If you own many websites, chances are that you’ve had one or several of them compromised at some point and that’s never a pleasant experience.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the exact steps you can take to secure your WordPress websites, as quickly and easily as possible.

Risks

If you’ve been lucky enough to never have had any security issues with your website, you might be wondering: “how likely is it that I’ll get hacked?”

Especially if you have smaller sites, it may seem like they wouldn’t make interesting enough targets for hackers, so you  don’t really have anything to worry about, right? Wrong, unfortunately. My first ever site that got hacked was on a simple little blog that hadn’t been around for more than a few months and that barely got 40 visitors a day. Not a prominent target by any means.

The first thing you need to understand is that there doesn’t have to be any reason for an attack. You don’t have to have made enemies in hacker-circles, you don’t have to have a big, popular or controversial website. An attack can happen out of the blue, for the simple reason that your site is easy to hack. And that’s the number one rule: the easier it is to hack your site, the more likely it is to happen.

In this post, we’ll look at the two most important factors for securing your WordPress site:

1. Backing it up, so that it can easily be restored, in case it does compromised.
2. Adding security measures to make it more difficult to hack and therefore less likely to be attacked.

A WordPress site consists of two main components: the database, which stores all your written content and settings and the files on your server, containing all of your images, plugins, themes etc.

Database Backup

Install the WP-DBmanager plugin, which you can set to automatically create backups of your database at specific intervals and email them to you or store them on your server. In addition, you can also use this plugin to restore your database from a backup file.

Here’s a video showing how to use the installation, setup and restoration features in WP-DBmanger:

Files Backup

The easiest backup solutions are those that come with your hosting provider, but depending on your provider they might not offer all the features you'd want. Our recommended hosting provider for getting started is Hostgator. Hostgator provide a weekly automatic backup on all their shared hosting accounts, as long as you have fewer than 100,000 files stored on the server and less than 20GB of space used.

If you install multiple WordPress websites on one account, it's likely that you'll exceed the file limit at some point. You'll see something like the following in the sidebar of your cPanel dashboard, when this happens:

When you are below the thresholds for files and disk-usage, you'll always have a backup available, but it can be up to a week old and there's only ever one backup stored. It's a good solution, but it's not perfect.

You can manually create backups by going to the backup wizard in your cPanel. This will create a file for you to download, in a few easy steps. You can also use this same wizard to restore your files from an existing backup file.

Our recommended high-end hosting provider, StormOnDemand, comes with it's own, fully customizable backup solution. Here, you can have daily backups created and you can store them for up to 90 days. The service is pay-by-use and the rates are very low.

If you are using a different service or you want to extend the limited backup functionality of a shared hosting account, the SiteAutoBackup service is worth taking a look at. For any cPanel hosting account, you can create automatic, daily backups very easily and you can store them for up to 31 days. The pricing starts at $2/month, so you don't have to break your bank for this added bit of security.

With the above, we've made sure that even if you get a WordPress site compromised, you'll never be more than a few clicks away from restoring all your files and data. The next step is to do what we can to ensure that restoring a backup will never even be necessary.

Updates

Since you're familiar with the Internet, I'm sure you are aware that there are sites and forums/communities on pretty much every topic imaginable. And so there are also sites and communities that are all about documenting and discussing online security flaws and how to exploit them. Someone might read up on such an exploit and then do a quick search to find a site to try it out on. If your site meets the criteria and happens to show up in the search results, that's all it takes for it to become a victim of a hacker attack.

The most commonly exploitable issues with WordPress as well as WP plugins are usually addressed with updates and luckily, WordPress makes updating very easy, via dashboard notifications and one-click-updates.

Always update to the latest WordPress version and always keep your plugins up to date. If you're running an older version, it will still contain all the bugs that have been fixed in the newer version and some of those bugs might be potential security loopholes.

If you run many different WordPress websites, it can be difficult to manage, as you'd need to log in to each dashboard separately, to perform the updates. If you want to make this process easier, take a look at manageWP (hosted service) or WP Mass Updater (Windows desktop software).

When installing new plugins for your site, check to see when they've last been updated and whether they've had multiple versions in the past. As a general rule, a plugin that is updated regularly is less likely to be a potential security risk than one that had only one release, years ago and was never updated since.

