SERP Rank Update

Using Backlinks To Increase SERP Rank and Page Views

It’s been a while since I discussed in detail my thoughts and results from my previous post on increasing eHow SERP rank. Some of that is because I’ve been busy with numerous projects that come up from time to time. Part of it is because of the recent turmoil at eHow and with many of the writers there. Some of it is even recently due to my confusion relating to the apparent changing of the eHow earnings algorithm.

I’m not sure that the algorithm has been permanently changed however because since my post on the subject my CPM has been climbing back up. It bottomed somewhere around the 22nd of January at around $7 per 1000 page views but is now back up to around $8.25 as of this writing. This is squarely lower than in each of my past full months at eHow but it isn’t quite as low as I thought it might go. I suspect and hope that the algorithm or earnings well affected by the eHow UK mess which was getting worked on during the middle of the month.

Regardless however, as I mentioned in my past publication my mega-backlinking mission to my eHow articles have brought increased page views with little to no extra article publishing on the site. I only published two articles on eHow since early November. I’ll try to break this all down in a future article I’m afraid. I want to see how the month closes out.

Getting Anchored Backlinks To Increase Google Rankings

In the past I've discussed anchored backlinks and how they boost SERP rank. This information is neither novel nor unique. This knowledge is in fact known by many people who both make a living online and by those who dabble and fail. Most people know to rank well in the search engines you have to both have on page SEO focused on researched and deliberately targeted keywords and that you need to have backlinks pointing to your publications. The trouble is most people either just don’t obtain those backlinks or they simply don’t know how to go about a backlink mission.

I discussed at the time a friend’s article posted on eHow on the topic of honeymoon showers. At the time I said that this article had the potential to make probably around $5 per month max if it was optimized and ranked at the top of Google. When I stated this the article was ranked number 9 on page 1 for its main keyword. Since that time she tweaked her article to be more SEO friendly. I linked to the article with an anchored backlink once or twice, she did also from a couple other sites as did another friend… it’s been about three months and I almost forgot about this experiment but I decided to run a check on the article’s SERP rank and what did I find? An across the board improvement in the ranking of this article for all main variations of the article’s main keyword.

On October 14, 2009 this article ranked:
• 1st for “How To Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 1st for “Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 7th for “A honeymoon shower”
• 9th for “honeymoon shower”

Today, January 28, 2010 this article with some backlinks (very few backlinks actually) this article ranks:
• 1st for “How To Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 1st for “Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 1st for “A Honeymoon Shower”
• 3rd for “Honeymoon Shower”

That’s an excellent improvement and likely will bring this article up to the top of the SERPs for a multitude of long-tail searches related to her main keyword. Again, this article probably isn’t a huge moneymaker due to potential traffic and CPC as demonstrated by Gs Keyword Tool but with a few backlinks I bet it gets a lot more page views today and probably more money today than it did three months ago.

Incidentally the two pages still out ranking her for “Honeymoon Shower” are PR1 and PR0 pages and only one appear to even be optimized for search engines at all. A few more backlinks and this eHow article (which is a PR3 by the way) could easily be number one for the main keyword.

Is My SERP Rank Increasing?
I’ve also discussed a few of my personal SERP Rank goals as they relate to my main longevity blog. Currently I want to get my site: How To Live Longer to the rank well for the phrase “how to live longer”. In the past I stated a few other phrases I wanted it to rank for. “Longer Life” was the first I mentioned back in October in my post titled build residual income with anchored backlinks. This is the same article in which I discuss the Honeymoon Showers article (BTW).

In that article I noted that I currently ranked:
• 2nd for “how to live a longer life”
• 2nd for “live a longer life”
• 8th for “a longer life”
• 22nd for “longer life”

Today for the same terms I rank:
• 3rd for “how to live a longer life”
• 2nd for “live a longer life”
• 3rd for “a longer life”
• 4th for “longer life”

That’s a nice improvement and though I can’t say I’ve gotten to the maximum estimate for earnings because of this climb in the SERPs, I can say that my overall organic search traffic for “live longer” related searches is up a lot. In the month preceding my stated SERP rank goal for my main keyword I received 205 entrances via search to my main blog page on my longevity blog. According to G Analytics this was from 41 different keywords.

Over the next two months I built up a ton of backlinks to my main page and deep post pages using a variety of “longevity” related anchored backlinks. As you can see above, as my main keywords ranking improved, so too did my entrances via search to the main page from all the various long-tail searches. It’s only been a little over three months but the last month I have had 628 entrances via search to just my main blog page via 62 different keywords.

