Making money online is hard if you haven’t properly optimized your site. That includes coming up with strategies to properly master the skills required in most seo efforts. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of preparing a web page in the best possible way to encourage the search engines to rank it highly on their results pages for certain keywords. This process includes both on-page and off-page factors. On-page SEO includes things such as the title of the document, using heading tags, and using the keywords on the page. Off-page SEO mainly consists of pages that link to your site and the text they use to link to you, called anchor text.
On-page optimization used to be the only thing that really mattered. Many years ago, all you had to do to get onto the first page of a search engine was stuff your pages and meta tags full of the same keyword over and over. The more times the phrase was repeated, the higher the page would appear.
But search engines realized webmasters were doing this, and they had to take steps to counteract these effects. They started penalizing sites that repeated keywords too often in their meta tags or title. They began to ban sites that used “hidden” keywords, which was placing white text on a white background so search engines could see the text, but visitors couldn’t. The search engines had to take these steps, because their visitors were getting upset. They didn’t like the fact that they were searching for music lyrics or recipes and ending up at a site advertising porn or pharmaceuticals because the search engine spiders had been tricked into sending more traffic to that domain. Search engines began working harder and harder to counteract these measures, but for years, they weren’t very effective.
Once the search engines plugged one hole in the matrix, webmasters found another one and began to exploit it. Then along came Google. They had a unique algorithm that virtually eliminated all of those on-page spam techniques. They did give some weight to on-page factors, but they also included a new system that helped determine the importance of pages. They figured that sites that were truly high quality would have a large number of sites linking back to them. This system has come to be known as Google PageRank, or PR.
The more PR a page has, the more important it’s believed to be and the more you can make money online with it. Of course, PR itself also began to be abused. People figured out that all they had to do to increase their PR in Google was to get thousands of links pointing to their site. They started spamming guestbooks, free-for-all link sites, and other low quality sites to get links. So Google changed their algorithms again to give far less weight to links from low quality sites and more weight to higher quality sites. Another big part of off-page optimization is the actual text that other websites use to link to you. This text is known as anchor text, and it’s very important to your search engine rankings.
Anchor text is used to tell people what a particular site is about, but it also tells the search engines what the site is about. If your site sells golf equipment, and you’re trying to optimize a page specifically for “golf equipment,” then you should have sites use that text to link to you as often as you can. Backlinks are very important. These days they’re arguably more important than on-page optimization.
Backlinks from sites that are in the same niche as your site are weighed especially well, especially if those links are on pages with high PR. The more links from reputable sites that you can get, the better your page is likely to rank, especially if your on-page factors are also welloptimized. Backlinks are also money, so the more money backlinks you have, the more money you can make online as well!