Passwords

Any and all security measures are futile if someone can simply log in to your site as an administrator or log into your hosting account, with malicious intent. Because of this, it's very important to use real passwords for all of your accounts.

If you use passwords like 123456, password, letmein, qwerty, your birth date or anything similar, you're simply asking for trouble. You might think that that goes without saying, but I know that some people are reading this and thinking "how did he know my password?" (here's how).

I recommend using LastPass, a free and awesome password management app. Create one truly secure master password for your LastPass account and then have it auto-generate secure passwords for you, for every account you use. The downside to this is that with any password manager, you'll have a single point of failure: if someone gets access to your password manager, they have access to everything. This is still a far smaller risk than using non-secure passwords on your accounts or writing down your passwords to remember them, though.

The only alternative I'd recommend would be to use memorizable, secure passwords by stringing together random words and remembering them as visual representations. You'll still need some discipline and a good memory to do this, if you're going to use different passwords for all your critical accounts (as you should).

Bottom line: replace all your insecure passwords with secure ones, right now.

In addition, also make sure that your admin username is neither "admin" nor the same as your display name. If your username is either of those, that's one less thing a hacker needs to figure out, in order to breach your website. In the WordPress admin menu, go to "Users" -> "Your Profile". Here, you can set a nickname to anything you want and you can set the display name on your site to be your nickname:

Secure FTP

FTP clients are extremely useful for managing the files on your server, but on a standard FTP connection, all of the communication between your computer and your server is un-encrypted. This means that, among other things, your username and password is sent in plain text and could, theoretically, be intercepted.

The solution is to use an SFTP (secured file transfer protocol) connection.

The general procedure is very simple: make sure you have SSH (secure shell) access enabled on your hosting account, set your FTP client to use SFTP and use your main username and password to connect (i.e. the password you use to log in to your cPanel account - logins for individual FTP accounts don't work via SFTP). Here is the same in more detail:

SSH Access

If you are using Hostgator, log in to you client and billing dashboard and click on the "View Hosting Packages" link in the sidebar menu. Then, click on the "Enable Shell Access" link:

If you are using StormOnDemand, SSH is enabled by default. If you're using a different hosting provider and you don't know how to activate SSH access, a look at the knowledge-base or a quick support request should get you sorted.

FileZilla

Next, download and install the free FileZilla FTP client (available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux). Launch it and open the site manager (File -> Site Manager).

Use the following settings:

1. Set the host to your registered domain for the hosting account, preceeded by "ftp." or enter your server's IP address.
2. If you are using Hostgator, enter "2222" as the port. On StormOnDemand, leave this field blank.
3. Select the SFTP option for the Protocol drop-down menu.
4. Select the logon type "Normal".
5. Enter your cPanel username and password.
6. Click on connect.

That's it, you now have a secure FTP connection to your hosted files!

BulletProof Security Plugin

BulletProof Security is a comprehensive WordPress plugin that creates htaccess files to protect all of your critical files and folders. It protects from many types of code injection attacks, it hides your WordPress version number and it also makes recommendations for how to change folder permissions in your WordPress files.

Here's a quick video, demonstrating how to use the plugin:

CloudFlare

CloudFlare is a service that was already mentioned and recommended in the post about how to speed up WordPress based websites. It's primary purpose is to act as something like a content distribution network and caching tool and most of it's features are all about increasing your site's loading speeds. However, another feature of CloudFlare is that it automatically blocks requests from known malicious sources. It mostly blocks spam bots, harvesting bots and botnet zombies. Especially with the latter, CloudFlare adds a layer of security to your site.

To take advantage of this, simply sign up for CloudFlare (it's free) and install the CloudFlare plugin (also free) on your WordPress site.

Conclusion

Follow the steps above and you'll be presenting any potential hacker with a tough nut to crack, making it likely that they'll go look elsewhere, for victims. However, also keep in mind that you can never make a website 100% secure. Making attacks impossible is, unfortunately, impossible. That's why above all else, good back-up practices as described in the first section of this article, are the backbone of a secure site. With regular backups, even if things do go wrong, you never risk losing all of your valuable content and the hard work it represents.

