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How to Rank Your New Site without Spending a Dime

Sometimes I see that newer affiliates do not have enough money leftover after establishing their websites to invest into their SEO. Before you would be completely out of luck, but in the day of social media and manual penalties from Google, only reinvesting a portion of your sites revenue stream and never more than it brings in may be a viable solution to achieving the search presence we are all looking for.  For some, never spending a dime works well too.
website battleshipBefore we go further, let’s talk about sustainability and accountability. Even gray-hat seo will eventually die when the search engines get smarter. This is not to say that all free backlink building tactics are white-hat, or that they will be a sustained benefit to your sites ranking, but it is true that paying for an advertising link when you are doing it to increase your sites PR is against Google’s webmaster terms, and they can penalize people that engage in this tactic both manually and automatically. Think about what used to work in 2001 and how that had changed up to 2013 and you will certainly agree that sustainability is an important factor that many of us probably should have considered earlier. We all need to have accountability to the info we are providing, which is what will either get you out of hot water, or you’ll be crying, “You sunk my SERP battleship” in the near future.
Here are some ways to promise search engine rankings for free:

  • Make social media pages for your site: Facebook / Google+ / Twitter / Pinterest to start. Add more social media accounts to your profile when there is time.
  • Make a detailed description (including keywords) on each of these sites. Differentiate between your personal page and your business page. Do not try to cheat and make them think your website is a person, it just will not work.
  • Post on them with links back to your optimized articles on site
  • Your website should be optimized with your visitors in mind. This includes: good internal linking structure, good title and alt tags, and compelling, unique content.* This is how you rank for long-tailed keywords the right way.
  • If you take money for a link in anyway, you must add the rel=“nofollow” attribute to the link to maintain your compliance with Google’s webmaster terms of use. Or fear their wrath later.
  • Build backlinks the right way. Engage other webmasters to what you are doing. For example, I read that there was a new gambling book available and a webmaster was doing a free giveaway.  We talked and found that our sites would be great to write articles for, linking back to one another. It is not a paid link so it does not have to have a “nofollow” rel tag giving both our sites better search positioning.
  • Fetch your new content as Google in your Webmaster Tools, but don’t bother re-submitting. Just keep on updating at least every 4 days.
  • Speed ranks sites. The faster you are, the higher you rank. Optimize your sites speed and watch your presence grow.
  • Use Google Analytics. There has been a bit of discussion about hiding what you are doing from the big G, but as I said before, sustainability should be in the forefront of your mind, and Analytics literally lets them know info about your site including: speed, better representation on bounce rates, more detail analysis of search terms, etc. If you do not find this valuable it really does not matter, they do, and I am confident they will rank you higher for it.
  • Don’t forget the smaller search engines. Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com still take a liking to <h1> tags and including a few can’t hurt.

*I leave you with one of the best free .pdf’s on the internet for seo in general from our friends at Google.com.
Author: Jared Bates