Let’s face it everyone wishes for top search engine ranking but not everyone knows how to achieve this in the quickest time possible. If you don’t do link building, it’s going to be an uphill task for your blog or website to come any close to getting to good SERP positions. We’ve read too often many people have found success only after having done extensive link building to get them to the ultimate goal – Google Top 10. Of course this then translates to increased blog traffic, no. 1 SERP (Search Engine Results Page), more product sales etc.

But in this age and time and with the blogosphere being saturated with just too many bloggers competing for similar niches and therefore, similar keywords, don’t you think it take more than just hard work to make the cut. You’ve got to work smart not work hard if you want to make your link building effort work for you in the quickest time possible. I’ve found one that does.

Here is a Case Study of How To Use ebay free link To Save 9 months of link building.

Objective: Get Top Rank for Keyword Phrase ‘Work From Home Ideas’

The conventional way….

In this case study we’ll focus on the keyword phrase ‘Work From Home Ideas’. There are lots of ways to build backlinks. Most of these backlink techniques are easy to do but it takes time to see results. I remember when I was a complete newbie starting out, I was taught to just do everything- blog commenting, article writing, directory submission, reciprocal link exchanges, blogging. Well my hard work pays off proving working hard still works, though not the best way.
Results: Achieved Google Top 10 in Nov 2008; Time Taken 12 months (part-time)

The smarter way…

In this case study I used ebay free backlinks. If you remember my earlier post How To Get Free Backlinks From eBay, I shared how easy it is to startup an eBay blog just to get some free backlinks from eBay. Well you can use the same technique to rank for any of your selected keywords or keyword phrases. In this instance, I used ‘Work From Home Ideas’ as my preferred keyword phrase. Just remember:

• ensure that your name you’ve chosen for your business blog includes most of the keywords you are ranking.
• do lots of link exchanges with other bloggers using the same keyword phrase as your preferred anchor text
• treat your eBay blog like any of your blogs and give it due respect. Include internal linking from Squidoo lenses, linking from your other blogs, blog posts.

Results: Achieved Google Top 10 in Feb 2009; Time Taken 3 months

What we can learn from this case study

• working smart sure is better than working hard. Read up more to learn what other bloggers are doing to get things done, smarter, faster to achieve the same result.
• linking to quality sites with high PR, lots of inbound links prove the oldest technique works. Apart from eBay, guest posting on a top blog with high PR or submitting an article to Ezinearticle would have similar benefit than a similar post on your PR0 blog.
• we should be motivated to work on improving our page rank and building our blogs to one of great authority. As you can see from this case study, these are factors influencing top search engine ranking.
• I had intentionally used the same keyword phrase so as to determine how the same keywords will rank on ebay blog and more importantly make comparison with my blog. You should find similar success when you used other keyword phrases you are currently ranking.

Results again in a nutshell….

Finding success in search engine ranking is not just for the experienced marketer, although he stands a better chance of doing so first compared to someone new. That’s because an older blog tends to be favored by the search engines as well as having higher PR.  If you’re a new blogger, all the more you should start your link building now, as well as an ebay blog and you could still be on your way to top search engine ranking success.

Similar Posts:

• Watch Me Get To Google Top 10 Ranking
• Who Else Wants Free Backlinks To Their Home Business Blogs
• Case Study: 5-Day Old Post Gets No.1 Top Ranking In Google
• How To Get Free Backlinks From Ebay
• How To Increase Blog Traffic? Use This Simple Technique

This is my Link Love-Links Round Up No.20 that I have the pleasure of sharing with you some interesting work from home ideas I’ve read this week. Check out my 5 favorite posts which cover blog layout, how to target keywords, increase blog traffic, blog monetization.