Basically in three months my anchored backlinking campaign increased my search traffic more than 200 percent and increased my long-tail search traffic by about 50%. I even started getting ranked for a new search term that I will be heavily backlinking over the next 30-60 days: “How To Live Longer”. In the month before my campaign this keyword brought one visitor to my blog; in the past 30 days however this one keyword brought 300 visitors to the blog… and I’m still on page two! In fact this keyword ranks 18th in the SERPs. I can’t wait to get this to page one.

Improving SERP Rank – Making Goals

I share this with you for two reasons. This is fun for me and form of entertainment when I don’t feel like writing articles or generating backlinks but also to refine my opinion on what is working and how to do it better. I also hope that you reading this come to understand that increasing your SERP rank is not complicated; it just takes time and work. It just takes anchored backlinks.

What are you doing next, you might ask. How can I do the same? The answer to this is simple. Court at the Keyword Academy recently identified a challenge to single out 30 URLs that get little traffic and to build five backlinks to each of those articles over 30 days. I won’t rehash the terms though, go to his site and read about the backlink experiment for yourself. Regardless of his experiment however I’ve been doing just that for some time and will continue to do so.

How To Build Backlinks – My Evolving Strategy

I have recently identified about 10 articles on my longevity blog which make good money and which get decent traffic. I am sending backlinks like a storm to them. I have also identified roughly 15-20 eHow articles (my best performing articles) and am doing the same for them. Sending more backlinks to them will cause them to appear in searches more often and will increase them money they make.

Recently I’ve identified 33 articles on InfoBarrel that I published between late November and early January that mostly send backlinks to my blog and my eHow articles. These 33 articles in fact send about 55 backlinks to my articles on eHow and my Longevity blog. I feel these articles could earn more money on their own so I will be sending backlinks to them over the next 30 days as well.

This is how you increase your SERP rank and increase organic traffic. Publish a lot of stuff and identify the articles which appear to perform well and send backlinks to them… then send backlinks to those articles as well.

Here’s my pattern for how to build backlinks as it stands now. Keep in mind this is not set in stone.

An article on eHow is backlinked by an article on my blog. An InfoBarrel article then backlinks both the eHow article and the blog post. Then an article directory submission backlinks the InfoBarrel article, the blog post, and the eHow article. From this point on I have three articles (out of four that I wrote) that can make money, my eHow article, my blog post, and my InfoBarrel article. Each one has between one and three backlinks and this can be increased further by simply adding an extra layer of an additional directory such as eZine articles, Squidoo, or GoArticles.

Personally I also backlink my moneymakers with ArticleBast, SelfGrowth, and Buzzle though these get less of my time for now. That’s how I did it. And if you’re wondering if it’s worth it then give it a few months of hard work and see if you get addicted to seeing traffic growth via search engines that grows 20-30% month over month consistently. This growth comes purely from increasing SERP rank and an increasing volume of long-tail traffic. Get to work on building those backlinks; they work.

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Changes to eHow Earnings Algorithm?

Update on Mega-Backlinking

I had a question come to me regarding my backlinking of eHow articles since Thanksgiving which I touched on in my post titled InfoBarrel Versus eHow. If you haven’t been following along I’ve gone on a mission to send a ton of dofollow backlinks to my eHow and Blog articles from various submissions sites including InfoBarrel and various article directories.

In roughly two months I’ve backlinked 100% of my eHow articles at least once, 76% of them at least twice, 57% of them at least three times, 40% four times, 23 percent at least five times, and a few backlinked over ten times with a spattering in between.

I’ve also sent dofollow backlinks to my best performing blog posts on my Longevity Blog and here from the same sources as well as blog carnivals.

The question was this:

“Out of curiosity, have your views picked up at all since you mega-backlinked recently? How about pay? Does Google do a once-a-year shuffle of article ranking (just wondering)?”

My answer - Regarding eHow specifically, my article views on average for the first 18 days of January are up 22% over the average daily views I got in December... that would imply an increase in earnings of roughly 22% as well however my earnings per 1000 page views have dropped considerably.

On face value yes, my article marketing and backlinking has considerably increased my organic search traffic to my eHow articles month over month and I continue to expect further gains in the future. However there has been a lot of talk on the eHow forums about low earnings this January. Some of this is being fueled by some of the long running writers who have experience significant success and longevity on the site. Many of these writers also feel something is wrong.

