Get Backlinks And Organic Traffic – Step By Step

A lot of people have asked me recently how to get more organic traffic. So this post will show you the step by step methods I use.

Before we get started I should mention a couple of things.

• I do the below steps for medium competition keywords and sites – i.e. keywords that have Google competition in “” up to about 30-40k. Obviously with less competition you can skip or reduce some of the steps.
• I use some automated tools. It saves me A LOT of time (I’m talking of up to 95%!). It’s your choice whether you want to invest in the tools or do it manually. Time versus money.

As you may or may not know, getting ranked in the search engines require on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization information is widely available, so I am not going to go into that. Off-page optimization is getting backlinks and that is what I will show you with this post.

So here are my steps for getting backlinks to a newly launched site:

I submit my site to Bing. I have found that by doing this generally Bing index my site within 48 hours, something that has taken a long time previously. Just type in your website URL on Bing and if it is not already indexed they will give you an option to submit your site.

Social Bookmarking. I use Bookmarking Demon to submit my site to 100+ social bookmarking sites. I normally submit the home page and two other pages on the first day and then submit 2-3 pages every two days until all the pages of my site are submitted. Social bookmarking traffic is normally untargeted and most of the time won’t make you a lot of money, but it is an early boost in traffic.

Directory Submission. I use DirectoryBot to submit my home page to 500+ directories. Directory links might not carry as much weight now as they did previously, but it only takes me 2 minutes – well worth it. It goes without saying that this step will give you a lot of backlinks spread out over 2-3 months and although you will not receive any direct traffic, it will increase your search engine rankings over time.

I get two articles written at Articlez and create a Squidoo lens and a Hubpage. Not only does it give me two backlinks from authority sites, but they also earn me a little money directly from Squidoo and Hubpages.

Article marketing. My article marketing might seem complicated but it is actually quite simple. I first get 5 articles written at Articlez (or more or less depending on how big my site is). My signature at the bottom will have a link pointing to the home page and one other internal page. So with the 5 articles I will get 5 home page links and 5 links pointing to different internal pages. I then use these articles in the following way:

1. I submit them to Ezine Articles first and when approved I submit them manually to GoArticles and ArticlesBase. This will give you authority backlinks and also give you some traffic.
2. Next step is to use Automatic Article Submitter to submit the 5 articles to a ton of other article directories. Not for traffic, but backlinks. I generally submit 1 article a week.
3. The last step is to add these 5 articles to Article Marketing Automation. Make sure to rewrite the article at least 30% using their rewriter as it will be published on a lot more sites. Article Marketing Automation is great for getting in context links as I just move the links from the resource box to somewhere in the article itself – something a lot of article directories from upon.

That’s it!

Because I use software to automate the process plus I outsource the article writing all these steps except for the Article Marketing Automation bit only takes around 20 minutes! AMA takes another 50 minutes or so.

So let’s see what you get after all your submissions have been taken into account (which may take several months).

You get a 100 social bookmarks to each page plus more than 1,000 links to your home page and 1,000 links to 5 other pages. There are a lot of variables but even if you only get half that you should be able to destroy the competition!

Step 5 – Getting Traffic

There are so many ways of getting traffic to your website that a 100 page guide would not be able to list them all! This is probably the question I get asked the most, so I will cover the 3 main ways that I generate traffic and mention a few more.

Free Search Engine Traffic

Search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc) are my preferred traffic source. Why? Because it is free and with the right strategy and a bit of work you can receive tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Search engine optimization (SEO) deals with getting your site ranked on the first page of the search engines – preferably at the top spot! Each search engine uses slightly different ranking criteria, but as Google is the 800 lb gorilla of the search engine world, let’s see how we can rank on them.

There is a lot of incorrect information online about SEO, so forget everything you have been told and remember only this: Google ranks according to on-page factors and off-page factors. That’s it! Nothing complicated about it!

On-page Factors

These change all the time, but I generally do the following: your keyword should appear in your page title, in a H1 header, at the beginning and the end of the page. If you can add it to the alt text of an image of the page, brilliant. Don’t stuff your page with keywords. It does not work and can get your site banned.

Off-page Factors

Links, links and more links. That’s it! Get links to your site from wherever you can. One way links are best (one way links are where you don’t have to link back to the site linking to you). Another important point is to change the anchor text of the link to your keyword (the anchor text are the words forming the link).

Let’s look at an example:If you have a web page about “blue widgets” the anchor text of your link should be blue widgets, not click here. It is unbelievable how many people make this mistake. Don’t be one of them!

Where can you get links to your site? Loads of places. I use Article Marketing Automation and 3WayLinks. They work differently, but compliment each other well. I will do a case study in the future to show exactly how I use them. If I need more links, I will distribute articles, submit RSS feeds, etc.

Pay Per Click
I will be completely honest here. I have dabbled with PPC for 5 years (since reading Google Cash in 2004) but have never really built my websites or business around it. I am NOT a PPC expert, so I would suggest getting Google Cash, PPC Classroom or any of the dozens of PPC products being launched each year.

PPC is good for getting immediate traffic to a product or affiliate offer with very little effort. The problem is that it costs money and if you are not that good at it you can lose your shirt. I have a few times, so I know

Google Adwords is definitely king of PPC marketing, but don’t forget the second tier PPC markets like Yahoo, MSN, etc. Clicks are normally a lot cheaper through them than Adwords and I have had a few campaigns where traffic converted a lot more using MSN than Adwords. However, the amount of traffic from MSN was around 10% of the Google traffic.

My most successful PPC campaign is one I started a couple of weeks ago. Fuelled by the enthusiasm surrounding the launch of Google Cash Detective 2. Through more luck than skill I started a campaign that made me $30 profit per day for only one keyword. It took me all of 10 minutes to set up. With a bit of testing I got that up to $80 per day. The next step is to add more keywords and see what happens

Article Marketing

I am not a big article marketer, but I do incorporate writing and submitting articles into my marketing plan for two reasons: visitors and getting links to my website (remember the SEO section above?). Some people, like people following the Bum Marketing method generates a lot of traffic from articles and it works. 

You write a keyword optimized article, submit it to Ezine Articles and a few more (I submit to around 20) and voila. You have back links to your site and if you did a good job on optimizing the article you can get a lot of search engine traffic to the article, and hopefully to your site if they click on your links.

Which brings us to the two most important parts of article marketing:

Firstly, the title. Get your keyword in there. Also, make the title interesting. Entice people to click on it and read further. If your keyword is “losing weight” don’t use a title like “Losing Weight By Exercising”. Rather use something like “3 Exercises That Will Make Losing Weight Easy”.

Secondly, your resource box is where you can convince the reader to visit your site. Don’t write about you or what you do. Rather mention what benefits they will receive when they visit your site. And try and include your keyword in the anchor text.

Squidoo Lenses, Hubpages and Blogger Blogs

There are a lot of social networking places where you can create a web page (or similar) for free. The above 3 are probably the most widely used. Think of little feeder pages on different social networks feeding traffic to your main site.

I create these pages only after a niche or website has proven that it makes money and I want to increase my visitors. No point going through all the effort if your main site is not profitable, no?