26 Weeks to Freedom: Creating an Internet Business

Here’s a second photo from my visit yesterday to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm about 30 miles south of Portland.  But getting back to business:-) the main thing I want to talk about today is one of the ways—in fact, perhaps the most important factor of all—for achieving a high ranking for your website in Google’s “organic” (i.e., unpaid) listings.  And when I say “high ranking” I’m referring specifically to Google’s first page.  I don’t know what the statistics are, but I’d be surprised if more than 5% of all searchers on Google ever bother going beyond the first results page.  I know that I almost never do—how about you?

One of the really cool tools I’m using from Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey’s Commission Blueprint 2.0 program is something called “Authority Hub.” This software allows you to type in whatever keyword phrase you want, and then, after displaying the top ten organic search results from Google, it shows how many “backlinks” each of those sites is getting from other sites, and which backlinks are the highest quality (i.e., the most valuable ones to have linking back to your site).  I’ve heard that of all the factors that go into Google’s “formula” for ranking web pages, nothing is more important than the number of high-quality backlinks.

To give you an example, consider the keyword phrase piano lessons portland oregon.  Using “Authority Hub” I discovered that the most highly-ranked web pages for that search term had several backlinks from such high-quality sites as Local.Yahoo.com, MojoPages.com, and UrbanMamas.com (a Portland site that has lots of resources for parents and children in the Portland area).  All three of those sites have been given high “page ranks” by Google and therefore any backlinks from them are considered very valuable.   Yahoo, especially, seems to be a goldmine of valuable links, whether it’s from their “local” business search function or their “directory.”  (When doing a similar search for the keyword phrase real estate agents in portland, “Authority Hub” showed the top sites getting lots of backlinks from the Yahoo Directory.)  I think one major reason these particular sites are so popular (and thus valuable for their backlinks) is that they allow visitors to give and read reviews of the local businesses that are listed there.  So if I’m looking for, say, a piano teacher in Portland, I’m most likely going to check the sites where I can find reviews from previous customers.

Of course, there are other important factors that will help determine your web page’s “organic” ranking in Google and the other search engines, such as how “complete” your website is and how effectively you use the keyword search term in your page’s content and within the domain name itself.  But high-quality backlinks seem to count the most.

Copyright © 2010 by Bob Mann

(Compensation Disclosure:  in today’s post there is a clickable link for Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey’s Commission Blueprint 2.0 program. If you click through and subsequently purchase their products (which I use and enthusiastically endorse), I would receive a commission. Questions? E-mail me at Bob@BobMannOnline.com.)