Getting started with SEO - Part 3
This is the third in the series of my “Getting started with SEO” posts. In this post, I will cover one single, but debatebly the single most important thing to do in order of achieving a high ranking website. Do this well enough, and you can almost guarantee a good ranking. This is link building.
Link building is the act of getting as many relevant, authoritative links as possible. Generally, you want to have a keyword you want to rank highly for as an anchor text.
An example would be John Chow. He wanted to rank top for the term “make money online” which has over 272 million results in Google. so, what did he do? A very clever and viral tactic. As his blog allready had such a large readerbase, and good stats he asked for bloggers to do a review of his blog, with the anchor text “make money online”. In return, he would link back to them in a batch. This worked fantastically. The batches of reviews poured in, with the strength of all these links, i believe he reached the #1 spot for the term. Unfortunately, this fairytale story doesn’t have a happy ending. Google caught onto John and he was banned from the search engine. He doesn’t even rank for the term “John Chow” anymore! At least the reviews sent some traffic.
I wouldn’t say that there is any secret to link building. If you wish to start building links with a blog, my advice would simply be to start off with a few blogroll exchanges, roll out lots of quality content and link out to others. In return, you should be treated to some good backlinks 
These are my tactics for SEO. I don’t believe seo should be hard. It is not an art form, it should become something that is second nature when building a website to you.
This is the last part of my holiday, i am currently traveling to Bangkok, Thailand.
Great series Josh. I hope that you’ll keep churning out such good articles. Enjoy your holiday btw!
hello josh this is one nice article for seo, im just starting seo for a month and im looking for good reference will greatly help me … tnx..
Hi your post is delightful.
I will definitely read your diary..
ciao
Good post again Josh !! I enjoy reading these seo posts
You know of (or does anyone know of) free ways for lesser known sites to build links. I have a few sites I just started, and I want to promote them like crazy, but I am poor. I have found web directories to be decent places to submit links, but with Google anti-Web Directory lately, I am not sure if this is helping.
I’m still wondering if getting banned from Google hasn’t done John more good than bad. The hype over getting banned seems to have been bigger than the hype from his original competitions. xD
the thing is John Chow doesnt really need SERPS anymore. He has such a large following now, and he is always being talking about on the major web design forums.
I think John Chow even stated in his blog once that he does’t really need the SERP traffic. His blog is more of a word of mouth type blog but once again, if you produce great traffic and content, the people will come
Its so much easier to get backlinks when using a blog platform like wordpress. Things like top comments, URL in the comment form and trackbacks all make it much easier than it used to be.