This post is written specifically for Ali Godil who sent a request for this information.

Builiding backlinks to your site is the crux on optimization for the search engines.

The more links you have the stronger the presence in the Search Engine Results Page.

A logical place to put backlinks on is forums.  Forums take time  to build and if the forum is built using a paid forum script like vBulletin then you can only assume that it is white hat and the administrator takes the time and effort to ensure the site is working, functioning and most importantly non-spammy.

There are two places in a forum that you can place a link a) The post b) The Signature.

Here is what you need to do:

1) Use firefox as the browser.

2) Install these two addons:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036

The first is to identify DoFollow links. In the firefox browser goto:
tools ->nofollow and activate.
All links now in firefox will be displayed in a grey or red colour.  Grey indicates dofollow, red indicates nofollow.

The second is a tool that lets you resuffle the search results in order. In the firefox browser goto:
tools->seoquake->preference

you want to deselect all options except for PR and the number of pages indexed in google.

3) Use search engine mainly Google and insert this search strings into the box:

KEYWORDS “powered by vBulletin” site: /forum

KEYWORDS “powered by phpbb” site: /forum

Each forum has a copyright signature which is usually ‘powered by…’, the above two are for popular forums, you could do a search for other forums the same way and get an even bigger list of pages.

As regard to your niche Ali, click this Google search link:

Google Search Link

What you think? nice HuH!

No it goes without saying that this is a tedious task of backlinking and takes skill and patience.

I recommend you outsource the work, but if you are on a shoestring budget then buckle up!

Find the most popular forums with high PageRank and join up, do not put in any signature when you first join for at least 5 – 7 days.    Make sure you give as much information as you can in your profile, make it look legit.

You have a choice here:

a) Join the conversation, if the forum is in your niche then why not start giving advice to people who could potentially turn into customers; it can’t hurt.

b) Leave 10 – 15 posts [or some forums require a certain amount to add a signature] and then add you signature 5 – 7 days later, make sure they solid replies and not rubbish like ‘nice post’.

c) Add a signature or profile homepage anchor text 5 – 7 days later and ping the page.

The reason for the last one is that a forum admin can check each time a person joins, if they see the signature straight away then they could delete the profile; however if it is just a legit profile the admin should leave it alone.

Only you can set the goal for the number of backlinks you require based on the analysis of your competition, but do set goals ie. 1000 backlinks per month.

If your a new site make sure you done your research about Google  Dance, Google Sandbox, onsite optimization, etc.  I do not take responsibility if you start to go all crazy with this method and start building a gazillion backlinks over night.

Assuming you have a keyword list and a specific keyword that is getting relatively good number of searches, for this example we will use the keyword ‘get ex back’.  For those who do not understand it basically people who have lost their soul mate and would like her/him to get back into their lives.

Run the keyword through Google AdWords Suggestion and get these results:

You can see that the keyword has approx’ 8,100 searches and some advertiser competition, this indicates that it is in healthy market since competitors would only exist in a market that is expected to be profitable.

Let’s do a google search and see the result:

So we see that the keyword has 29,700,000 competing pages.  At the top of the search results is an ezinearticle.com article.
By clicking the link we get this page:

The date at the top will show you (for me) that the date is from yesterday as I checked this through the cache of Google to make sure that the information on the page is accurate as far as what Google sees, it is the same as you would see if you click the link and no through the cache.

At the bottom highlighted in yellow you see for just over 3 months the article has had just over 5000 views per month. However do you notice that the article only got 4 votes and only star at that.  Granted it is not enough to base your judgement of the article on 4 ratings but the fact that it did not get hardly any rating is a worry, anyway we will look at that later.

The two arrows at the top.  1 leads you to http://www.stopyourbreakup.net/getexback and the other to a scibd.com page.  The 1st link is important in our observation the 2nd relevant but not as much, again will explain in the conclusion.

The important question for us at this stage is how the article got ranked so well in Google.  Take a look at these results for the back-links in Google to this page:

Unfortunately I could not capture all the results in the tool but I will tell you the observations.

