Earlier I was reading a thread at Digital Point about building backlinks, one reply in particular made it obvious that many people don’t know how to successfully link exchange. The reply said “for every 20-30 link exchange emails I send, only 1-2 people reply” - that’s only 6% of people replying to him, in my experience over 80% reply to my requests and I only contact PR3+ websites. The difference in our success rates probably depends on one or more of the following factors; where the email addresses were gathered from, not natural and customized the email was, and how good our own website is (quality, traffic and Pagerank).

In case you don’t know about the potential of link exchanges, I’ll illustrate it with an example; my Naruto Wallpapers gets 12,000 uniques per day from Google and the majority of the backlinks are from link exchanges, about 10-20 exchanges from sites with Pagerank 3-5.

Finding people to contact

Obviously the most beneficial backlinks are those from sites that are related to yours, have high Pagerank, and have high traffic, so we will search for those. For this step I like to use the SearchStatus add-on for Firefox, I recommend you install it also. Many people look for link exchanges on SEO forums such as Digital Point but the websites link exchanging there are most often low quality, luckily I have a better method of finding websites to link exchange with - Google.

Here’s some searches that will bring back great results -

• naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/contact.php” - What this search does is look for all websites about Naruto that have a file named ‘contact.php’, a contact form. It also checks that the TLD is one of the popular, global TLDs which increases the likelihood of the site being in English thus saving you from having to browse and rule out non-English websites. This finds URLs like www.domain.com/contact.php
• naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/contact/” - This search does a similar job to the first search but less effectively, it finds both URLs like www.domain.com/contact/ but also www.domain.com/contact/anime/4/ which you may not want. This search returns about 5x as many results as the first so if you didn’t find enough with the first, try this one.
• naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/affiliates” - This search returns websites with a page about affiliates, which is often used as an alias for ‘Link Exchanges Page’. These websites will often be looking for link exchanges so this search is a very useful one. It returns URLs such as www.domain.com/affiliates/ and www.domain.com/affiliates.php. You could replace the word ‘affiliates’ with ‘partners’ in the search to find more results.

After those 3-4 searches you probably have 1000 search results but luckily you shouldn’t need to go through them all. Simply browse the results one at a time checking the Pagerank and Alexa rank of each using the SearchStatus add-on, writing down the URLs of the websites meeting your minimum Pagerank and Alexa requirements, you should write down roughly double the amount of exchanges you would like to make, so if you want 10 link exchanges find 20 URLs. My minimum Pagerank and Alexa requirement is PR3 and Alexa 500,000 if my site is new, higher if my site is old and successful.

Writing an email

Now that we have 20+ website owners to email we can get started. The emails I send are simple but work remarkably well, when contacting someone I will write something like this -

Title - (Their website name)
Body - Hi, I am the owner of www.narutowallpaper.biz, would you like to (exchange links) with my website?
Thanks, Dan.

Having the person’s website name as the email title makes sure they will read the email, if the title was ‘link exchange’ they may simply delete it. I keep the email short and sweet and unprofessional, this is suitable for Naruto related websites but for example if you wanted to exchange with SEO websites you would be better off listing your Pagerank. The professionalism should be changed depending on your website’s topic, if you want to exchange with an online store a couple of paragraphs may be more effective than the single sentence in my example above. Most of the websites we want to exchange with will have a title above their link exchanges like ‘Partners’, ‘Affiliates’, or ‘Friends’, if their website uses the term ‘Affiliates’ then customize the email to suit this, say to them “would you like to affiliate”.

The more generic and spammy the email sounds, the more likely the recipient will delete. To me the example listed doesn’t sound spammy because it’s out of the ordinary being so short, it doesn’t speak of things like ‘traffic’, ‘Pagerank’ or ‘rankings’, and it’s customized a little for each recipient.

Website Quality

For most website topics, whether a person will exchange links with you depends a lot on the quality of the website rather than the Pagerank or Alexa rank. If you have a great website that is only one day old most people will still exchange links with you unless you’re in a topic like SEO, but if your website is of a terrible quality but has traffic you may have trouble making exchanges. Link exchanges can be great for your search engine rankings, but only if you have a good website so people will exchange with you.

