SEM for Blackhat Marketers

SEM, as you no doubt know, stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEM is very closely related to, but different from, SEO.

The optimization of your page will make a tremendous difference in the actual marketing phase. If you remember what we discussed in the first part of this series, you will also remember that I stressed the need to have all of your ducks in a row. SEO ducks that is.

There are several areas of SEM. A definition of SEM could cover quite a few individual topics. For this discussion (and, for my purposes) we will disregard everything except the actions needed to get the site listed high in the serps.

So, you won’t see anything about ppc. Only the organic search results pages will be attacked in this post. Gaming the search engines. For money. Does it get any better?

First things first. In a perfect internet world, you would only need one link pointing to your site. That one link would lead all of the SE’s right to your door. They would spider all of your pages, and rank you for the content you have on the pages.

Fortunately, Google doesn’t do things that way. I say fortunately because it becomes somewhat easier to game the big G than some of the others. Since Google controls a vast majority of search queries, that’s where we want to concentrate our efforts.

Google likes links. It makes no difference whether you agree with the idea or not. Google likes links. It likes some links better than others. It likes some links a lot less than the rest. But it is still a linking game. So, that’s what we are going to do.

Drag out the notes you made while we were doing the optimizing on one of your pages. You’ll need the page url and the major and minor key phrases you targeted on the page. You did make notes, didn’t you? Good.

You now have what it takes to devise a link profile for your page. I don’t mean the same thing as what the pro SEO gurus mean when they talk about link profiles, but that’s ok.

Our link profile is going to be made up of percentages. There are a lot of theories about the numbers of links that point to different places on your page. I don’t think it really makes that much difference, but we’ll be a little cautious here.

Let’s say that you have ten key phrases that you want to be indexed for (on this page). You will have a lot of others that will just come naturally when the bots get thru classifying your page. And, that’s good, but we’ll be working to get those ten phrases listed as high as we can.

As a working experiment, figure that 50% of your links should point to your index page. The rest should point to your interior pages. Remember that. When you begin your link dropping exercises, don’t forget to post half of them to the index page.

For the other half we’ll simply divide the number of links remaining by the number of key phrases we want to rank for. In this case it would be 50% divided by 10. Or, 5% of your links will be targeted to one phrase.

I haven’t asked you how you were going to drop your links. I didn’t ask where you intended to spam. The reason I didn’t ask these things is…..it doesn’t really matter that much.

If you have a choice of where to place your index page links, then you should choose those places that only allow you to post a url. That is, a bare url. Without any anchor text. Since you want to get most of your links to your home page (index) anyway, this is a good place for those links.

For the other places where you can post anchor text…. Yeah man. There is where the juice comes from. Whether it’s a pr 0 or a pr 99, if you can post with anchor text (that isn’t no-followed) link juice will flow. How much? I don’t have a clue. Too many variables at play for me to even attempt to estimate the juice passing ability of any link.

Alrighty then. Here is the structure of the link that is optimal for our purposes:

< a href=”spamsite.com/page_name.htpml” title=”spin on your key phrase”>Your key phrase</a>

Of course, I left out the www part and the http stuff, but you know about that. Right?

If you can put a little in-context wording on both sides of the link, it will be about as good as it ever gets.

That’s about all there is to it too. Simple enough that anyone can do it. But, I’m surprised at how many blackhats do not do it. Anchor text is the key to deep linking. Deep linking is the key to higher serp positions (coupled with the SEO we did).

“But wait,” says him. “Wait for what?” says I.

“You didn’t tell me how many links I need.”

“Well,” says I, “how high is up?”

I can’t tell you because I don’t have a clue. I don’t know your niche and I don’t know your competitors. How many links you need will vary with each campaign. You must do the investigation. Just remember, Google won’t show you the true number of links to an page. You must experiment and adjust.

“Now hold on,” he says. “You didn’t say where to drop these magic links.”

Nope. I didn’t. If I were to tell you where and how I drop my links, then I wouldn’t have a place to drop links. I didn’t tell you the apparatus that I use because you will need to find one that you like and that provides the results you want.

There are lots of places and ways to get your links in the way of the spiders. I’m sure you know of some. And, I’m equally sure you’ll find some more.

Keep this in mind. If you followed the ideas in the previous article (SEO for new Blackhats), you won’t need as many links as most of your competition does. The reason is because you have done a first rate job of SEO in the first place.

Now it’s time for you to get to work. Start getting your pages indexed and positioned for profits. Start today. You won’t be sorry you did.

~dink