Actually if you were to click the link in the article it will redirect you to http://www.magicofmakingup.com/ but I mentioned that the link goes to http://www.stopyourbreakup.net/getexback.

This link is actually only a redirect hence this screenshot shows that it has no ranking in Google, there is nothing on the page so Google will not give it any rankings.  However there is an original site http://www.stopyourbreakup.net, it has links to the above link, but again it mentions the video; my conclusion of this is that it had some information originally and now has redirected.The actual page it redirects to does not have any ranking in Google either although some in AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

But take a look at the URL http://www.magicofmakingup.com/?hop=toolkits1.

The ‘hop’ in the URL indicates that it is a clickbank product *ching ching*, it is an affiliated link, the redirect URL is used possibly to avoid the display of the affiliate ID or for tracking purposes.  Anyway here is the Clickbank results for this product below:

It is quite good considering it has a gravity of 290.94 and you get 75% of the profits which equates to $24.05 per sale, would you happy be with 5 sales a day from 5000 visits a month?Lets get to my conclusion:1) Ezines are a powerful method of promotion via the search engines, I think we can agree on that.

2) Internal ranking to your ezine article will assist in the ranking of the article.

What would I do to achieve this?

I personally would push to get my article in the most viewed in the last 90 days, check out the articles to find minimum pages views over the 90 day and get traffic hits to the page.  Ezine article is very smart and can detect non-human traffic, play it cool so if you consider using unnatural traffic methods try to get it right; do not over do it and only do it enough to get the articles spread across the site the system will take care of the rest.3) The article should be compelling, the failure (if I can call it that) for this article is the poor use of the Anchor text, the visitor is expecting a ten minute video but gets a sales page; this is going to be a heavy hitter on the conversion.

I have no doubts it is getting conversion but the article could have gone all out.  The article should have been a killer getting more comments and more votes, sure there are good comments but if you read them they are sympathy comments.4) It is cool to link directly to the product page and get those sales but maybe the site could split test, think about it.  A redirect URL is used anyway, so why not capture some of the traffic as leads for yourself and others to the sales.  Ultimately you could have your own client base of visitors that are paying you, of course if you just want to punch out affiliate sales this is the way to go.5) The second link to scribd.com although can be an interesting read does not lead the visitor anywhere.  The links are in the content and the visitor just may not see them, it is not captivating or capturing and essentially it will very low conversion.

let me know if you get any results?

It uses an old school method whereby you add your domain to the end of an analytic stat site and it gives the feedback for your site.

An example of this would be http://www.statbrain.com, just add your domain to the end of it and it will analyse meta data. It of course stores that data and it is picked by search engines with the domain url visible to the spider that crawls, simple!

Now instead of manually adding your domain to a whole bunch of these type of sites the php script attach does it automagically.

1. Download the SuperIndex.php script from here. {right click and save} Then uzip.

2. Upload the file to the root of your server.

3. Run the script www.yoursite.com/SuperIndex.php

4. In the small text box type in your domain name.

5. Once you site is indexed  delete the file.

Since most of  the  sites I have build have  been using wordpress, Joomla or built in php the script has been built as an affiliate php script.

As part of this post I intend to discuss a affiliate php script that is relevant to wordpress for bloggers and the free and paid option that is available to you.

I do believe that it is best practice to use a paid solution if the relevant support and additional features to make it an awesome script worth installing.   Support is important since wordpress is every evolving and conflicting when one plugin clashes with another, sometimes that particular plugin plays an important and crucial role on your blog; so do you get rid of this plugin in favour of the affiliate php plugin or favour the affiliate link cloaker above the plugin?

However in the initial instant if cash is tight and you are on a shoe string budget then the alternative for wordpress is a simple 301 redirect plugin like redirection.

Redirection offers the following features:

• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

The most important features from the above  updated features June  2010 is  the custom ‘pass-through’ redirections to an alternative website ie. to your affiliate link and full logs  for all redirected URLs.

These two features are the most important that you need for affiliate marketing, redirection and tracking:

Simple interface to add a redirection

Simple interface to add a redirection

This should  be good enough to start.