Hopefully you now know the potential of link exchanging, how to do it successfully, and how immensely useful a single Google search can be.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Have you ever wanted to see where your competitors get their traffic from? Well now you can. In this article I will teach you how to find your competitors’ Awstats Reports and how to analyze them and utilize their most successful traffic generation methods.

The Google Search

The Awstats statistics application uses the file name awstats.pl and the title of an Awstats report starts with ‘Statistics of’ so to find all of the Awstats reports indexed by Google you search for (inurl:awstats.pl intitle:”Statistics of”). After completing the search Google tells us there are 27,100 results, that’s a whopping 27,100 Awstats reports we could look at. It would be too hard to look through all of them so we should refine our search.

Many of the 27,100 results are not in English so we will instead search for (inurl:awstats.pl intitle:”Statistics of” intitle:com|org|net|biz|info), now there is 6,940 results which are mainly in English. What I did there was make sure the domain is of a common TLD, not a country specific TLD like .cn .it .cz etc.

Finally we can add a broad keyword to the search to get more relevant results - (inurl:awstats.pl intitle:”Statistics of” intitle:com|org|net|biz|info games). This won’t give 100% relevant results but you get the idea.

Navigating the Report

Many of the search results lead to URLs such as http://www.backupzone.org/stats/awstats.pl?output=allkeyphrases%E2%8C%A9=de, to reach the main Awstats report you simply remove the variables from the URL except for the optional ‘config’ variable. For this URL there is no ‘config’ variable to we remove everything after the question mark - http://www.backupzone.org/stats/awstats.pl.

Once you’re at the main section of the report everything is quite self-explanatory, you can see; the daily and monthly traffic, the visitor locations, which pages are accessed most often, the browsers and operating systems of the visitors, and most importantly the traffic sources.

Using the Report

For the sake of example we will use the Awstats report of OnlinePot.org. The website is about Medical Marijuana, the reason that it’s a good example is that it gets 3000+ uniques per day. Following is how to use the report -

• Pages-URL (Top 20) - Here you can see which of their pages are most popular, this shows you exactly what the visitors want to see. If you create similar pages offering the visitors exactly what they want they are likely to visit your site if you tell them about it.
• Links from an external page - Here you can see the external websites which link to this website. Backlinks are not only important for targetted traffic but also to increase search engine rankings, so backlinks increase traffic directly and indirectly. If your own website is of high quality and a similar topic, you can email the people who link to the website you are analysing and ask them for a link to your website and there is a high chance they will do so.
• Search Keyphrases (Top 20) - If your competitors are receiving traffic for a certain keyword that is proof that the keyword is worth ranking for. You can find out how competitive each keyword is by searching for the keyword in quotation marks in Google and checking how many results are returned.
  
  For the example report I linked to above their top keyword is ‘Marijuana Games’ so you search Google for (“Marijuana Games”), this returns 5780 results. 5780 is not many competitors and for 1000 visitors per month it is worth putting in the effort to rank for that keyword. After checking their second keyword (“Marijuana Songs”) we can see that there is only 1500 competitors for this keyword which also brings 1000 searchers per month - great, another keyword to target!

Hopefully with the help of your competitors Awstats reports you can find some great backlinks and also some great keywords to target. Also I hope this article helps you to think outside of the usual Google keyword search, Google has a lot more to offer if you know how to find it.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Brainstorming for the perfect domain can be quite a troublesome task, mainly because there are 100,000,000 domains already taken; the best ones were bought years ago. But using the following steps you can still find a great domain for your next website idea.

Do you have a budget of $10 or $10,000?

If your budget is $10 then you are limited to buying domains that nobody else has thought of, which can be bought immediately from a domain registrar such as GoDaddy. To find domains nobody else has thought of you will have to try many different domains because the majority of good domains have already been thought of. The best you can hope for with a $10 budget is a good domain, finding a great one is near impossible.

With a higher budget you can get a great domain, but the price of domains can be sky-high for single and even double word .com domains, for example NewlyWeds.com sold for $130,000 while FloridaGolfCarts.com sold for $565; generally the shorter the domain the more expensive it is. If you were hoping to buy Marketing.com it won’t be cheap! If you are looking to buy a great domain and have a higher budget than $10 you will need to purchase the domain privately from the owner, to find out the email address of the owner of a site just type the domain into a WhoIs tool. Otherwise you can look for great domains at a domain auction website such as Sedo.

