to Google search and enter the following: your keyword phrase site:squidoo.com. For instance, I’m going to enter: dog adoptions site:squidoo.com
• You can see how many phrases there are and which phrases are most relevant.
• Go to any of the relevant Squidoo lenses and check to see if they have a guest book (place to leave a comment). Now make sure you leave relevant information to add to the conversation in the lens.

We should try to do this for 5 minutes a day and gather 1-2 links. 40-50 links will go a long, long way as we’ve seen from our Market Samurai repot.

How To Find Out If Your Site Is Indexed

(video length ~4 minutes)

One of the keys is you want Google to find your site through these outside links. When the google spiders are crawling websites they will find links to our site (hopefully), crawl the link, look at the anchor text, and find our site.

Guru Bob says we just want the search engines to know we are there. Ranking doesn’t matter right now. If you keep a close eye on your keyword phrase you may notice lots of fluctuation in your ranking and it’s totally normal for you to completely drop out of search for a couple days then re-appear.

We can check Google, Yahoo, and MSN the same way just type the following into the search field:

• site:yourdomain.com
• You’ll most likely notice that Google probably found the home page, contact page, article page etc. That’s what we want.

As long as we are indexed we will now show up in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). If you’re not showing up keep bookmarking, comment marketing and eventually the spiders will follow one of those links to your website.

Time to get cracking on day 8. I haven’t written this in a while, but here’s our to do list:

Steps To Take Today

• Make sure we’re indexed in Google - if not take further steps as mentioned above…eventually we’ll get into the SERPS. (YAY, we already are).
• Start comment marketing. Lets concentrate on 1-2 comments a day using Squidoo or Google Groups. I’m sure we can get creative and think of some other ways to create backlinks.