Search Engine Optimization For Amateurs

Be forwarned! I don't have a quick way for you to get top rankings and mountains of traffic to your site inside of ten seconds, like all of the other so called SEO Experts who fill your email inbox claim. But then again, if you believe all of the hype that they regurgitate, you probably still believe in the tooth fairy or that the earth is flat.

If you would like some honest information about how a sheer novice established and marketed a successful website in less than one year, then stick around. This article is about what has worked exceptionately well at getting tons of highly targeted traffic to an ecommerce website that I own.

A year ago I was a complete amateur at this, and I didn't even know what SEO, reciprocal links or article marketing was. Today I am the owner of a highly successful ecommerce website.

Now, I don't claim to be an SEO expert. But I can honestly tell you that in well under one year, I've been very successful at driving huge amounts of traffic to my ecommerce site without paying for it. And my ecommerce site also has a much higher conversion rate than many other ecommerce sites on the web do. In other words, my site is well in the "black" and making plenty of money.

Here is a little bit of background information on me: I've been in my own business for many, many years and I've had a lot of success at it. Since about 90% of all new businesses fail within 36 months, and many established businesses fail regularly, I like to think that over the years I've learned how to rapidly adapt to a changing marketplace.

I decided to mold my existing business into an online business in February. So I bought a copy of FrontPage and I started building a website. At the same time I started transforming my "product" for Internet consumption. In June, I was 59 and I retired from my business in order to focus full time on marketing my "product" via the Internet.

Right about now you are probably wondering what my "product" is. My "product" is information. But I'm not going to tell you exactly what kind of information it is, and I'm not going to send you to my ecommerce site because I don't want my competitors to know how I took a brand new homemade PR0 site, and advanced it to a PR4 site by Thanks Giving - a six month time span.

More importantly, I don't want them to know exactly how I got my homemade website to rank on the first page in the Google organic SERPS for dozens of very important keyword phrases, and on the first three pages of Yahoo, MSN, and Google organic SERPS for literally hundreds of different excellent keywords. It has taken me way under one year, while lots of my competitors have been struggling at it for ten years!

I'll be the first to admit that along the way, I wasted lots of hard earned money and time on lots of Internet marketing software and lots of worthless information from the "Internet Get Rich Quick Gurus." At the same time I've learned which Internet software applications are beneficial and worth the investment.

HOW I FOUND SUCCESS ON THE INTERNET - ARTICLE WRITING AND MARKETING

Many people use link trading to promote their website. I myself have traded links with others in my industry. However, it is my belief that publishing articles that I've written on thousands of competitor websites for free has had the largest impact on my ecommerce site's ranking and the amount of money that I've made. But beware: If you are not cognizant of the downside of article marketing, you can quickly drive yourself out of business.

WHAT ARE THE FACTORS THAT MAKE ARTICLE MARKETING SO EFFECTIVE?

It's simple: 1. The fastest way to good rankings on the search engines is to have lots of one-way links from other on-topic sites to your website.

2. When you write and publish a good article to another website, your "payment" for the use of that article is one or more links from that article back to your site. The more articles that you write, the more free one-way links pointing back to your domain. The more one-way links from other on-topic sites, the better your site will rank in the organic SERPS.

3. If you are able to write a good article, you can set yourself apart as an expert in your field. Well written articles will validate you. And a well-written article is one of the best ways to get qualified traffic to your site. That is because people will read it, and if you've built their trust, they will click your link to see what you have to offer them.

NOW FOR THE MONKEY WRENCH - AVOIDING THE GOOGLE DUPLICATE CONTENT FILTER

In order to be successful you have to get your articles published on hundreds or even thousands of other websites. None of the major search engines like duplicated content. So even if you have an article on hundreds or thousands of other websites, the search engines can find the duplicate articles and only give you credit for the back links in one, or maybe a few of the articles.

So in a perfect world, in order to get the most benefit from your articles you must create a different well-written article for each website. But it is almost impossible to accomplish that, right?

Well . . . . Thanks to modern software, articles can be spun, spooled, or re-written automatically using software. And indeed, in 2006, article-spinning software began to appear on the scene.

Unfortunately, most articles that are spooled are worthless because the articles that the software creates on full autopilot are often totally laughable. The grammar and syntax is very often all wrong. And people who read them will think that they were published by a 6 year old. And because of latent symantic indexing, the Google algorithm can also pick out and ignore these laughable articles as well.

However, if you create a well-written article to begin with, and then use the software correctly, the software can re-write it into hundreds or even thousands of unique, high quality articles that anyone would feel proud of. And most importantly, your articles will be more than unique enough to avoid the duplicate content filters.

