If you have followed the advice I gave you in part one then by now your page should be set up correctly to fully take advantage of the targeted keywords that we chose. After all of the effort you put into making your page ready, you may be surprised to learn that your onpage optimization is actually only a very small part of getting a high page ranking in Google and other search engines.
So here comes the hard, yet critical, part. You must get other pages to link to you and they must be relevant pages to your page. Once again you will do a search for your keywords and go to the top sites listed. It is also quite helpful at this point to use Google Toolbar so that you can see the page rank of the sites you are visiting. You want to get sites with a decent page rank to agree to link to your site. This may prove difficult with higher ranked sites but should be attempted anyway because the potential reward is great. Not only will you reap visitors from their sites but having relevant high ranked sites linking to your site will boost your own Google page rank significantly. How well you accomplish this step can mean the difference between a wildly successful website and one that is lost in obscurity.
So what is the best way to request a link from another site? I’ve found that a polite and professionally worded email sometimes goes further than polite and personal. But you need to find what works for you. Be prepared to have to include a link to their website in almost every case. If you do manage to get someone to link to your website without providing a reciprocal link then so much the better for you because one way links are more valuable for page rank than reciprocal links.
A note about AdWords: I said in part one that we were only going to be using AdWords’ keyword tool. However, if your website is selling a product you may very well find it necessary to pay for text ads. Crafting ads that produce high click through rates is a science unto itself and outside of the realm of this particularly blog post. If you are not selling a product it is usually a waste of money to pay for advertising. The one exception to this rule is if the ads that are showing on your site have a much higher payout than what you spend to advertise your site elsewhere. Even then it is risky and you would typically want to look at the range of receiving 8 to 10 times per click more than you are spending per click. The reason for this is that every time someone clicks on an ad to come to your site, that is guaranteed money you are spending but you have no guarantee that they are going to click on an ad once they are on your site. I should note that statistically people who click on text ads to get to a page are more likely to click on another ad to navigate away from a site. Still this is risky business and should only bet attempted on a trial basis and not with a “set it and forget it” mindset.
There are entire books dedicated to the subject of search engine optimization and I’m sure that there are a few nuggets of good information to be had in them that I have not covered here. If you do follow the instructions in both posts on the subject however then for most people there should be little need to purchase additional resources. I hope this was helpful for the fledgling web entrepreneurs out there.