My eHow Earnings Experience

My earnings per 1000 page views on my eHow articles for September '09 – December '09

September - $9.76
October - $10.19
November - $10.25
December - $10.41

Notice the obvious trend of slightly increasing earnings per page view month after month. This is the result of aging and optimizing ads. As the article matures the ads are more appropriate. As far as Adsense goes your page will receive better converting ads as you get a history of ad clicks on a page. When Google understands what ads convert better for your content the ads will be better optimized and your earnings per 1000 page views will increase.

Declining eHow Earnings

Now see my figures for January 2010.

January - $7.94

This is through the first 18 days. Despite the very tight range for the previous four months and the increasing trend due to aging this month is seeing far worse conversion of page views into earnings. What makes this crazy is that my article marketing and backlinking since Thanksgiving has produced increasing page views month over month.

Even though my page views on eHow articles are up 22% over December my earnings per 1000 page views are down 23.7%. That is huge considering my tight range for four months in a row... each month even increased until now.

eHow Earnings Glitch?

Something is up with eHow; I'm sure of it. This month I have added only one article to eHow so it doesn't have to do with a large influx of new articles which aren’t earning due to their relative youth... all articles are simply not earning like they should be or have been in the past.

Truth be told, my eHow articles were earning at a fairly normal pace for the first week of January... until they said they would pull eHow UK articles from their database. From that time on earnings/1000 PV dropped considerably.

Every day my number gets lower. I'm curious how low it will go. After all nothing has changed. I haven't edited my articles, my best performing articles haven’t changed their placement considerably in Google, some are up a few spots even. In fact my Blog earnings on How To Live Longer (my Longevity blog) are up considerably January over December on an earnings/PV ratio. We’re talking they’re up 79%! I’ve done the same backlinking to my articles there as I have with eHow, my earnings at eHow should not be declining.

eHow Earnings Algorithm

This has nothing to do with advertisers. In my mind this is a change in the eHow earnings algorithm and/or a glitch associated with the pulling of articles from eHow UK. What are your thoughts?

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Residual Income Report – December 2009

December seemingly came and went quickly. It’s almost a whole week behind us know. In fact by the time I get to publishing this residual income report surely it will have been a full week into 2010. I cannot lie December was an interesting month and a really bad one in many ways. The biggest reasons behind this are personal but to some extent I was disappointed with my earnings too. Then again I’ve never been blogging or writing online for money during the holiday season.

Personally my wife and I had a tough time about a week before Christmas when our beloved little kitty died. I won’t go into the detail here but if you are interested you can stop by my longevity blog and read all about on my post Living Longer and Genetics.

Once that happened I pretty much lost all motivation to write and really didn’t do much of anything until really this week. On top of that I was sick twice during the month and my productivity was much lower than what I would have liked.

I don’t want to moan and complain all over this blog but I might as well finish off my dissertation on my residual income disappointments by noting that it is true, no matter your work ethic holiday traffic sucks. My longevity blog saw a decrease in traffic by roughly 20 percent while my traffic to my eHow articles declined by roughly 10 percent.

My InfoBarrel articles unfortunately I cannot vouch for because December was my first full month writing for InfoBarrel. I had hoped to close out December with well over 100 InfoBarrel articles, each one essentially sending backlinks to my eHow articles and my blog posts but around the 20th of the month I slowed on my publication schedule and ended up only finishing the month with 90 articles published since the 18th of November.

I don’t know what normal traffic levels for those articles would be in any other normal month so I’ll just assume they’re roughly 15 percent below normal as well.

Despite the low levels of traffic for the month I must say that I’m quite happy with my earnings. Over the course of the entire month from all sources combined my earning increased month over month by 0.6 percent. That’s not too bad considering I got way fewer page views than in previous months.

Over on the eHow forums so many people were moaning and complaining about low earnings. In fact a number of people are convinced that eHow is responsible for slighting it’s writers on compensation. I disagree. They are honestly in some transition with the new eHow UK website they are rolling out but overall my page views there held up better than my own blog that I own. Not only that but my earnings per page view at eHow once again climbed to the highest level it’s ever been at for an entire month. November eHow earnings saw my dollars per 1000 page views hit $10.25 and in December my dollars per 1000 page views climbed to $10.41. I’m very pleased with that.