But if you want a killer solution, one that understands where you will go into the future as your blog expands and importantly the less time you spend going through your archives then you want MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate.

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate link has  one  crucial and  essential ingredient when it comes to the twist on a affiliate link masking, redirection of keywords!

Essentially what this does is identify keywords that you would preselect and it will mask those within the site.  This takes away

a) Tedious task of finding every single keyword throughout your blog posts

b) Converting them to an affiliate link.

The official description on the site is:

Description: Automatically convert keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. Also manage, track, cloak and shorten unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location of Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate.

I use the plugin on the Joomla Templates blog which is a review site for Joomla based templates.

What you will see is not only the keywords in the post are masked but those left in the comment, which only strenghtens the trust factor for click through.

Installed WowJoomla Ninja Affiliate PLugin

Here is a detailed view after you add the affiliate link and the keywords to redirect:

Ninja Affiliate for Rockettheme Keywords

A quick tip here would be at an earlier stage to tag your posts with exact keywords in the post, therefore in the future you would be able to quickly identify the keywords based on the tags.

Pete Cahsmore of Mashable was interviewed on a podcast and wished he had tagged his posts more so the readers who are coming on 5 years on would be able to find his old posts easier.

Check out more details for if you want to automatically convert keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. Also manage, track, cloak and shorten unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location of Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate.

When writing posts on a blog or making design changes  you will visit a site frequently in one day or over several days, you do not want to influence the stats.

So creating a filter in Google Analytics is straight forward.

You will need the IP address to create a filter, this you can get by visiting the site http://whatismyipaddress.com/. As soon as you go on the site the IP address appears, try it now.

Once you have the IP address, login into Google Analytics and select the account from the ‘My Analytics Accounts:’ drop down menu.

At the bottom right you will see a box which is ‘Filter Manager’, once you click on this you will see the empty space with the message ‘No filters found’.  In the top right darker grey strip is the ‘Add filter’ link, click on this to create the filter.

Give it a name, ‘My Computer’ seems like the logical choice.

You will see a  choice of sites that you can apply a filter to, add the site from the ‘Available Website Profiles’ to the ‘Selected Website Profiles’.

Just above that is the 4 boxes for the IP address.  As you see in http://whatismyipaddress.com your IP address is seperate by dots, therefore insert the number set of your IP before each dot and then save changes.

That’s it, done.

Credit for the landing page design goes to Creative Digital Media.   Creative Digital Media has spent extensive amount of energy testing what works and more importantly what converts when it comes to a landing page.  It was all those small tweaks here and there that could lead a landing page to convert 44% times more  greater without adding any more content.

So now you have an idea of what an ideal landing page looks like, but I want you to take a look at this landing page that works in all browsers crisp and clean and is an ideal model similar to the one displayed above;

No you have not been rick rolled, it is the main Google search homepage.  It fits all the criteria of what a perfect landing page should aspire to be. Simple, clean, direct to the point.  Give the visitor what they want.

OK, I hear you; what if you want to collect some data from an opt-in box after displaying a video?  Well Google has also got this covered;

You can see this here [unless the page changes by the time you have read this post].

I want to add that both pages for Google are above the fold!

Again clean, crisp and direct to the point.  You can replace that area for the click for more information with a opt-in box.

It does not stop there, the pages is optimized for all browsers and is almost 100% W3 Markup Validated according to a display in html 5.  The only thing that let it down is the youtube video, but that is a problem faced with javascript embedded videos.

Now I am not discussing of conversion based on the merit of brand, no doubt Google had that page converting like crazy before someone even hit that page, nevertheless you can not dismiss the effect that pages has as a landing page that will convert.

There is no reason that this layout can not be applied to a sales page.

If you feel the need to include a sales page alongside the landing page layout then leave the landing page principals [displayed in the first image above the fold].  Take a lesson from  Creative Digital Media, the team at the forefront of converting landing pages.

