This is a treasure map. It could be worth untold riches but is worthless if not followed. It was written for my relatives and friends to help them create success on the net (SEOmozzers: this is probably useful for those who don’t know much about what you do). I am giving it away because other people first gave it to me. You may have already used bits and pieces of this map, you may have used a much more elaborate map, or you may be starting fresh. In any case, following a treasure map always leads to treasure... so lets begin!  

How to pick your topic  

In the non internet world, let’s say I have good intentions of building a better car than Honda. Would I be wise to pursue this venture from ground zero? No. It would take decades to even come close to the knowledge Honda has gained.  

Let’s say instead I have good intentions of building a better air bag than what is currently being used. Is this idea more doable? Probably, but it would still take a few decades.  

Even better, let’s say I decide to invent something completely new but useful to the automobile industry. Would it still take time to see success? Yes, but I think it has the best path towards success.   

You must look at creating a website in the same way. Is your area of focus already dominated by websites with years of amazing history? If so, what are you going to do better or different that would be useful or entertaining? Is there a website of a different niche doing something new or useful or entertaining that you could emulate for your niche? Is there a different niche you could dominate instead of being dominated?  

How to check your competition  

Wait a minute, you say. How do you know I would be dominated on a certain niche? I don’t, but I know how we can check.  

Let’s say you picked cars as your industry. Do a search for “cars” on any major search engine and the number one result will be cars.com. Why that website?  

Well, let me show you. Go to yahoo.com and search the following exact phrase: “site:www.cars.com”. The default result shows “pages” as 105,000 - meaning cars.com has 105,000 different pages that yahoo recognizes and has indexed. I wonder how long it would take you to create that many pages?   

Next, do you see the part where it says “inlinks 125,000,000”? That means 125 million webpages have a link somewhere on their page that goes to www.cars.com.  That is an amazing number and is EXACTLY why cars.com is the first result in search engines.  

Search engines show the most popular websites first. Why? They want to show the most useful and the most trustworthy websites first and they’ve decided the best way to measure usefulness and trustworthiness is by popularity. It makes sense - would millions of other websites link to cars.com if it wasn’t useful and trustworthy?  

Please take a moment to make the following mental note: YOU WANT LOTS OF OTHER WEBSITES LINKING TO YOUR SITE.   

Ok, let’s move on. Don’t forget your mental note though.  

How to pick the right keywords  

When picking keywords you want the following attributes:  

1. HIGH-TRAFFIC. The more people that search using that exact keyword/phrase the better.

2. LOW-COMPETITION. Is it easier to swim with or against the current?

3. RELEVANCY. I hope this is self-explanatory.

Let’s say you are bull headed - you decide to build a website about cars. You would be silly to think that you could rank #1 for the keyword “cars,” but all is not lost.   

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - this is a tool from google that will give us keyword suggestions. Type in “cars” and run the tool. When first starting your website, you will want to find some keywords that get a relatively low amount of searches a month as they will be easier to dominate!  

I found the following keywords: used car reviews, cars on line, dream cars.  

Now you’ll want to research the competition using yahoo’s site explorer. Remember, I already showed you how to do that. I want to show you some new tools that you can use.  

www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/ - This is a nifty tool “to see how difficult it would be to rank for specific keywords or keyword phrases. This tool issues a percentage score that indicates how difficult it would be to rank on the first page for this term; higher percentages mean greater difficulty.” Got it? Good. Now tell me out of the 3 keywords I found above - which is the easiest?  

“Dream cars” was the easiest at 69.81 while “cars on line” was the hardest at 84.02!  

Ok, the next tool needs a little of explaining so that you can understand why it’s so awesome. When someone links to your website it matters what words they use as the link text. Why? The search engines give more value if the “anchor text” is related to the keywords you want to dominate.

http://backlinkseotool.com - This tool shows you who has the most instances of an exact keyword being used as the anchor text linking back to their website. Make sense? Just try the tool out for “dream cars.”  

How to dominate the search rankings  

For that keyword one website has 129 instances of that exact anchor text, but is listed as the #4 result while another website only has 30 instances but ranks #1 for the keyword. Why? The website with 129 instances only has 381 total links, while the other has 2,636 links. Do you remember the mental note I had you create? YOU WANT LOTS OF OTHER WEBSITES LINKING TO YOUR SITE.  

Before we get too deep into link building strategies you need to know the difference between nofollow and normal links. Lots of websites put a hidden code onto their links to make them nofollow which tells google... you guessed it... don’t follow! As a general rule, you would rather have normal links as compared to nofollow links, but it isn’t a bad thing to have a nofollow link - it just isn’t as good. You can get addons for your browser which automatically highlight nofollow links, I use this one: http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The other thing you need to know is that your website needs to be useful in some way. Make a website that people will want to link to.  

If I was mean, I would end the treasure map here. It would be funny in a sick kind of way - but don’t worry, I won’t do that. I want to share with you the nitty gritty instructions I have on HOW TO BUILD LINKS.  

1. Gain your competitors links. If a website is already linking to your competitor, there is a good chance they would be willing to link to your website if you have some value to add. Use the yahoo site exploring tool to find all the links of your competition and then send a friendly message to them. Then, find a different competitor and gain their links too. This idea can be used to gain links from tons and tons of different sites.  

2. Utilize free profile links. You probably already have a facebook account, so put a link up on your profile. Then, check out this wikipedia page for other websites that you can get a link out of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites  

3. Leave Blog Comments. Many people spam blogs just to gain a link. Don’t do this. When you leave blog comments you must read the blog article and add a relevant comment. If you are having a hard time finding relevant blogs to comment on, you probably don’t know about blog search engines. Try these: http://blogsearch.google.com/ - http://www.blogcatalog.com/ - http://technorati.com/  

4. Link Directories. There are websites out there which only link to other websites; they  are directories. In fact, there are many many websites that do this. But, all directories are not created equally. Here are some good lists of the better link directories: http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/ - http://www.seo-lab.com/directory-articles/best-free-directories.php - http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html  

5. Build Relationships and Be Useful. I don’t have a lot to say about this, other than just do it.   

Read these articles if you're serious about link building: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/5-rare-valuable-link-building-tactics - http://www.viperchill.com/link-building/ - https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z  

How to convert traffic into money  

In my mind there are 4 main ways to convert traffic into money:  

1. Normal Advertising. The main type of advertising is offered by google and is PPC (pay per click). So every time you click on a PPC ad, you make money for the website who is displaying it. Now it can be your turn to get money from showing PPC ads on your website. The amount you receive per click depends on a few factors, but mainly it is from what keyword the ad is showing for.  

2. Affiliate Advertising. In this form of advertising, you direct traffic to a specific product or website which you have made an affiliate partnership with. You have the opportunity to make a percentage of how much your referrals spend. Sometimes the percentage can be quite high: 20-60 percent. Here are some websites that help you find places to promote: http://www.cj.com/ - http://www.clickbank.com/index.html - http://www.motiveinteractive.com/  

3. Offering Services. Think of services that are so useful people would pay money for them. SEOmoz does this wonderfully. They have some amazing SEO tools and, for some, you need to be a paying member to use.   

4. Selling Your Site. There are people willing to buy your site. The more traffic your site has, the more money your site is worth. Check out http://flippa.com/  

One Last Piece of Advice  

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson 

With that I bid you good luck and farewell on your treasure hunt!

Matt is the creator of tiepedia - His longest streak of consecutively wearing a tie is 2 years and 5 days! (it happened while he was serving a Mormon mission) He loves life, his family, his heaven, and his sports (golf, basketball and college football).