Lissie over at her passive online income blog has posted a link to what I have to say is probably the best introductory break-down of link-building, AND why it is so important.

Lissie points to a post on a site called bloggerillustrated.com, run by Allyn Hayne. The post essentially details everything you need to know about backlinks. I have visited the site a few times and there is some good stuff there, and I have now subscribed to his feed. Only thing is I don’t like watching video tutorials – I prefer to read instructions to digest them. That’s OK though, and don’t let this put you off as Allyn has a pretty good written breakdown of each video, so you shouldn’t miss anything if you don’t watch the vids.

By all accounts, Lissie has moved back to New Zealand for the time being, so I guess she is a bona-fide New Zealand SEO expert. And maybe branching into photography, as her newer posts have some lovely pics that she has taken from New Zealand.

I would post a pic or too, but I’m currently stuck in a hotel in Auckland and there is no view to speak of.

On another note, what cracks me up are the SEO jobs I see listed in New Zealand from time to time on Seek and TradeMe. The only qualifications they seem to care about is a knowledge of Twitter and Facebook. Agreed that SEO is not really a NZQA qualification you can get (yet) in New Zealand, but if you have a more than a passing knowledge about online marketing, you should already know that traffic to your website via a social media site is practically worthless and that organic traffic from search engines is king.

There are two reasons for this: if you are an affiliate marketer using AdSense as your revenue model, you will more than likely be smartpriced for any traffic that arrives via one of these social media sites. The implications are that your entire online portfolio could suffer the same consequences. Those keyword-targetted posts that you carefully researched that should be earning $2-$3 per click could well be dumped in the worthless bin and you may be lucky to see 10 cents a click.

The other reason why I don’t see social media sites as a desired source of traffic to your niche or business website are simply that the visitors that come from the sites are generally not in a buying mood. They probably tend to click on the link out of boredom.

Sure, you may get a little thrill out of the boost in traffic from Digging or Twittering your site, but the visitors you get are practically worthless.

For affiliate marketing you want targetted traffic. And this is achieved by getting a decent ranking in Google for the keyword you are targetting, i.e. a bare minimum of the first page, results 1-4 is best.

The same is true for a website that promotes your offline business. A ranking outside of the top 10 results ain’t going to get you customers.  Get your website ranking in the top 10 for keywords relevant to your business, and then you will see some results.

Argh, I’m not delving into politics here – I’ll leave that to KiwBlog- and yes, I should be spending more time developing my money sites, but the New Zealand First website is JUST SO BAD. I mean, c’mon, who uses tables for design these days. Almost as bad as frames.  Seriously, grab a CSS book.

I’m not a designer, and couldn’t draw myself out of a book – but jeez this site makes me cringe.

It’s obvious the support-base of NZ First is aged 70+, when one of their ardent supporters is entrusted to “redesign” their website. No wonder their is no link on the footer credit – he’s just too plain embarrassed.  Not that I’m knocking old people. I know some old people.

Ugly aesthetics aside, they’ve got one thing right.  Keyword in the Title tag. Actually,  probably two – they may well rank for the phrase “we got”.

I’m expecting a defamation suit from Winston for this post. I interviewed him 15 years ago and asked him could NZ First really be taken seriously. With a soddy Website like this – no way.

Just a quick post to say pre-season has started for the 2009 30 Day Challenge.

What is the 30 Day Challenge? Basically, make your first buck online.

It’s a step by step course (totally free of charge), that shows you how to research a niche, set-up a website and then promote it.

If you’re interested in how to make money online, or even just need to bring your self up to speed with current SEO techniques, then this course is for you.

I have to say, the only thing I don’t like about it that all the material is delivered via video – I prefer to read instructions.

Anyway, here is the link to 30DC.

If you’re a New Zealand web developer, I’d recommend you sign up just to get some insight into SEO today.

I will start a group for fellow Kiwi’s to get involved – will post details here before the end of pre-season.

The 100% Interest KiwiBank ad campaign currently running in New Zealand interests me.

Not because it is a good example of a great banking ad. It’s quite the opposite. It’s actually a textbook example of how not to run an online campaign. Others might call it a clusterf**k.

You see, the call to action on the KiwiBank 100% Interest ad is NOT to visit a specific website. It asks you to Google the phrase 100% Interest to find out more. I’m guessing the idea was that Kiwbank would have the top organic result for that phrase (or at least a sponsored result), and that’s how you will be lead to the KiwiBank website. Wrong.

Why? Do a search and where does KiwiBank come up? Not in the first two pages of Google, that’s for sure (typically the first result on page one of Google will get about 40% of the traffic, anything after that page ain’t worth knowing about).

And the problem is the Kiwibank website isn’t even half properly SEO’d for the phrase.

Has the web dude at Kiwibank never read SEO for Dummies?

The exact phrase “100% Interest” has just over 800 competing pages that Google knows of. This phrase should be dead easy to beat. No need to pay for Google Adwords for this phrase, that’s for sure.

So KiwiBank, what use have you made of your title tag, h1 tag, copy etc – heck, just registering a domain along the lines of www.100percentinterest.co.nz would probably get position one without ANY content at all.

Just to put the knife in, WestPac is supposedly paying for some sponsored Google AdWords using the 100% Interest phrase.

Why bother, if they had spend 20 minutes optimising a website (or even just a single page) for the phrase, they could probably get the top organic result for 100% interest, as Dan at Xebidy has shown.

