how to make money with adsense

Today I’m going to continue talking about the same subject I’ve been blogging about for the last couple of days, namely how to get backlinks. I’m going to change track a little though and look more in depth at why we need backlinks in the first place and their important to search engine optimization.

Why Do We Need To Get Backlinks?

If you’re trying to make money online then you need to either get traffic to whatever it is your trying to sell, or sell traffic to someone else that has a product or service they’re selling. If you’re attempting to make money with Adsense then you are basically just a middle man funneling traffic to other people with a product that needs buyers. So in the Internet marketing world traffic is money and those who have the most traffic are generally making the most money.

You might be struggling to see what relevance this has to the topic on hand but to get the most web site traffic we need to get our sites as high up on Google as possible because Google is the big boss when it comes to controlling Internet traffic. We need to convince the world’s best search engine that we are worthy of their respect in order that they will send us a nice steady stream of visitors for us to convert into cash in whatever way we choose. This is the game know as search engine optimization.

The battle to get to the top of Google is like a giant popularity contest where the most popular site gets to sit at the top of the Google castle and scoop up 40% of the traffic for a particular keyword. Backlinks are the key to the popularity contest in that they are the way that we collect votes in our favor from the rest of the Internet community. When someone with another blog or website links to your site they’re telling Google that they think you’re one of the coolest kids in school. Collect the most votes and Google is going to start taking notice of your site and send you to the top of the SERPs.

Another, equally important aspect of backlinks is their ability to signal to Google what your site is about. For example if I link to this site with the text Make Money Online than Google knows that this is a site about making money online and will take that into consideration when deciding where to put me in the search engines.

The words you use to link to your site is known as anchor text and its vitally important if you are to make the most of your backlinks that you take so much effort to find. A mistake that many beginners make when they are building backlinks to their domains is to use anchor text that bares no relation to the subject covered in the site.

If you leave comments in blogs for a backlink with your name as an anchor link what are you telling the search engines about your site that is of any value? Do you want Google to rank you highly for the word “George” or “Susan”? Probably not! At the same time using anchor text such as “click here” as a link to your site at the end of articles is a waste of your energy.

When getting friends to link back to this site I will get them to use anchor text such as “Make Money With Adsense”, “Make Money Online” and “Adsense Make Money” because thats one of the best ways to let the search engines know what subjects I’m covering. Hopefully it will also let them know that my site is respected for the content that covers that topic though if you’ve read much of my content you’ll realise that the respect is misplaced, but that’s another story.

So get into the habit of having all your back links to be keyword rich anchor text that is related to you blog. On that point make sure you mix the anchor text up or you might be penalized for Google bombing.

What Is Google Bombing?

Google bombing is a method of manipulating the search engine results by using a specific keyword relentlessly as your anchor text in order to get ranked highly for that word or phrase. Google has cottoned on to this practice and now punishes sites whose anchor text links look unnatural. The remedy for this is to vary your anchor text between a large number of related keywords for which you would like your site to rank. This is the reason that I don’t always use one specific keyword such as “make money with google” in the resource box of any articles I write.

Now you know the importance of being able to get links and making sure your anchor text backlinks are relevant to the subject of your content to further your SEO efforts. Next time I’m going to talk about another element of your links that is important and how to get yourself the very best quality backlinks available.

When you talk to many so-called Search Engine Optimization experts they will talk endlessly about the importance that “on-page” elements have to your place on the SERPS. The reasons for this are that most SEO “experts” aren’t that great at what they do, on-page Seo is easy, and it doesn’t take up too much time. Because of this it can be a nice little earner from a client that doesn’t know any better.

What really matters in the battle for good search engine rankings is off page optimization. After all, good on-page work only tells Google that you can optimize a web page. But get a barrow load of sites from all over the Internet pointing to your domain and Google is going to really sit up an take notice, believing that the information or service you provide must be of value.

So, to get your website further up the search engine results pages you need to find ways to get backlinks that are of a good quality to your pages. This is definitely something that is easier said than done but it is imperative to your success if your aim is to make money online.

Next post I’m going to talk about the best ways to get backlinks that will make a real difference to your search engine rankings.

How do we go about getting backlinks to our websites?

There are a few ways to get backlinks to your site, the traditional way and the method that is preferred by Google is to build a site that is so awesome that people all over the Internet will love your content so much that they will link to your pages. This technique has the main advantages of being free but it also rocks due to the fact that you don’t have to do the backlink building work yourself. Unfortunately it does rely on you creating a place on the Web that’s so good that links to it appear by magic and this is an extremely difficult, time-consuming task.

Option number two in the backlinking toolbox is to get out there and beg, steal and borrow links from wherever you see the opportunity. The most popular and successful ways to do this are as follows:

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a very simple way to get some links which only costs a little of your time. Sign up for an account with an article publication site such as Ezine Articles and they will allow you to publish a short article on your chosen subject with a couple of links back to your own site.

Set up some free blogs

There are a huge number of sites out there who will give your own free space on the Internet where you can publish your own content. Publish a blog with a few short articles on it, get it indexed by Google and you can use it to get free links back to your money sites. The best place to get started with this method is at Blogger.com which is Google’s own free blogging platform.

