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Aside from hitting the 6 month blogging mark, Google has finally given my blog sitelinks for my blog’s name: Mixed Market Arts.

While this may seem like a lame reason to post because there is nothing special about ranking for your website’s name, but it is a little more than that. Sitelinks are an automated feature of Google’s algorithm that gives a website an authority status for a specified keyword. This means that unless I do something extremely stupid, there is no reason I should ever stop ranking for that name. This also means that Google is now giving my domain, with my newly acquired pagerank 5, a good amount of trust in the eyes of the search engine, which should be later reflected across every page of the site. In simple terms, sitelinks are basically Google reminding you that you are slowly but surely growing into a ranking powerhouse, and that there is no denying that you are the only one who should rank for that term.

So now that I am an “authority listing” for Mixed Market Arts keyword, I will move onto “MixedMarketArts” and then later “Collin LaHay,” and ultimately, “Website Marketing Strategies.”

I just wanted to make a quick post thanking Geoff for writing a “free paid review” of my blog through a program he calls Reviewu. You can read his review here.

To follow up with that, I wanted to let you know that a few days ago my friend Richard over at the Link Building Bible Blog made a post about getting free backlinks from free reviews which is definitely worth the read, however I believe that CantGetRich.com should be added to the list.

I recommend reading Richards post, as well as taking a look at CantGetRich.com and especially his ReviewU section. For a blog with 162 RSS readers that is offering anyone free links and promotion, you would be stupid not to take up that offer.

Due to the nature of these posts, it may take awhile before Geoff gets around to reviewing you, but like people always say, you get what you pay for!

It is sort of embarrassing to admit, but for whatever reasons Google may have, they were ranking my LinkedIn.com profile #1 in google for a “Collin LaHay” search. For those of you who don’t know yet, Collin LaHay is my name.

It seemed odd that I had received a pagerank 5 and having an extreme amount of trust on my domain, that Google wouldn’t think I should rank the top result for my own name. It just goes to show that you should register your name, as well as your companies, and possibly even your competitors as users on many of the web2.0 websites because they are growing so fast and the search engines give them so much authority.

My LinkedIn profile had only 41 backlinks to it, while my blog has over 10,000, yet Google still considered it to be the most trustful result for my search.

Since it was my account, I was not too worried about it, but the thought that worried me was what if someone else registered the LinkedIn name “Collin LaHay” and was using the profile to make me look bad? Since LinkedIn.com doesn’t know who you are, you could potentially register some honest persons name and have a bunch of racist URL’s as your homepage, and Google would think that since the page was on LinkedIn.com, it should rank really high. Can you imagine what kind of annoyance this would be?

Well, thankfully my blog now ranks #1 for my name, but the lesson that YOU ALL should take out of this is to register your name on any big social media website that you can think of, even if you are not planning on using the website. You will thank me 6 months down the road before a competitor grabs your name and tries to blackmail you or make you look bad… A 30 minute fix now can save your reputation (or that of the businesses you are affiliated with) down the road.

Has anyone had any bad experiences like this one? It would be a very lame thing to do, but I know there are people out there who have tried it.

Every day I see a ton of blog posts and articles about complex techniques on what people think are great website marketing strategies. I see dozens of people selling (as well as dozens of people buying) useless ebooks about techniques that do not work, or even worse are the ebooks or people telling others about techniques that may have worked last year, but can actually be bad for your websites now.

I was inspired to write this post because I truly believe it is a must-read article for internet marketers and webmasters of all kinds. This article was written to help those who have been scammed into buying crummy ebooks and have lost a lot of money by putting their trust in the wrong people. I have done the same thing myself in the past. This post is also for those who are sick and tired of EVERY self-proclaimed link building expert who all tell you the same thing:

“Submit to directories, write articles, use social media, blah blah blah.”

No, we don’t want useless regirgitated content that you read 300 times before, we want easy advice to better ourselves and our websites, so that we can enjoy lots of long term targeted search engine traffic, and excellent free additions to our advertising income.

The 3 golden steps to website marketing success that will work for a website in any niche, with a marketer from any background, of any age, from anywhere in the world, are so simple that even if you blog about website marketing strategies like the blog you’re reading, to owning a website that sells guitars, these techniques will work for you.

Forget what everyone else has brainwashed into your mind and memorize these 3 steps to website marketing success.

Without further delay, here are the three steps to website marketing success.

1.) Content

Writing great unique content on a frequent basis is the number one way to build long term targeted search engine traffic. Google and most other large search engines feed upon content, especially if it is updated often. The more frequently you create new content, the more often the search engines will visit your site and crawl your pages. This in turn leads to the potential of immediate top rankings if there is a massive amount of new searches for a term (like when a disaster strikes such as a cyclone in Myanmar). Google wants the most recent news to appear above an old research paper about a cyclone that hit Myanmar five years ago. Frequently updated content also means that there will be more unique pages for the search engines to crawl, which means more internal links pointing to your strongest pages on your website. In simple terms, the more content that you create on a frequent basis, the higher the search engines will rank your site.

2.) Links

In addition to giving the search engines plenty of unique quality content to browse through, the largest factor that Google and other huge search engines have to base a sites quality from is how many other websites are linking to yours. The search engines count a link to your site much like a voting system. If two students are running for school president, and one of them has 200 friends voting for him and the opponent has only 180, by popular vote the person with the 200 friends would win, unless the kid with 180 friends had more of the official judges in his network. The same theory goes towards link building. Google pictures it as if there are 200 websites linking to SITE #1, and only 180 linking to SITE #2, chances are Google will rank the more popular site higher, unless SITE #2 has 180 very powerful related authority links and the 200 links are less related or filled with complete garbage/spam. In simple terms, after you are frequently adding quality unique content, the best thing you can do is to spend your time building links to your site and your articles/posts.

If you are ready to start building links, I recommend checking out my link building cookbook, which is the internet’s largest FREE unique one way link building resource. I guarantee you will see a 100% increase in your search engine traffic down the road from my FREE link building strategies, or I will personally quadruple your money back!

3.) Time

The internet is massive, and I would assume it is only a fraction of how large it will be in a few years. The search engines are not perfect, it takes a heck of a long time to index the entire web, which means your search engine optimization and your link building efforts are going to show slowly over a long period of time, and you shouldn’t expect results the first day.

I use to play a lot of chess when I was younger, and even had a personal coach who was a grandmaster at the game. After playing professionally for a few years, I started getting tired of having to do homework assignments for a hobby, and so I stopped taking lessons and ultimately quit playing. Even though I have not played a professional chess game in years, I still remember the last thing my coach Bill told me after I told him I didn’t want to play chess anymore because too much work was involved. The last words Bill said to me were…

“You just need to find the fun in hard work.”

While I never did find fun in chess homework, I have adapted Bill’s philosophy into my link building campaigns. Building links to your websites can be a lot of tedious work, but you just need to find the fun in it. I love working hard building links because it allows me the freedom of not having to go to a 9 to 5 job, work for someone I dislike, or be forced into doing work that doesn’t appeal to me.

In Conclusion,

The main thing I hope you take away from reading this is that there is no “secret formula” that you can only learn by buying someones product. The formula for success only involves writing great content and backing that up with an aggressive link building campaign. In the end, you will be receiving a lot of very targeted search engine traffic whom are known to have a better rate of buying your product, clicking your ads, or subscribing to your content.

It is a shame that most people are trying to scam others into buying products they don’t need, or selling strategies that don’t work. The truth is all listed here for free, so I hope you do me the favor of showing at least one other webmaster the truth about website marketing success by either telling him the 3 golden steps, by forwarding them to this page, or by helping promote this article.