My longevity blog for whatever reason seems to be languishing. I think it’s because I’m targeting very difficult medical niches and have yet to crack the top ten search ranking for anything beyond long tail keywords. I’m working on it however through some of the backlink techniques I’ve described in previous posts on this site.

Many of my InfoBarrel articles in December backlinked many of my posts on that site and I have expanded some of my article submission work to backlink the blog posts as well. I also have a long term goal of going back through all my old posts and laying down some solid SEO on each and every post. I’m talking about changing the titles of many posts, changing the anchor link text in posts, adding bolded keywords, and grabbing better backlinks for good money making posts. This however is a long term plan which I won’t be able to get done all at once.

I had a question pop up in the comments a couple days ago asking about my InfoBarrel earnings for the month of December. I last discussed my earnings there about two weeks ago. Since that time I posted a few more articles on IB and am currently sitting at 94 publications. None of these articles are even two months old and most are not even one month old. Hardly any have any backlinks pointing at them at all outside of internal links from other InfoBarrel articles. Having said that my InfoBarrel articles are earning me less on a dollars per articles basis than my eHow articles. I believe this is an oddity due to the quick influx of page views you get right after publication and due to the fact that the first month or so your contextual ads are not exactly perfectly matched up to your content. I expect this to increase in future months.

Because Adsense doesn’t allow you to publish CTR and eCPC I won’t say exactly what I’m making there in those terms but I will say it is more than my Longevity blog and less than at eHow. In January I expect my numbers to increase simply because normal traffic should start hitting my pages as well as I expect to slowly start sending some backlinks to my InfoBarrel articles just as I’m doing with eHow and my blog.

For my first 6 weeks on InfoBarrel I made nearly $8. You are absolutely right… don’t rub it in. It’s not much, I know but I feel there is potential here because many of my articles there were posted just before the holidays and they didn’t get viewed hardly at all because of search traffic. I’ll be honest too. Many of these articles were not as geared for search as I would have liked either. They were geared to send relevant links to my eHow articles. I didn’t need them to be SEOd to do that… I wish however I had at this point… in any event.

eHow Earnings Breakdown – December 2009

As I’ve done in past months I’m going to break down my eHow earnings a bit for comparison sake.

73 published articles earned at a combined rate of $10.41 per 1,000 PV – up from $10.25 in November.
80 percent of my earnings came from 23 percent of my articles – down from 24 percent in November.
20 percent of my earnings came from 34 percent of my articles – down from 45 percent in November.
43 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – up from 31 percent in November.

All in all, my trends were basically down for the month other than my coveted dollars per 1000 page view. I have my suspicion that this is due to the low traffic volume of the month… but then again who knows.

Breaking down my result overall just a bit I wanted to say that my top ten articles for over all earnings have made a cool $14.90 per 1000 page views and they account for 43 percent of all of my page views and 64 percent of my overall earnings to date. Considering I have taken the time to send backlinks to every article nearly twice at minimum from InfoBarrel I think it’s time to start focusing on these top articles and a few “notable” articles which are not in the top ten to really help increase my eHow earnings.

I parsed my article results into potential performers and found that I have and addition nine articles which are not in my top ten for earnings which combined have been earning at a rate of $17.86 per 1000 page views. The potential searches for these articles based on their main keywords are actually greater than my top ten and I only selected articles which have been getting page views so I think I can focus on these too and increase my earnings dramatically.

To that end I plan on sending more anchored backlinks at these 19 eHow articles, which I feel can be milked for a lot more money, with good backlinking promotion from InfoBarrel and from a few article submission sites. Furthermore there is one article in particular on eHow which I’m going to do my very best to heavily market. I’m talking like 4-5 times as heavy as the others because I feel the article has the potential to make more money than all my others combined. To this date the article has been earning at a rate of $46.67 per 1000 page views and with a little more ranking in the search engines I believe I could be making almost that every month on this one article alone. I’ll report back on progress on this article in the coming weeks and months.

To close out this epic residual income earnings report I’ll leave once again with my goal progress bar for all sources of online income combined. My goal is to duplicate my full time monthly income with just online residual income. The last couple months I’ve kind of plateaued and things didn’t change this month. My overall residual income online increased only slightly over November and I achieved 1.87 percent of my long term goal. That was on significantly lowered traffic due to the holidays and thus I expect January to be quite better. In fact I’m already off to a noticeably faster pace even after a slow couple days right after New Years.

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