In this post, you’ll find a simple, straight-forward explanation of what the three match types are all about and exactly how this is significant to you.

Google Searches

I will be using “blue vintage car” as a randomly picked example search term. Please feel free to follow along with some Google searches of your own, with any kind of keyword. To illustrate the difference in match types, I recommend you use a search term with at least three words.

Broad Match

A broad match search is the “normal” and most common way of searching in Google. A broad match search for my example keyword looks like this:

With this kind of search, we are asking Google to return pages that contain the words contained in the search phrase, as well as synonyms for those words in any order and any distribution.

This means that along with pages that contain the exact keyword I typed (blue vintage car), the pages with the following phrases could also be included in the results:

• Blue classic car
• Vintage car: blue
• Vintage car with blue leather interior
• Blue skies, vintage comics and car models

In general, a page containing the exact words you searched for, in the correct order, is likely to show up further up in the results than one with synonyms and a different order of words. The further down you go in the search results, the more “exotic” the listed results will become.

Here’s an example from page 50 of the results for the example search term:

As you can see, “vintage” is not featured as a word on the page, but the synonym “old” does. In addition, the three words are quite far apart on the page and aren’t even in the same sentence. The point of this is simply to illustrate: with a broad search, Google will return absolutely any page with even a hint of similarity to your search term.

Phrase Match

A phrase match search is performed by entering the search term in keywords. In the case of our example, it looks like this:

You’ll see that the number of results found is now significantly lower. This is because for a phrase match search, Google will only return pages that contain the keyword exactly as you typed it in. In this case, the three words “blue vintage car“, in exactly that order. Also, synonyms are no longer used, when you do a phrase match search.

We can confirm this by looking at the last page of results. Even the very last page listed contains the exact search phrase:

Keyword Research

If you are using Google as a search engine, there is no such thing as exact match and this is perhaps where some of the confusion about match types stems from. Exact match only exists as a search type from the perspective of keyword research (either for SEO or for PPC advertising).

If you access the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you can activate the three different match types in a small box in the left sidebar (see image).

Now, whenever you get keyword suggestions, you’ll always get three versions: the plain broad match keyword, the “phrase match keyword” in quotes and the [exact match keyword] in square brackets.

Here’s what the results look like for our example keyword:

The significant difference between the three match types comes into play when we look at the search volume numbers. As you can see, it’s estimated that our example keyword gets over 12,000 broad match searches per month, but only a dozen exact searches. What does this mean?

In this case, broad match indicates searches that include the words in the keyword phrase, as well as synonyms of those words, in any order with or without the addition of more words in the search. Examples of broad match searches for “blue vintage car” include:

• blue vintage car
• classic automobile blue
• pictures of a blue vintage car
• classic blue jeans jacket with car emblem

The phrase match search volume number only includes searches containing all of the words in the keyword phrase in that exact order, but can contain searches with extra words in them. Phrase match searches could include:

• blue vintage car
• pictures of a blue vintage car

Finally, the exact match search volume number only includes searches for the exact keyword phrase and nothing else. In other words, the number indicates the estimated amount of people who typed in the following phrase and then hit the enter key:

• blue vintage car

Search Volume and SEO

The search volume of a keyword is one of the important factors to take into account, when doing keyword research. In order to answer the question “how many people are searching for this keyword”, you have to always look at the exact match search numbers. Only the exact match numbers are an estimate of how many people are searching for that specific keyword.

An SEO campaign should always focus on one keyword at a time, since trying to get a top position for a dozen keywords all at once, for one and the same page is a surefire way of spreading yourself too thin and not getting any results at all. And when you are focusing on and optimizing for one keyword, all of the possible variations of that keyword that show up as broad match searches really have no relevance.

In other words: when you’re working to get the top spot for “blue vintage car”, it doesn’t matter how many people search for “classic blue car photo album”, “vintage blue jeans jacket with car emblem” and countless other broad-match variations, because you aren’t going to rank for those phrases.

Match Types Video

Here’s a video, illustrating the same concepts as discussed above:

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!