• Jack Rugile, guest poster of SmarterWealth tells us all about his 5 Must Haves Above The Fold. He explains what it takes to captivate your readers when they first land on your blog and ways to get them explore your blog to their hearts’ content. If you’re looking to increase blog traffic, don’t miss this post.
• How to target keywords has got to be one of the most important aspects of SEO and ranking high in the search engines. Justin Briggs tells us How To Target Keywords in 7 Simple Steps.
• Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to describe each page to the search engines through the use of hierarchical XHTML tags like <title>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc. Don’t worry it isn’t mission impossible if you just let Chris Pearson show you what this  blog architecture means in The Definitive Guide To Semantic Web Markup For Blogs.
• In our never ending quest for getting traffic to your blog, this post should appease our appetite for more traffic building tips but with a difference. Caroline Middlebrook tells us the advantages of a highly saturated niche and reveals her 3 Blog Traffic Strategies For A Saturated Niche.
• If you are thinking of more ways to monetize your blog, here is one simple one called Kontera which offers a new way for you to monetize your blog. Tom Lindstrom tells us more in his post Monetize Your Blog Content With Kontera.

Grab The Bookmarketer For Your Site
Similar Posts:

• Link Love No.19-Blog Traffic, Monetization, Guest Post, SEO
• Link Love-Links Round Up No. 18
• Micro Niche Affiliate Marketing In The Works
• The Secret To Catchy Headlines Using Good Keywords
• Work At Home Blog Income-Feb 2009

Featured Posts on your Blog

If you are familiar with my blog, you probably would have seen a ‘Featured Post’ I put up on this blog, something that looks like this:

Essentially what I’m doing is linking my work at home blog homepage with all these blog posts of mine but with a difference. On each of the 6 posts I selected a keyword phrase and all these anchor text links appear on all the 100′s of single posts on this blog. I then offer a short description of each post as the keyword phrase may not tell much. This technique works only on a WordPress Blog. That’s why having a WordPress blog continues to amaze me as I never stop finding new advantages I had not known before. So can you imagine the power this technique yields as your blog grows?

What’s the difference between Featured Posts and Popular Posts

My ‘Featured Posts‘ Section shows a short list of posts with just the keyword phrase and a brief summary. It is advisable to use posts that are different from Popular Posts. By doing so you actually present to your blog visitors more reading options and that helps to improve your page views and ultimately repeat visitors to your blog too.

Your ‘Popular Posts‘ show your entire post title that your blog visitors can go to and click the link to read your post if it interests him. It would be hard to expect someone typing a search term in the Search Engines like ” 200+ Passive Income Resources, Tips & Home Ideas” to land on your post. Well that’s where your ‘Featured Posts’ and how well researched your keyword phrases are that can make this possible. Also the fact that you have 100′s of posts with these keyword phrases definitely help in bringing these search engine hits to your blog.

The Key Benefits of Featured Posts on your Business Blog

• it can be used as part of your existing link building strategy to obtain faster results
• It increases your page views of your blog as it complements your ‘Popular Posts’ and ‘Must Read Posts’
• it helps to increase blog traffic to these specific pages, improved page rank on these pages and hopefully your SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
• Google bots loved it too…take a look at the screenshot below showing that one of my keyword phrases has been indexed.

How Featured Post Technique is helping this blog

Out of 6 featured posts which I’ve selected, 2 posts i.e. 2 keyword phrases I selected for this technique have achieved Google Top 10 (page 1 SERP).

• passive income ideas
• home business blog

My Final Thoughts

Personally I like this technique to increase blog traffic as it uses the linking and seo power of a WordPress blog which I’ve seen it work on many other experiments that I’ve done e.g. my How Blog Commenting Got Me 1200 Backlinks in 5 Days.  A word of caution I can give is that achieving your result is a long term process so don’t expect to see immediate results once you’ve put up your Featured Posts. It’s not to be used to replace your link building strategy but to complement it and should be used concurrently if you wish to achieve your SEO top ranking results.

It also works better when your blog is not a new blog, has plenty of inbound links and you are constantly using deep linking on these featured posts.  Here is a post I found titled “Get The Top Spot On Google” showing that this technique has been used by other bloggers to achieve some measure of success. Well get craking and start this easy technique to increase blog traffic.

Similar Posts:

• Watch Me Get To Google Top 10 Ranking
• Blog Traffic- Top Tips To Increase Blog Traffic
• Here’s A Smarter Link Building Strategy To Get Top Search Engine Ranking
• Wanna Know What Google Sees In Your Blog’s Home Page?
• My Strategy To Increase My Google Adsense Revenue