Golden Rule of SEO

During a recent review of my website traffic, I noticed that one of my pages was getting about 100 unique visits each day.

However…

While that page had great content, it wasn’t leading to a lot of sign-ups or sales (which I was easily able to figure out with Google Analytics).

The page was devoted to “diet plans for men”…so I simply added an affiliate offer and video to the page, and now it’s generating about $80 per day in affiliate commissions from sales of TheDietSolutionProgram.com.

That’s the power of SEO…it’s about as close to “passive income” as you can get online.

Website + Traffic + Converting Offer = Passive Income

A beautiful thing.

So let’s talk more about SEO today, and we’ll go back over to my buddy Rick Porter, our SEO guru, for more help on getting you website traffic through search engine optimization by using his GOLDEN RULE of SEO.

A reader asks:

“I’m at a loss when it comes to Google’s infamous “sandbox” where they take your site and throw it somewhere that they only know.

I made a site with good keyword density and content, it ranked on the first page within a week or two, stayed for a week or two, then I haven’t seen it for about a month now.

I see my privacy page making it on the 5th page but that’s about it. I added some backlinks and changed some content but still nothing. Any ideas?”

Rick’s Answer: The Google “sandbox” as they call it is sort of a probationary period of time that a site is penalized for being new.

This period of time is intended to see if a site owner is truly serious about their website and will continue to add good content and backlinks even though it’s not ranking high in the search engines.

If you check the top 1000 listings for your keyword you may find yourself ranked somewhere in the 600’s to 800’s or sometimes not even in the top 1000.

This time period can last anywhere from 3-6 months or longer if you don’t do anything to keep your website going.  The longest I’ve ever been in the sandbox on a new site was probably 2 months and many of my sites never go into the sandbox.

A big mistake you can make and a surefire way to get a brand new site IN the sandbox would be to put content up, give it a bunch of backlinks over the first couple of weeks and then not doing anything more.

Google sees the initial activity and will rank a new site high but then when the activity drops off it could sandbox you to see if you come back and take care of your site.

The best way to get OUT of the sandbox is to just act as if you don’t even know its there.

Follow this GOLDEN RULE: Keep adding great content, and keep adding quality backlinks.

Usually when you just keep doing what a serious site owner would normally be doing it will come out of there quickly.

You will also want to make sure it is sandboxed and not being penalized. When your inner pages like your privacy page are outranking your home domain then you either have a sandbox penalty which is temporary or you could have a duplicate content penalty or any number of other things.

Make sure to setup an account in Google Webmaster tools so that you can see if you have title tags or meta descriptions that they see as a duplicate page.

I have had tag and category pages actually show up as duplicate which shouldn’t happen but it does. So make sure to double check your sites health with the Google Webmaster Tools.

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Craig here again…I also had my own question for Rick, based on a recent video I watched.

The video suggested that there were a lot of websites where you could submit a PDF in order to get a quality backlink.

I asked Rick about the validity of these sites.

Rick’s Answer: Yes, this is true. I have actually been wanting to take a rebrand of each of your Turbulence Training PDFs and submit them.

I can use Magic Submitter to submit to these sites:

scribd.com
4shared.com
calameo.com
divshare.com
docstoc.com
esnips.com
slideshare.net
yudu.com

You’ll get a good quality backlink to your site from each of those.

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Alright, thanks Rick.

Tomorrow we’ll be back with our 2nd Internet Independence Transformation Contest winner.

This winner is a BIG-time ACTION TAKER, and it shows why he has been so successful in building his $100k per year info product business (often “working from his office at Starbucks”).

Be an action taker,

Craig Ballantyne

“Once begun the job’s half-done” – Felix Dennis, author of How to Get Rich