The Best Backlinks for Making Money Online
There’s no doubt that getting backlinks (also known as inbound links or inlinks) will greatly help improve your search engine rankings. That fact was proven long ago and continues to be true today. There’s also no doubt that having top rankings on the major search engines, specifically Google, will give you targeted traffic and increase your earnings. Actually one of the best ways to make money online is to build websites around various keywords and get them ranked highly on Google by getting lots of backlinks.
There are a lot of ways to get backlinks. Some of these ways include:
- Quality Content so people naturally link to you
- Article Marketing
- Link Exchanges
- Web Directories
- Blog Directories
- Forum Signatures
- Blog Commenting
- Guest Blogging
- Social Bookmarking Sites
- Social Networking Sites
- Link Bait Posts
- RSS Directories
- Link Wheels
- Press Releases
- Backlink Services
- Web 2.0 Properties
…And several more. The point is that you will never run out of places to get backlinks and you should never stop trying to get them. They are extremely important to your success at making money online.
Getting almost any backlink to your website is better than nothing but certain inbound links are a lot better than others. If you can get these particular links they will help you exponentially more than any other type. So, you should spend a larger portion of your time going after these backlinks.
So, without further ado, here are the criteria for finding the best type of backlinks for making money online…
1) From a Related Site – Generally the rule is that the best inbound links are from websites that are related to yours. That means they are in the same or similar niche and the content is related to what you have on your website. For example: A link from an internet home business related site to your make money online site would be great.
2) Keyword Anchored – You definitely want keyword anchored links whenever possible because the anchor text tells the search engines what to rank you for in their results. For that reason the anchor text should include the main keywords you want your website to rank highly for on Google and other SE’s.
For example: If your website is about making money online then you might anchor your links with keywords such as; make money online, earn money on the internet, money making, how to make money, ways to make money online, and other similar phrases. Be sure to vary the anchor text because it’s not good to have them all the same. You should also have plenty of links that are not keyword anchored but that will happen naturally so you don’t really need to worry about it right now.
3) From an Authority Site – A link from a highly ranked site in your niche is very beneficial to you. These are typically called authority site links and they will help your rankings quite a bit.
4) High PR Site – PR is short for “Page Rank” and that is one way that Google measures the importance of a web page. When you have a backlink from a website with high PR it will carry a lot more weight than one from a site with low or no PR. This will give you more “link juice” and help improve your rankings even more.
5) Do Follow – It should go without saying that part of the criteria for the best backlink is that it is a “dofollow” link. If the “nofollow” tag is applied to your link then you are getting very little benefit from it as far as search engine rankings are concerned. You need do follow backlinks to help you make money online with SEO.
6) One Way – A one way backlink is when a site is linking to your website for whatever reason without you giving them a link back. These are very high quality and are typically considered to be the best type of inlinks you can get.
That’s basically all there is to finding the best backlinks for making money online. If you get a backlink that includes all six of the criteria listed above then it is about as perfect of a link as you will ever get. The more you can get like this the better, and it won’t be long before you see top search engine rankings and start earning more money from your website!
The Google Sandbox Effect
One of the favorite things for people in the make money online and SEO worlds is to argue over theoretical concepts like “what is the best type of link?” or “how important is getting links from different c-class IPs?”. There are countless concepts out there like this, but few catch the attention of people like the google sandbox effect. Some people don’t believe it exists. Some people are so afraid of it that by the time someones site gets out of the sandbox they are getting their third link and are still on page 20 of the SERPs.
Ok so I’m getting a little ahead of myself I guess. First things first, the google sandbox effect is a phenomena where a site climbs in the SERPs too quickly and subsequently is applied a temporary penalty. The penalty can last anywhere from a couple of months to nine or more. A site that is seemingly going strong, climbing up towards a magical page one ranking, flies too close to the sun and gets knocked down a peg.
So what exactly gets a site relegated to the dreaded depths of the sandbox? Well this is where the debate truly heats up. We all know that the basic thing that happens is a quick climb followed by an even quicker fall, but there is more to it than that. A lot of people think that getting only strong links (in content, from high page rank, and high trust rank pages) will keep you out of the box. Others think the key is building links very slow and steady, not setting off any red flags. To be truthful I don’t have the answer to this question, but one can take a good lesson here anyway. Build your links naturally, which means slowly and from a wide range of quality sites.
Another thing to think about is why does google even have the sandbox? Well that isn’t too complicated to figure out, and since google is logical it also seems to be result that supports the theory. Google has the sandbox to, like everything they do, fight spam. Think about it, spammers are generally into sites for the short haul, the quick buck. When they run the risk of google slapping their sites down it deters them from building in the first place because unlike those of us who build a passive income they want a site to pay off short term.
A final question that is interesting to consider, and probably more useful is what to do if you think you are in the sandbox. The answer there is simple in the MMO world, keep building links. That’s all you need to do if you find yourself in the sandbox, or just in the midst of a normal shuffle. Don’t complicate things unless you’re just looking for some good mental exercise.
Oh and if you want to see the sandbox effect in action here is a good image of my site when it went in for NINE MONTHS! I kept working on this baby thought the rough times and it paid off well. Keep working.
Keyword Selection
One of the most important aspects of making money online is keyword selection. If you don’t pick the right keyword you run two risks:
- You won’t be able to rank for it
- If you do rank for it, you won’t make any money
As you can imagine either of these scenarios can be extremely frustrating. Even the best of us can run into a keyword the ends up being far harder than it should be, but people new to SEO often choose to go after search terms that they will never rank for. There are some pretty basic ‘guidelines’ that you can use to help you go after terms that you can be successful in ranking your site for (and I say guidelines because keyword selection is more of an art than a science).
- If the keyword isn’t in the title, you can beat it
- The lower the PR the better (While PR isn’t conclusive it is certainly indicative of page strength)… as an easy guideline if the site is PR 3 or less you can beat it
Really if you find a keyword that satisfies both of those guidelines then you should have little trouble getting your site to rank.
The next part of your consideration is will the term get my site traffic, and more to the point will the term make me money? I know what your thinking… my god this guy is going to give me more guidelines. Well think again. This time it will be a formula :)
First thing you want to do is go look at a keyword tool and see how many EXACT searches the keyword get per month. The next thing you need to look at is what the CPC of the keyword is. With that information you can figure out if the keyword will make you money. Here is what you do:
Exact Searches * .4 *.05 * CPC * .25 = Keyword Income Potential
The .4 is because 1st place in the serps gets around 40% of the traffic for that search, the .05 is because a typical site can count on converting 5% of visitors to ad clicks, and the .25 is because google will generally pay you are 25% of what they pay advertisers. For those of you who aren’t that good at math I’ll simplify that a bit down to this formula, but it doesn’t make as much sense to look at:
Exact Searches * CPC * 0.005 = Keyword Income Potential
Generally if I am building a small niche site I am looking for a keyword with income potential of around $50 or more.
So now you know how to choose a keyword that will both make you money and will pay you something too. Best of luck!