This is an original screen-shot of what you get when you visit the page, then you have a screen-shot of the entire page if you where to scroll down:

The images are different since the above the fold  image is from a slider.

So in initial impression a visitor is hit by is this whoooosh graphic image of what the site/service is all about.  They may not scroll down and go blog or portfolio which both are great to communicate your message further with the visitor.

The correct layout matters when it comes to landing pages.  The guru’s  are all now using a similar layout to the first image and what Google has appiled ie. video+opt-in+killer points+Big Ass subscribe button.

Some go to the extent of  using arrows or circles around the boxes, etc; and you may have a view on that for being overkill but I kid you not when I say that there is a method to this madness and it is a ‘psychological trigger’.

It pushes the person to the ‘call to action’, something that we think is ‘duh, obvious next step’; wrong.  tests have been done on this and some need that push.  For some reason this overkill works best with the youtube crowd, some people call them the ‘dumbed down generation’ but heh I ain’t judging.

Check out ijustine’s youtube channel you will know what I mean but I think she has taken it a notch down now.

Simply put, a server issue!  To offer a solution on a mass scale requires a robust server-side solution.

I could devise a script now in 30 minutes that will capture your feed and attempt to process this to deliver to social media sites like facebook, twitter, etc and then create an app for it;  this does not mean you will get a good service.

Even if I am channeling only the one feed it does not mean that my host server will get it right.  I have been having a nightmare with Dreamhost and cronjob for submitted a script for a while now, after the exchange of over 20 emails with the support staff [brilliant in their response]; just could not get it right. So I gave  up.

A shared server will need a cronjob to submit the feeds, now imagine attempting to do this for 100′s or even 1000′s of feeds for free [which most of these apps start of with].

In the years up and running since the blast of social media better infastructures have been invested in for sending pings and statuses to social media sites.  One that has been standing the test of continuous streams in cyberspace [do people even use that word] of pings and statuses is ping.fm.

Ping.fm is simple in that it shares your statuses updates to an individual or collective of social media/networking sites in one, you guessed it; ping!

However ping.fm does not directly submit your rss feeds, they recommend 3rd party sites that use the ping.fm API.  This can be problematic since again you are looking at the channeling process between different servers,  so the problem I discussed earlier about building a solution on my own host to submit rss to social media still applies except with ping.fm in the mix.

So is there a service out there that exist that can deliver rss directly to facebook, twitter, etc with the robust server-side solution that we crave.

Comes along twitterfeed.com, twitterlive.com and the awesome superfeedr.com [although not directly].

I have added awesome to superfeedr.com since they developed the realtime search for keywords and the services  unique selling point is real time feed submission  ie. your blog posts rss feeds are  instantly pushed to your subscribers.

Simply put these are the 3 players that have come up that will distribute your feed to social media/networking community without the need of an app.

There are discussions about what is the metric measure of real-time for superfeedr.com, but that is another discussion.  Here I just wanted to present the solution that will get yourrss  feed out and across to the wider communities.

You can use ping.fm to distribute a rss feed through superfeedr without the need of a hub account at superfeedr.  So you just sign upto ping.fm and insert your rss feed to this page and it will distribute to that all the locations you have applied to in ping.fm in real time, cool!

Although it may seem a problem to use two or even multiple services therefore increasing the potential for server-side issues, this does depend on the quality of the servers.

Under the hood there are many services that we access that go through several servers.

A lot of sites we use that have adverts and tracking tools  andgo through several servers before the sites are loaded.  Some are appauling in the load time due to their own server and all of the scripts that they host on the site,  but some of them are so robust that we do not even notice.

A suppose on a side note I can add that before you install a script or use a solution to delivery feeds, ads, tracking, etc check out what they have to say about competence in their own servers to deliver the goods.

I wonder how many news outlets community focused initiatives are really taking advantage of the tools like superfeedr? A  community focused initiatives in web terms is just what you make of it!  If you have a facebook page that has a following who are interested in what you have to say about a certain idea, product, band, etc; then that is a community focused initiative.

Let me know of your experiences in using any of the services for the distribution of your rss feeds.