As I was thinking abou this, I decided to make a video containing as much useful and essential information about making money online as possible, aimed at a complete beginner (basically me, a year ago). I wanted to keep it short and to the point (attention spans are short, these days), so there could only be a very limited amount of information in the video. I had to cut it down to what I believe are the most important things a newbie needs to hear.

Here’s the result and I’d love to know what you think about it:

In case you're interested, here's the link to the report mentioned in the video.

So, what do you think? Is this a good place to start, for a newbie? Would you (will you) recommend this to beginners who ask you about how to make money online?

Let me know in the comments!

Below is a video in which I talk about two methods for making almost guaranteed, and fast, income online.

Don’t worry, though. This is still RQR and therefore still a hype-free zone. Video may not be quite what you expect, however…

As stated in the video, I believe in building long-term businesses online and I also believe that chasing quick cash will actually keep you poor, in the long term.

Expanding on what I said in the video, there is perhaps one way to make money that comes a little closer to most people’s “get rich quick” fantasies: Start with something you’re already good at. Maybe there is something among your skill set that can be turned into a product. If you can do that, that might be one of the quickest ways to get started. However, before you have a serious business, you’ll still need to learn all the basics like keyword research, market research, how to build a website, how to promote a website, how to create compelling offers, etc.

Let me know what you think of my video? Good advice in your opinion? Or would you have made different suggestions? I’d like to get your input on this.

Cheers,

Split-testing, sometimes also called A/B testing, is the process of testing two or more variations of a webpage against each other in order to determine which one performs better. The goal of split testing is simply to find out how to structure your page so that you can get more clicks, more conversions, more sign-ups or whatever else may be the purpose of the site.

Read on for to learn how and what to test.

How Split Testing Works

Lets begin with a very simple example: We take a hypothetical campaign where we try to get people to sign up to a mailing-list. To run an A/B test, we create two different versions of our squeeze page, one with a blue colour-scheme and the other with a pink colour-scheme.

We will now send our traffic either to a page that serves up one version of the page or the other via some type of script or we will send the to a script that will redirect to one variation of the page or the other. There are different ways to accomplish this on a technical level, but whatever the solution, the result is that 50% of our visitors get to see the pink-themed page and 50% get to see the blue-themed page.

Now, we want to find out which version of our squeeze page gets more sign-ups. To do this, there are again several possibilities, but it always comes down to tracking the source of all our sign-ups or conversions.

Your auto-responder system will almost certainly feature some kind of tracking for this purpose. If you’re measuring click-throughs (to a sales-page or offer), you can track the conversion rates with a tracking system like Tracking202 or similar. You can also set up two separate redirects, one for each of the page-variations, but both pointing to the same sales/offer-page, to see which one of the redirects is used more often.

Again, there’s no shortage of tracking options, but it all comes down to this: Split your traffic evenly between two variations of a page and keep track of which one gets more clicks, sign-ups, sales or whatever it is you’re after.

What to Test

There are three basic rules to follow when doing split-testing:

1. Test only one variable at a time
   If you change several things on a page and get better conversions as a result, you won’t know what exactly caused the increase in conversions. Was it the new font? The different headline? The new pictures? The only way to know for sure is to only change one thing at a time.
   
2. Test big differences first
   Don’t test tiny details as they will rarely make a difference (e.g. exclamation mark vs. period in the headline). Test large, significant variations first.
   
3. Keep testing
   Test two variations of a page against each other. When you’ve found the winner, make another variation of that page and test it again. Repeat this process until no change you can think of still produces better conversions. The worst thing you can do in online marketing is not to test. The second worst is to stop testing to early.

Here are some examples of what you can test:

• Text vs. Video
  Have a text-based squeeze-page and test that against one where you read the text and record a slide-show or some other type of video. You could also test video vs. video and text.
• Long vs. Short
  This goes for text as well as video: Test a long, extensive sales-page against a short one. Test a two-minute video against a 30-minute video.
• Bullet-Points vs. Paragraphs
  Write out a few paragraphs highlighting the main benefits that come with your product or offer. Then test that against a brief description and bullet-points listing the main benefits.
• Different Incentives
  Most squeeze-pages offer some type of incentive for signing up, like a free report or something along those lines. If you have more than one incentive at your disposal, test them against each other as well as one against several (remember that too many incentives can make you seem desperate). Also try giving your incentive a more compelling name and/or description.
• Colour-Themes and Design
  Test a “naked” squeeze-page against one with more graphical elements. Test different colour-schemes against each other. Even fonts and background-colours can make a difference. At the end of the day, you have to make sure that your page is visually appealing to your target demographic otherwise they’ll leave before taking a closer look at it.