If you don't like writing articles, if you do not have the time, or don't have the expertise, you do not need to worry. You can purchase PLR (private label rights) articles and spool them! But you are always better off if you can write your own articles.

I've used desktop article spinning software that I paid about $200.00 for, to create spun articles, and the software works great. As I write this page, I still do use this kind of software for spinning articles that I submit to article directories. The upside of this is that each article directory gets a unique version of the article, and this version won't get filtered out by the duplicate content filters. The down side is that as other webmasters take these articles from the article directories and publish them on their sites, most of these re-published articles will get filtered out. But they will still increase the traffic to your site as people read them and click your links.

Your published articles will usually trigger far more referrals if they are placed directly on your competitor's website! But it is almost always somewhere between very difficult and impossible to recruit other competitor webmasters to publish your articles. So that relegates you to submitting only to article directories.

HERE IS SOME GOOD NEWS!

Now there are some inexpensive Internet sites that allow you to use their article spinning software right on their websites, to create dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unique articles. Some of these sites will even let you try out their service for free. It is amazingly easy to learn and to use their software. And the benefits of using these services are almost too good to be believed. Let me tell you a little bit about these services.

First off, the best part about these services is that they can take your article, and they can spin an unlimited number of unique versions of it. Then they place a different unique version of your article on hundreds of on-topic websites. These spun articles are unique enough that a duplicate content filter will not filter out these articles. So you will get the benefit of all of your back links for ranking purposes.

This is real power. We are talking about the ability to get your articles published on hundreds of your competitors and your peer's websites practically overnight. To make the situation even more attractive, when these services publish your article on another site, they won't publish that Webmaster's articles on your site. This eliminates reciprocal linking and nets you hundreds, or even thousands of one-way links.

And unlike most article directories where your links are severely limited, these services allow you to put up to 5 keyword rich back links in each of your articles. It's best to have each of those back links go to a different webpage on your site, not just to your home page.

You should make the back links appropriate. So if your story is about baby furniture, and you are talking about cribs, you'll want to link to a page about baby cribs on your site. If you are talking about playpens, you'll want to link to a page that features playpens, etc.

Future plans on some of these article spooling networks are to publish your unique articles to thousands of on-topic blogs, and into hundreds of article directories automatically. And remember, every submission will be unique as far as the duplicate content filters are concerned.

Don't get carried away, because this is not a ten second fix for the huge job of publishing hundreds or even thousands of unique articles and submitting them to hundreds of directories and thousands of your competitor's websites. If you believe that something like that exists, then you probably still believe in the tooth fairy.

You still must put sufficient effort into creating well-written professional articles. And then you must be willing to put sufficient effort into looking up the synonym words and phrases that the software will use to spin or spool your unique article. But believe me, you could not do in a year by manual means what these services can do in a matter of mere hours.

Here is an example of what can be accomplished: I wrote 4 different articles on different kinds of information that I sell. After only twelve days on one of these services, my articles were on 242 different competitor site on-topic web pages.

You do the math! With five back links in each article, one to my home page and 4 to different deep linked product pages on my site, that's 968 links in only 12 days! And I began to see some of those links indexed by the major search engines within that same time period. Use your imagination about what will happen after a month, six months, or a year!

JUST HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO SPOOL ARTICLES USING THESE SERVICES?

It is very easy to use the software and a 9-year old child could learn the process. You will learn to use the software within a few minutes.

Most of these article spinning services will allow you to try out their service for free. They give you a 30-day money back guarantee. So you get to try their service for a full month to find out how much it will help your site to improve its rankings before you have to pay for the use of the software. I highly recommend this type of online service and you will be thrilled that you gave it a test!

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Albert Weiss is a novice at SEO. He isn't a self-proclaimed SEO Guru. However, as a beginner, he has built a very successful ecommerce site in well under one year. His site is successfully competing with the other top producing ecommerce sites in his industry, many of which have been on the Internet for ten years!

Mr. Weiss has documented what he did to drive tons of free traffic to his site to make it successful by using article spooling, as well as how incorporating several other aspects of SEO can make a site a successful money maker. He created a Free SEO Website for everyone! So go to www.ArticleSpooling.com right now.

Mr. Weiss has documented the steps he took to drive tons of free traffic to his website to make it successful by relying on article spinning and marketing, as well as how relying on several other aspects of SEO can quickly make an ecommerce site a success. He built a Free Search Engine Optimization Site for everyone! So drop by www.ArticleSpooling.com right now.

- Albert Weiss