Conclusions:

From a marketing prospective unless you have been under the rocks, more and more people are shifting their time on social media sites.  You need to be sourcing and channelling people to find an interest in what you have to deliver.

Chances are that your target audience are spending time on facebook , twitter and other social networking sites.

I would however suggest that the most focus currently is on these two, the masses are going there due to the amount of push via media. They are in your face, and subconsciously you are driven there unless not there already.

There are other discussion about best utilising these medium to increase your subscriber list and traffic, but for brevity here you need  to be creating a facebook and twitter account/page and channelling your content to them to build the communication link between your site and thes social networks and rss fills that void.

Ping.fm is a bonus since you can channel your voice via statuse updates to several social networking site to continue the stream of content you send other then rss on the move from a phone, just added value to what is there.

The research I am carrying out at the moment is whether I will a) lose the PR  from that site if  it links back to this site b) what happens to the backlink.

There are very positive research available about what Google has to say about 301 redirect, and favourable to the site. However there was an interview  that was conducted with Matt Cutts of Google that there is PR loss on a 301 redirect.  This naturally has me concerned.

Fortunately there has been an actual test carried out by Seer Interactive that has some positive news.  The upside is that Google did not lose the PR  on the 301 redirect, however the downside is that Yahoo and Bing did not pick up the pace.

The question may arise about a 401 redirect.

401 is no redirect at all, 401 is the apache status code for “unauthorized access”

See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html for more details on this.

I have still yet to find some experiment on the consequences of the back links and what weight these will give me for future posts that I right once I have done a 301 redirect.   I am thinking in theory that the transition will have  a positive impact and internal linking structure will play a vital role.

If you need to do 301 redirect then here are 10 ways to go about doing  for a site.

WordPress of course has a plugin  that can do that for you quite simply.

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
• Enter the redirection page
• Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Click on ‘Apply’

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com“>

PHP Redirect

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

ASP .NET Redirect

<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.new-url.com“);
}
</script>

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(“http://www.new-url.com/“);

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.new-url.com/”
end

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc] rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Jack Duncan over at warrior forums gives off this excellent tip.

Step 1: Open Up Google.com

Step 2: Type a “Seed Topic” word

This can be anything like:

wedding
fishing
online marketing
baby crib
microphones
photography

Step 3: Insert the “Secret Google Code”

Code: (copy the entire string)

[sourcecode]

site:ezinearticles.com "This article has been viewed 2000..199999" "Article Submitted On: * *, 2009"

[/sourcecode]

Step 4: Click Search

To fully understand the power of this method of finding hot niches and keywords check out the two videos here and here.

I also recommend following the full post over at warriorforums.

How ever you can see an exact replica of what it does here since I ripped this page for the developer to base the development on:

http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/affiliates/

All the content from that page will load and you just modify the text to suit your affiliates needs.

Also all the features of that site is also available.

In essence what it will do is ask the admin to place the word {link} anywhere in the text in the backend and the affiliates link will appear inside of the affiliates promotional tool i.e. banner, text links, email copies, etc. The affiliate only need insert their affiliate link in the frontend and it will populate.

I never released it and it is and making it available here.  I am was intending to convert to a Joomla version as we speak since in that niche I can dominate on the sales.

Also here is the other version called Affiliate dominator that does what my script does but in some areas better however works off a window based installer:

http://affiliatepagedominator.com/

that should better explain what my script does. my script is also php based and does not require mysql.

Just load up and goto:

mysite.com/sub-directory/admin

You would want to upload to subdirectory as you would want to put a link on the frontend to the affiliate promoter i.e. mysite.com/affiliate-tools.html

PLEASE NOTE: I WILL NOT AND CAN NOT OFFER ANY SUPPORT FOR IT, YOU WOULD HAVE TO GET YOUR  OWN CODER TO DO THIS.

All I request is  you subscribe to the blog using the rss link below for email or the one on the right for feedreader, is that fair?;

Some screenshots of  the backend ;

You can see the live demo that I uploaded here.

Here is the download link.