Which TLD?

.com domains are worth between 25 and 250 times as much as the other common TLDs - net, org, biz and info, so if you can get the .com then you should. Finding a suitable .com that is not already taken is not easy so if you really want a certain name like ‘MarketingHub’ you may need to choose a different TLD. Which TLD you should use can be worked out using this simple rule: if most people will be typing your domain into the address bar then get a .com, but if most of your traffic will be from search engines the TLD doesn’t matter.

Keyworded vs. Brandable

If you expect most of your traffic to come from search engines then a keyworded domain such as www.NarutoWallpaper.biz is preferable as the keywords in the domain will help your search engine rankings, ‘Naruto Wallpaper’ is something people search for so the domain will benefit me. Something like MySpace is brandable rather than keyworded because nobody would have searched for the key phrase ‘My Space’ before MySpace became popular, you should choose a brandable domain if you expect your website idea to go big.

Hyphens or not? Numbers or not?

A single hyphen in a domain name greatly reduces the value so you should avoid them where possible. Numbers also greatly reduce the value of a domain unless they have a specific purpose such as in www.24hours.com or www.mp3.com, www.marketing1.com is an example of a bad number.

Short or Long?

Shorter is generally best but short domains are the rarest, if you want to get a domain for $10 you should be looking for 2 or 3 word phrases if you want a keyworded domain or you can create your own word 6+ characters long.

Conclusion

If you consider all of these points you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a good domain, and if you have a higher budget you should be able to get a great one.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Too many people believe that cloning a successful website will bring them riches and fame, sadly it won’t. The most important marketing technique every person will benefit from knowing is to differentiate yourself from your competition. If somebody sees a clone of YouTube they have no reason to use it since it doesn’t offer anything more than YouTube, it isn’t worth the visitor’s time to bookmark it. Offering something new, innovative or ground-breaking gives the visitor a reason to bookmark the site, return again or even link to the site.

When developing a new website, Keywords Database - Highest paying Adsense keywords, I remembered this technique “to differentiate myself from the competition”. My differentiation is that the majority of my competitors sell paid membership/software while mine is a free (ad powered) web-based tool. Because of this differentiation I have seen quite a few natural backlinks pop up, mainly in forums where people are talking about it, which has brought some decent traffic. Having a website worth talking about is what can really make a website take off.

Here’s some examples of successful website differentiation -

• John Chow - Lots of people talk about John Chow because he openly displays his website’s earnings (and they are significant).
• Pro Blogger - Frequent, high quality and useful content is something not all websites provide, Pro Blogger does provide this.
• Blue Hat SEO - Very innovative gray hat SEO ideas, the sort of ideas that you would expect to be kept secret.
• Keywords Database - A free tool when the alternatives cost money.

Google didn’t get where they are today by copying their competitors, they became the search engine with highest market share by continually improving their search algorithm to provide searchers with the best results possible. Studying the big guys is useful for finding good marketing techniques, but cloning or mimicking them won’t get you far at all. Give your target audience something they don’t already have and they will love you for it (and hopefully give you a link or two), and in turn your site will succeed.

Popularity: unranked [?]

My website Naruto Wallpaper ranks 1st for ‘Christmas Girls’ on Google and 1st AND 2nd on image search. This keyword was bringing me 5000 uniques per day over the Christmas period. There are 9,000,000 competitors for this keyword so to rank 1st you would assume I have many good backlinks to my Christmas Girls sub-page, well I don’t. I have almost no backlinks from other websites, but I do have an internal backlink to it on every page of my website (in the right-hand sidebar).

So from this case you can see that external backlinks are not necessary to rank highly. The sub-pages of Naruto Wallpaper generally have a PageRank of 4 which I’m sure did help me to rank for ‘Christmas Girls’. Since the ‘Christmas Girls’ sub-page gets an internal link from each of my pages, it gets roughly 100 PR4 backlinks.

So in my future SEO strategy I will focus external backlinks to my homepage, which will leak PR to the sub-pages and from each of my sub-pages I will have a link to the pages targeting my main target keywords (with good anchor text).

Popularity: unranked [?]