Create Hubpages

Hubpages.com is another place where you can publish your own content and get backlinks to your sites. With their easy to use system you can quickly get content up on their server and use it to build links. Hubpages has an advantage over other options such as blogger blogs and squidoo due to the fact that they are held in high regard by Google, at least for now. Because of this, links from the hubpages domain can be a real powerful force in improving your own domains in the eyes of Google.

Link Exchanges

Creating loads of original content to fill up blogger blogs, hubpages and article directories can be a tough job so it can help to have other weapons in your arsenal which aren’t so draining. One way to get great links from quality sites is to email fellow bloggers in your niches and ask if they would be willing to place a link to your site in exchange for one to theirs.

Buying links

This is a big one that pretty much everyone in the super competitive niches such as loans and credit cards seems to use. Google have serious problems with this one for obvious reasons. If you buy a link you’re basically faking your popularity and manipulating the search engine results. Its not something I have ever done due to the fact that I don’t know enough about it, but I’d advise anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing to stay well clear. Get caught doing this and your site is in danger of getting deindexed from Google.

If your sites aren’t ranking as well as you would like then you are going to have to work on getting more backlinks. Its not a glamorous job and quite frankly its a pain in the arse much of the time but building links will make a world of difference to the amount of traffic you get.

There are a few other ways to get links that make things a bit easier but I’ll go into them more in a future post.

I haven’t bothered writing anything for this blog recently as I’ve been too busy trying to make money with adsense on my other sites which are showing signs of making progress. For May I made a record $170 in adsense earning which is well behind where I want to be but was an improvement. Things are definitely looking up this month though and I’m target to make well over $300, if things continue as well as they have so far then I should be looking at closer to $400. The rate at which my adsense money is increasing is definitely something I am quite happy with although we always want things to progress faster than they do.

I can say quite honestly that the vast majority of the reason for any advances I have made over the last 2 months in my quest to make money online have been from joining the Keyword Academy where I have learnt an incredible amount not just from Court and Mark but also from the many helpful members who make the forum a great place to increase your make money online knowledge.

I’ve quickly built my number of niche sites up to about 20 thanks to the keyword research techniques I’ve learnt and my sites are slowly working their way up the SERPs as I build quality backlinks from various sources.

As myself and many others have said a million times before, making money online isn’t rocket science but it does take a lot of hard work and perseverance. The how to make money online “experts” who promise to give you the secrets to online business success are selling a dream that doesn’t exist. Getting your head down and making the success for yourself by working without reward for a few months is the way to long term Internet riches.

I Made A Mistake And I’m Sorry

Back when I started this blog I made a mistake for some reason that I can’t quite comprehend but which I must none the less take responsibility for. Justin over at SEO Zombie designs wordpress themes which he happens to be damn good at and when I was looking for a theme for this site a few months ago I happened to stumble over his blog and picked up a theme.

As I was putting together this site I took out the link back to Justin’s site which is in the footer of the page, not only that but to make matters worse I put a link in my second post saying that I had used his theme and make the link nofollow. For those of you who don’t know what a nofollow link is its simply a way of tagging a link to tell google not to follow the link to the page it points to. I basically did it to conserve the Google link juice of my site without realizing what I was doing. Justin put time and effort into building the theme that I used and the least he deserved for his time and expertise was for me to give him a link back to his site as a thank you.

Anyway, a couple of hours after I put my post up I got an email from Justin telling me what me what we thought about my actions and he was quite rightly a little pissed. As soon as I received the email I realized my mistake and corrected things by reinstating the link in the footer and making the link in my post to a “dofollow” link. I also sent him an email saying sorry and telling him I had rectified my mistake.

So why in God’s name am I writing about this today, 3 months later?

I was reading a thread in the Keyword Academy forum where some people were talking about removing links to the builders of wordpress theme. Lissie of Passive Income Online fame left a link to a post that Justin had made in which he talked about the incident where I had removed the link from this site. He called me a cockhead with no morals who deserved to have nuts crushed in a vice. lol, OK, he didn’t say that but he certainly wasn’t happy and had a rant about me being a jerk.

Read his Value Of Free post here and see for yourself. I found it quite funny reading about something I had done on someone else’s blog, felt like I was having my five minutes of fame. I totally understood Justin being angry although it would have been nice if he told his readers that I had apologized and instantly corrected my mistake.

In the world I live in people make mistakes all the time and the only thing I expect from someone who makes a blunder is that they correct it and try their best not to make the same mistake again. If they say sorry for their actions, so much the better.

But at the end of the day Justin has a right to feel however he wants towards me, what bugged me was that everyone that reads his bog ends up getting tremendously angry about something that had been a newbie mistake which I had done everything in my power to sort out when it was pointed out to me. If they had known that I had reinstated the links the instant I received the email from Justin and sent an apology would they still have wanted to slap me across the face with a dirty sock? Probably not!

It seems unfortunate that people out there in Internet land are going to get angry about something I’ve mistakingly done without hearing both sides of the story which may cause them to be suspicious of everyone they come into contact with online. I mean if everyone in the SEO and MMO world gets angry about all the thieving gypsies who are only out to help themselves then the Online world is going to become a less pleasant place to be. After all the best thing about trying to make money online is the fact that so many of us help each other out to get to where we want to be together.

Anyways that’s me had my own rant on the episode so we’ll leave it at that. I just had to get it off my chest and it gave me some content to fill up this post.