As per my recent comment on Justin’s SEO Zombie site, I have been experimenting with the nofollow attribute.

The nofollow attribute is a piece of HTML used in your links that is intended to tell search engines that the page you are linking to should not influence that particular page’s search engine ranking.

In essence, you are linking to another website, but not endorsing it, per se.

So, I was playing around with a website I have had up for about five years. This is a niche tourism-related website, and I routinely add external links to websites that are related to that specific page’s content at no charge (yet!).

The trouble is (or so I suspect), is that because the site has relatively few inbound links, and several pages have more than 20 or so external links, that Google may have applied some sort of paid-link or link exchange penalty.

With this in mind, I selected a page that was SEO’d to the max on-page. I.e. Keyword in title, H1, description, first para of content etc. This particular page was not targeting a very competitive keyword phrase, yet had always struggled to get past page two of Google search results.

So, all I changed was adding the nofollow attribute to all the external links I had on that page (i.e. links not pointing to other pages on the site).

The results really surprised me – within about two weeks that same page now appears on the first set of Google results, sometimes as high as position four.

I’ve recently applied the same changes to another couple of similar pages on this website, so will let you know soon if I get the same results from the nofollow attribute.

So are you up or down since Google updated the PageRank toolbar at the beginning of the month?

I have to confess, I’ve taken a lot less interest in PageRank over the last year or so.

Sure, it can provide some sort of semi-useful SEO data, such as an indication as to a particular web page’s inbound link-strength, i.e. the number of external sites that point to that particular page. And it obviously plays a part in some Google algorithms, because one of the reports in Google Webmaster allows you to see which page on your domain has the highest PageRank.

Of course, it’s also helpful to have a good PR if you want sell your website, because a lot of people out there in internet marketing land still judge a website’s worth by its PR score.

But if you’re interested in getting top placement in Google, don’t stress over PageRank. It’s common for websites with a PR of ZERO, ZIP, NADA to outrank other pages with say a PR of 4 or above.

There are many factors that come into play, and having a PR6 website doesn’t even remotely guarantee you top placement in the Big G for your coveted search phrase.

As at March 2009 (and for some time now), this is pretty much the most important element to ranking YOUR keyword in Google. We can also call this off-page SEO.

Yup, that’s it. If you sell staplers, then to have the best chance of an organic ranking on the first page of Google, YOU need sites (and preferably relevant sites) that link to your site with the keyword “staplers” in their anchor text.

Hat-tip: Justin’s Blog at SEO Tips

But hold your horses, cowboys. This doesn’t mean you should go and trade links with every link-whore on the planet in an effort to get those links.

You want one-way, relevant links. And you certainly don’t want a to be building tonnes of spammy link pages on your site

If you’re new to Internet Marketing and trying to find out how to make money online, one of the first things you will should have been doing (I hope) is researching the many methods and strategies out there to follow your dream to making money online.

So it’s more than likely that apart from the ‘gurus’, such as John Chow, John Reese and all the other John and Jane internet money-making messiahs out there spamming your inbox, you’ve stumbled across Site Build It.

Site Build It is promoted as the the

“only, all-in-one, site-brainstorming-and-building-and-hosting-and-marketing, step-by-step system of software tools that delivers thriving, profitable business.”

With this hefty self-promotion, and intrigued by the promises of internet glory, you’re probably Googled for a few Site Build It reviews as well to see if it’s all it’s stacked up to be.

Funny thing is, all the Site Build It reviews you will probably find on the all-important first couple of pages of Google are by Site Build It owners (until recently I might add).

They must be mighty pleased with their purchase -to the extent you’d almost think that they get a kick-back for recommending Site Build It to YOU? Wouldn’t you? Just like those pyramid schemes, eh?

Anyway, before you fork out the $US300 for Site Build It, make sure you do read an independent Site Build It review or two.

I knew more would come up along the way…and this is another internet marketing project I’ll keep you updated on.

One of my teachers from high-school is now running his own limousine business. He has a nice looking website, but the traffic that it is drawing doesn’t seem to be converting to bookings.

First thing I have asked him to do is install Google Analytics – we need to understand the visitors first before we go making any changes to the site.

And oh, he has multiple domains, yet all with the same content. This presents huge duplicate content issues, so this is another major factor that needs to be addressed.

With Google Analytics installed, we’ll wait a few days and then have a look a the data that has been collected. This stuff is gold.

I have a number of internet marketing projects planned for the year (including this blog).

Actually, a lot of the impetus for me to set up my blog was to share with you my experiences tackling a few different ideas.

So on the go at the moment:

• Redesign and SEO of a website for a family motel.

• Push on with a blog I started for the 30 Day Challenge (I’m in the hall of fame for 2008!). Despite low traffic, the conversion rate is excellent.

• Further develop the first website I created in 2004. This currently uses a Google AdSense revenue model, but I believe  it could be making more money through other avenues.

• Two other domains I have recently registered, but haven’t yet decided on the monetisation method.

Now, as I’m working close to 50 hours a week in the real world, I’ve probably bitten off more than I can chew.  And no doubt I’ll have some more ‘bright ideas’ as the year progresses to add to the ‘to do list’.  The key is to follow-through.

All the projects I’ve mentioned above will be documented here. I’ll probably give them project names and permalinks so you can easily follow progress.

What about you – have you got your plans mapped out fot the year ahead?