Whatever you do, you should be testing your sales-pages and squeeze-pages. Check out Google Website Optimizer, for a free way to do some basic split testing. If you’re a WordPress user, there’s a review of the WP Split Test Optimizer plugin here, which will help you integrate Website Optimizer with your site. Finally, if you just want the overall best split testing solution available (complete with visual editor, super-easy setup and WordPress integration), I can warmly recommend Visual Website Optimizer.

Now go forth, test and prosper.

Cheers,

Market research is usually concerned with the demographics of a market, the amount and kind of competition you can expect, evaluation of what type of content and delivery the target demographic responds to etc.

For this article, I want to take the market research down a notch and present you a very simple, very basic research “method” that you should be applying on a regular basis as an online marketer. Especially if you are new to this game.

Competition “Spying”

To get a feeling for a market (or even Internet marketing in general), go and take a look at websites and sales-pages created by other Internet marketers.

How do you find those pages? If you are already selling products or affiliate offers yourself, simply find some more offers in your niche and run a search on the product names as well as some closely related keywords. Especially for the product names, most of the resulting pages will be pure marketing sites. For your “typical” money-makers like “weight loss”/”how to lose weight”, “dog training”, “make money online” etc. you’ll also find lots of pure money-sites.

If you haven’t decided on a niche yourself yet, just go to ClickBank or CBtrends and search through the product catalogue there. Not that ClickBank is the only or even the most important online marketplace, but it’s the most easily accessible and you can find lots of product names and keywords to search for within minutes.

If you’re a member of some CPA networks, apply the exact same method. Search for the product/offer names as well as closely related keywords and browse some of the results.

What to Look Out For

As you are browsing these sites and pages, here are some things to take note of:

• Types of Sites
  Are you encountering many squeeze pages or sales pages? How are they set up? Is there an order-button right on the page or do they squeeze your e-mail address first? Or are you encountering blogs and blog-style pages?
• Use of Media
  What are you finding on the resulting pages? Is it mostly text, test with images, audio or video? What’s the writing style like? How is the information in the video delivered?
• Visuals
  Are the sites visually appealing? How are they making use of colours and fonts? Are they simple or graphically elaborate?
• Incentives/Promises
  What is being offered on the pages? Are there free giveaways or other incentives? What’s being promised?

Once you’ve taken note of these things, simply ask yourself: Could you do the same? Or could you even do better?

Remember that many of the people behind those pages you’re looking at are making money from them. Of course, not every offer and every sales-page is profitable, but particularly the top listed pages in organic search results are almost guaranteed to turn some kind of a profit for the site owner.

The reason I mention this is because especially those new to online marketing can easily feel overwhelmed by it all and not know where to start. If you just take a close look at what other marketers are doing, you’ll soon realize that there’s no real magic to it. Many a successful sales-page is not particularly pretty and you don’t have to be a genius to create something similar, or superior, yourself.

Allright, now go forth and research! And once you’ve researched, build!

Cheers,

WordPress Websites Made Easy is the first free downloadable report made available on RichQuickReview. This is a very easy-to-follow guide on how to build your first website, completely from scratch, even if you’ve never done something like this before and can’t code (hint: neither can I).

Check out this page for more details and the download link!

Obviously, I’m very excited to finally publish this guide and I’d love to get some feedback from you!

Cheers,

There are countless ways of making money online and I cannot cover them all in this post. However, in terms of monetizing a website, there are four very common methods: Renting out ad-space, using AdSense or similar contextual advertising, promoting CPA offers and promoting products as an affiliate.

These four methods are arranged neatly along a sliding scale and understanding them makes for a good foundation of knowledge about website monetization in general.

So, let’s go right ahead and examine these four methods.

