As a follow on from my last post Make Money by Working With Search Engines,where I looked at several methods of working with the search engines rather than against them, I’m going to mention a linking strategy that you can use to boost the authority of your main site from which you make money online while remaining within the guidelines of the search engines.

First and foremost, you have to understand that this is by the book and legitimate, but the trade off is that it takes quite a lot of work on your behalf.

Ok, now that statement has probably frightened of the tyre kickers, the serious contenders can read on…

This idea of how to make money with a linking strategy is simple, obvious and actually quite simple to set up. It just takes time and some planning and using what we know about SEO to make money online. Time is something we all have plenty of, its just that a lot of it is wasted on non-essential pursuits, so instead of checking your stats 20 times a day, use that time to do this. Find a niche that you believe you can make money in. Avoid the Make Money Online niche as it is saturated and very competitive. Find a less competitive niche. You’ll have to do the research and come up with one that has several well searched keyword phrases that combined, will generate sufficient traffic for your main website or blog to make money. Then you need a plan.

Build Your Plan:

If you have the basics on how to use a spreadsheet like Excel (or if you prefer free, Open Office’s similar offering) then crank it up and make yourself a simple spreadsheet. On this you are going to make a list of blogs in the left hand column. Those blogs are the ones you are going to create on different platforms but in the same niche. Use free blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Blinkweb etc and create set of around 8-12 blogs. Divide them up into two groups and split blogs on each platform up as best you can so you don’t have, say all Blogger blogs in one group. They need to be split across various platforms for this to work best.

These are your first tier sites and they are going to be fairly general themed around your main niche. They are also going to provide your main site with the links it needs to dominate the SERPs for your chosen keywords. Getting the keywords part right is one of the methods of how to make money with SEO and has been covered in provious posts here and at the sites that are linked to in this post. Of course, the number of first tier sites you make will depend upon how competitive your niche is. So look at the top 3 sites in Google’s SERPs (this is the search engine you need to rank in by the way) for the keywords you want to rank for and find out how many anchored links they have pointing at them. You can do this with software like SEO Elite.

The strategy is simple in that you need more links than your competition to beat them in the SERPs.

Now build up each of your new blogs with posts, using relevant content. It doesn’t have to be quality content, just mostly original and relevant including your keywords both in the title and text of your posts. You can get links to these sites using the common variety of methods such as dofollow blog comments, forum sigs, article submissions, pligg site submissions etc. Once they have been indexed by Google you can start including links to your main site in each post.

You can also link some of the first tier blogs together but not all of them. This is why you split them into two groups. Only link blogs together within each group and do not link to blogs in the other group. Better to be frugal with interlinking and don’t daisy-chain them together but rather link out to maybe only two other random blogs in the group from each blog.

Why?

There is every chance that even though your blogs are perfectly legit, a competitor in your niche might not take kindly to a new site coming along and knocking them off their pedestal. They may check the back-links coming into your site and if they see a large group of blogs that not only link to your main site but are also interlinked, they will smell a rat and report your blogs as spam. Now, even if they are not spam, Google will shoot first and ask questions later and your blogs may get de-indexed until the Google visual inspection team can satisfy themselves that they are legit. During this time, your links will be discounted and your main site will drop out of the index.

It takes a while to get it back there and in that time you will lose money. So by not interlinking all your blogs, you minimize the risk.

Ok, now to the linking strategy itself and how off site SEO works its magic. All links must come from within posts. So no blogroll links. The links must have a keyword text anchor and either point directly at the homepage of your main site for its main keywords, or point to a post on the main site with the title of the post as the anchor. The title of each post in both first tier blogs and main site must include your keywords. This is highly important and what will help you to beat your competition, because chances are if the niche is not competitive, they will not know what you now know. Generate a mixture of links all containing variations of your keywords to make it look more natural.

Don’t overdo it. Keep it to a maximum of two links out from each post and work of a basis of one link per roughly 200-250 words for maximum link juice.

Well, that’s the strategy. It works but it takes time. Google take their time indexing sites, indexing posts within blogs and counting links. Several months may pass before your links get counted and your main site rises up onto the first page in the SERPs, let alone takes first place. So you need plenty of patience and keep diligently working all your blogs to keep providing fresh links to the main site.

Good luck, be tenacious and stick to your guns and you will succeed.

Freelance Writer Terry Didcott
Co-Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: SEO