Today’s lesson on how to earn cash online involves a few external SEO tricks that I’ve learned. Too often people spend time optimizing their own site’s internal SEO but ignore doing external SEO, aka link building. Most people who’ve learned a little SEO know about trying to get dofollow comments on other blogs and article marketing. Here are a few other tricks you can use to further expand your external SEO efforts.

Using Free Web Hosts

This is one that Griz has mentioned on his make money online blogs recently and one that I’ve also recommended before. There are many sites where you can build free blogs and static sites ranging from big names, like Squidoo and Blogger, to small private and semi-private WPMU and free webhost sites. How you populate them depends a lot on their level of moderation and their terms of service so make sure that you understand them ahead of time. For some sites, you can use content generated with tools like my own Blog Content Wizard or unaltered PLR articles. For others, you’ll need to have quality original content. Also bear in mind that the more obscure and less moderated a site is the more likely it is to be penalized by Google. The opposite is also true, Google is unlikely to deindex Blogger (which they own) or WordPress.com.

Griz has a great list of these sites here: Link Resources.

Discover Others’ Linking Strategies

Another way to improve your external SEO is to analyze what other people are doing and figure out if you can use it as well. The first place to look is at your competitor’s sites, especially those that are outranking you. This will give you niche specific information that can be quite valuable. Another good place to look are sites related to Internet marketing product launches since the competition is always high there. Lastly, look at sites that rank well for highly competitive terms.

Now, let’s investigate these sites in SEO Elite or even with a free tool like the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox. What we’re wanting to discover is where the site in question got its links, especially it’s higher quality ones in terms of anchor text and PageRank. While you’ll see some obvious related sites, such as a flagship blog, you’ll often see other stuff. This might include blog comments, especially comments on high PR posts on dead blogs. You may also locate abandoned forums which are left unmoderated. You may find link and article directory sites that are easy to get listed in and produce good results. You can even find guest book pages from years ago that have left the door open. You might find other interesting locations where you can add a link yourself or that reveal more about how others get their links.

Also look at “Web 2.0″ locations they’re using, like those on free web hosts like Squidoo or bookmarking sites. Often people will setup a tiered approach where lesser sites link to a free host and the free host points to the primary site. Check the links on these sites as well to discover hidden linking resources.

Pretty soon you’ll have a good list of resources you can use for linking to your supporting sites and perhaps even your primary sites. One important thing to remember is that sometimes these links get abused and lose their link juice. Should you see a sudden drop in PageRank or search engine results placement then this is probably what has happened. Your defense against this is to build a large and varied promotional network for your sites so that if one part of the network is weakened, other areas can be used to pick up the slack.

Promote Sites That Link To Your Sites

When you find sites where you can promote your site, make sure that you promote them as well. How can you do that?

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use social bookmarking to promote pages that link to your pages. If you leave a comment on a blog, bookmark it with StumbleUpon or Digg. This will often bring appreciated traffic to a blog, especially to a blogger who’s concentrating mostly on social referral traffic. Also use Bookmarking Demon to bookmark the site to Scuttle and Pligg networks. Do BMD runs for other pages, like forum posts and such, that link to your site. The idea is to build a strong cluster of links that promote your site. Not only will you get more search traffic but you may also get decently targeted referral traffic as well.

Remember, the more you can do to promote sites that link to yours the better off your site will be.

Do you have any suggestions or questions about How to Earn Cash Online With External SEO?

Frank Carr March 4th, 2009 SEO

SEO
blogger, external SEO, squidoo, supporting sites, wordpress