Qualification vs. Payout

The “sliding scale” mentioned in the title has to do with how much you get paid for each of the monetization methods in relation to how difficult it is to qualify for payment. Here’s an illustration:

On the x-axis you see the four major methods, renting out ad-space, AdSense, CPA offers and affiliate sales. The labels going from “minimal” to “high” along the y-axis have two meanings: On the one hand, they describe the potential payout and on the other hand, they describe how hard it is to make the payout happen.

If that doesn’t immediately make sense, don’t worry, I’ll go into a bit more detail on each method right away:

Renting out Ad-Space

If you visit a lot of blogs, you’ve probably come across several that have small 125×125 pixel boxes in the sidebar, displaying ads. Sometimes, some of the boxes read “Your Ad Here!” or something along those lines. That usually means that the owner of the blog is renting out this space on his site for advertisers. A product owner or company can call them up and arrange to have their ad placed in one of the boxes for a set amount of time and a monthly fee.

Once the ad is set up, the blog owner gets paid no matter how effective the advertisement is. The only pre-requisite for getting paid, is that the blog continues to be visited by many people, but the payment stays the same regardless of whether the blog’s visitors actually click on the ads and/or end up buying something from the advertiser.

In other words, there’s no obstacle that you need to get your visitors across, in order to make money. The downside is that you won’t get paid a lot for renting out ad-space and you need a hell of a lot of visitors to make this kind of monetization lucrative at all.

By the way: Not all banners are rented out ad-space. A banner could also contain an affiliate link to a sales-offer or a CPA offer.

AdSense

I’m sure you’ve seen many, many AdSense ads already. Whether you’ve clicked on any or not is a different story, but there’s no doubt that AdSense is a very popular way of monetizing a website. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s what AdSense ads usually look like:

Don’t bother clicking, by the way, it’s just an image.

AdSense is something you can plug into your site and it will automatically serve up these small text-ads that are relevant to your content. I.e. if you write something about cars, AdSense might display ads for car insurance offers.

Behind every AdSense ad, there’s a person or company paying for clicks. As an example, let’s say a visitor clicks on an insurace-related ad. The advertiser will pay Google a certain amount, for example $0.60 for that click. Google, in turn, will pay half of that to the person who’s site the ad was displayed on when it got the click.

Depending on the subject, these clicks can cost more or less and in turn, the ads on your site will not always net the same amount per click. Usually, you’ll get only a few cents per click, however.

You can easily make a few dollars by using AdSense on your site, even if you don’t get tons of visitors. You can potentially earn more per visitor compared to renting out ad-space, but the visitors need to actually click on the ads, otherwise you don’t get paid. So, the threshold is a bit higher, but you get more in return.

Affiliate Sales

Selling products as an affiliate is a very simple concept: You send visitors to a sales-page with your special affiliate link, and every time one of those visitors makes a purchase, you get a cut of the price. This is basically your reward for sending the visitor to that product-page and making the sale possible.

What’s very attractive about affiliate sales is that the payouts can be very high. You will typically get paid between 50% and 75% of the purchase price (at least for info-products and downloads). If you are promoting an expensive info-product, you can earn up to hundreds of dollars every time someone buys through your affiliate link.

The downside is that you only get paid whenever someone makes a purchase. In other words, the threshold is very high and you’ll never see 100% of the people clicking on your affiliate links ending up buying the product (0.5% to 3% is more realistic).

CPA

CPA stands for Cost Per Action and the reason I saved this one for last is that, in a sense, CPA represents the “sweet spot” between AdSense and affiliate sales.

As the name implies, with CPA, you get paid whenever a visitor performs a certain action. The action required is specified by the advertiser. For example, for many offers you can make a CPA commission, by sending a visitor to a page where they have to enter their e-mail address (in other words, they sign up to a mailing list). Other offers require the visitors to fill out a survey-form.

As you can imagine, it’s easier to get someone to supply an e-mail address than it is to get someone to make a purchase. The payouts for CPA offers are typically quite a bit higher than what you get for AdSense clicks – usually in the range of a few dollars.

To get back to the above graph, with CPA, the threshold isn’t very high – visitors have to do more than just click, but they don’t have to spend actual money – and the potential payout is quite good.

So, Which Is Best?

You can’t really say that any one of these monetization methods is better than the others. That’s also something I wanted to illustrate in that graph: The two factors of potential payout and qualification for payout usually balance each other out fairly well.

Whether you get thousands of clicks for a few cents each or send thousands of visitors to a sales-page and only a small percentage of them buy the product, you’ll end up with similar profits.

You can optimize any of these methods to make you lots of money and I’m sure there are people making a full-time living on each one of them. Ultimately, it’s a question of what suits you best.

What monetization method do you prefer? Which ones have you tried and which ones would you like to try? Let me know down in the comments!

Cheers,

Below, you find two short videos explaining everything you need to know about how to add affiliate banners to your WordPress blog. The first video covers the very basics and the second video goes into a little more detail, showing you how to cloak the banner-links, how to make your own banners (in case none are provided) and how to add a banner to the sidebar.

Part 1

Part 2

I hope you find them useful.

All the best,

P.S.: For good measure, here’s a banner:

This post covers the most important basics you need to know about backlinks. Getting backlinks to your web pages is an essential part of search engine optimization (particularly for Google). However, not all backlinks are equal. In this post, I describe the three things that matter most, in terms of backlinks. These three factors are: Amount, value and anchor text.

Note: If you prefer watching a video to reading, scroll down to see my video accompanying this post.

Here’s a short description explaining each of the three factors:

Amount

This first factor is the simplest. The higher the number of backlinks pointing to your site, the better this is for your ranking.

The thinking behind this is simply that every link to your site represents something like a “vote”. Someone linking to your site is basically saying: “Check this out, there’s something worth seeing there.”
And the more people are saying that there’s something worth seeing on your site, the better your site must be.

On a perfectly innocent Internet (what a weird concept), this would be all it takes to determine the rank of websites. But because there are many people with commercial interests online and it’s fairly easy to build links yourself, determining rank based solely on the amount of backlinks would just result in those pages whose owners have the most powerful link-spamming bots working for them to rank highest.

This is where the other two factors come in.

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Value

This is the most debated and most elusive factor determining website ranks. The value of any given backlink is dependent on many different variables and no one, apart from a few engineers at Google, knows exactly how link value is determined.

Here are some factors we can be pretty certain about:

• Page Authority
  A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. How the authority of the website is determined, is an entire subject of its own. You can assume that the more traffic a website is getting, the more people are participating on that website and the higher the Google PR of that website is, the more valuable a link from it will be.
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  As example, a link coming from a blog with thousands of subscribers and many people participating in the comments is more valuable than a link coming from a blog that hasn’t been updated in months and sees hardly any traffic.
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• Link Location
  Another important factor is where on the page the link is located. For example, a link placed in the footer of a website is less valuable than a link that is part of the main text on the page. The context, and number of other links on the same page also play a part.
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  For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable. However, if the link is one of only a few integrated in the text flow, then it carries a lot of value.
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• Link Distribution
  In a greater context, it also matters where your links are coming from. Hundreds of backlinks, all coming from the same domain are probably less valuable than just a handful of backlinks coming from many different sites.

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Anchor Text

Finally, the anchor text of your links is what determines which keywords you will rank for. For those who don’t know, the anchor text is the text you click on, to follow a link. As an example, here is a link with the anchor text reading “Killer Bunnies”: Killer Bunnies

The anchor text of your backlinks help the search engine spiders decide which keywords to rank your page for. Ideally, you want to get many backlinks that have your targeted keyword as their anchor text. However, you should avoid getting many backlinks that all have the identical anchor text, because this looks unnatural.

For the links you build yourself, I recommend using your keywords in the anchor text in most cases, related keywords in some cases, and something completely unrelated (e.g. “Click here”) in a few cases.

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Rule of Thumb

The rule of thumb for good backlink building is this: the more natural your backlink-profile looks, the better.

In other words, aim for diversity when you build backlinks. You can’t go wrong with links from different sites, using variations of anchor text and placed in different contexts on the sites.
Also, don’t shy away from getting links from low-authority sites. As long as it doesn’t take you too much time to get those links, even low value links are useful and make your overall link profile look more natural.

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Video

Here’s the video, where I say the same stuff I wrote in this post:

If you have any more questions about link-building, ask away in the comments section below!

Cheers,