If you own an Ecommerce site and don’t know where to begin on the SEO go through this check list. In total, it’ll cost less than $500.

1. Signup with all related forums. Put your site in the footer links and go through answering product related questions on a weekly basis.

2. Create a free OSCommerce and Zencart template related to your parent niche (if you sell CDs make a music template), insert your link on it and distribute it on template
directories and their repositories.

3. Create an articles section on your site and put in a form allowing people to submit articles. Email hobby blogs in your niche asking to use some of their particularly good posts in exchange for a link back in the article. This will make them aware of your site and they might even link to you in future posts when talking about a particular product.

4. Steal your competitors articles and product reviews and do article distribution.

5. Create a blog on the site and give out manufacturer coupon codes regularly. This will sometimes help with getting negative results. Post those coupons on item #1.

6. Put all your products in Google Products (froogle/base). This will sometimes help with getting negative results.

7. Browse Google Products for small ecom sites with no reviews and similar products and link exchange on a separate automated link exchange script on a separate page.

8. Make sure you optimize your onsite seo. I assume you know how to do this.

9. Download, convert to html, and attach all the product manuals to each individual product. Link back to the product on each manual. This will give you more pages for indexing and catch a lot more longtail keywords.

10. Spam the fuck out of Yahoo answers and similar.

11. Directory submit! It may not work well for other sites of yours but ecommerce sites are almost always welcome in directories.

12. Customize a nifty and unique toy style item with your logo on it and mail it to the most popular bloggers in your niche. Shirts and hats also work well.

13. If you have access to the products get a webcam and pretend to be a vlogger. Review the products and post them on all the major video sites.

14. Create autoblogs and link wheels.

There’s more but I think that’ll keep you busy enough for now

EDIT:
There was some confusion in the comments on what I meant by “Negative Results”
“negative results” or “negative rankings” are the results inside of the regular results that Google puts in.
Such as:
Video Results
Image Results
News Results
Product Results
Blog Results
They used to always appear above the regular results so we call them negative rankings because they’re less than #1. Now they tend to go between random positions. This term may change the older this article gets.

The Problem
Your site is holding a particular rank and a Wikipedia page is ranked right above it. The specific ranks don’t particularly matter, but much like Hillary Clinton in the primaries you can’t possibly live being beaten like that. You have to drop the Wikipage down a notch and you have to continue moving up.

The Simple Solution
The simplicity of this tactic actually depends very heavily on the Wikipedia entry. Either way they’re all very beatable, but some are easier than others. In fact as mentioned I just ran into this problem recently and I managed to knock the competitive Wikipage entirely out of the top 20 in just two days using these steps. First you need to understand why the Wikipage ranks. Most of these pages rank for 3 reasons.

1) The domain authority of Wikipedia.org.

2) Innerlinking amongst other Wikipedia entries boosting the page’s value. <- Particularly the *See Also’s

3) Inbound links from most typically blogs and forums. <- An observant person would not only notice the high percentage of links from blogs/forums in contrast to other types of links but a strong lack of sitewide links from any of those sites.

You obviously can’t do anything about the domain authority of Wikipedia.org but understand that it’s pages are like a tripod; If you knock out one of the legs the whole thing falls (pun). Well now that you understand why it’s there right up above you like a towering fugly friend of the girl you’re trying to hit on the solution becomes obvious. Knock out reasons two and three.

Steps
1) Using your favorite link analysis tool (I prefer the simplistic Yahoo Site Explorer) find all the pages that link to the particular wikipedia entry that come from the wikipedia.org domain.

2) Go to each listing and find the reference to the offending Wikipage. You’ll find most of them in the See Also section or linked throughout the article. This is where the simplicity that I was talking about before comes into play. Listings such as “Flash Games” or “Election News” are easier because they’re so irrelevant. When people are searching Google for terms such as these they’re obviously wanting to find actual flash games or election news, not some faggy Wikipedia page saying what they are. The same concept applies to other Wikipages linking to them. Just because the author put the text Cat Food in the article or the See Also doesn’t mean its a relevant reference to the subject matter.

3) SLOWLY remove nearly all those bitches! Be sure to leave a good convincing reason for the removal on the editing reason. Remove as many as possible but strictly limit yourself. I understand Blue Hatters have a tendency to overdo things but you’re just going to fuck yourself if you quickly go through each and every reference and mass delete them. If you don’t know how many you should remove, then keep it to no more than 1-2 a day. Remove the references with the highest pagerank first if you got a ranking emergency and switch IPs between each one. This will either knock out one of it’s legs or at least cripple the leg a bit. Which leaves you with my match and exceed philosophy.

4) Find all the blogs and forums that link to that Wikipage and go drop a link in as many of them as you can. Match and exceed. I’m not going to dive into the nofollow talk on this one or talk about the benefits of links via blog comments. Just realize your goal in this instance isn’t to get more links it’s to get your link on the same pages that link to the Wikipage. As mentioned above you’ll be dealing mostly with blogs and forums, you’re in the same niche as the topics they’re talking about obviously and you probably won’t have any sitewide links to deal with so you won’t have to go through any link begging pains.

5) Try to drop your link into the article. This is common sense.

Side Note
Wikipedia’s domain authority isn’t something Ý0µ should be entirely worried abouṪ. They’re site and µrl structure actually ßÊcomes favorable to help deaden some of the heightening factors.

OH FYI! There is now a Printer Friendly link on every post on Blue Hat by popular demand

From Adsenser

I loved your SEO empire post.
But I was wondering how much effect does a lot of links from a lot of indexed pages from the same domain have?
I always thought that the search engines looked mainly at the number of different domain linking to you.
Can you give some more info on this?
Or do you use these pages to link to a lot of different domains?

This is a fantastic opener for a conversation on sitewide outbound links affects on other sites as well as the site itself. Which has been long debated but never cleared up, not because its too complicated just because theres so many myths its hard to work the fact from the fiction. To be clear in my answer I’m going to refer to the site giving the link as the “host site” and the site receiving the link as the “target site.” Just so I don’t have to play around with too much terminology.

The entire explanation of why sitewide links, main page links, subpage links, and reciprocal links work is based off a simple SEO law called Diminishing Values. It basically states that for every link whether it be recipricol, innerlink, or outbound link there is some form of consequence. Also, for every inbound link, innerlink accepted or reciprocal link there is a benefit.

SEO Law of Diminishing Values
Diminishing Values = sum(benefits) > sum(consequences)

The need for the sum of the benefits to be greater than the sum of the consequences is essential because, as mentioned in my SEO Empire post there can’t be a negative relevancy for a site in relationship to a term. For example lets take the niche of cars. There’s a theoretical mass of car blogs. For the sake of the example we’ll say there are several thousand blogs on the subject of cars. Something in the industry happens that stirs all the bloggers such as SEMA having a car show or something. So all these car blogs blog about SEMA’s new car show coming out and give it a link. If these outbound links caused a consequence greater or equal to the valued benefit given to SEMA than all these blogs would drop in value as per the topic, cars. Thus the mass affect would be that of a negative relevancy, therefore sites with no relevancy but contain topic links would by all theory rank higher than the general census of on topic sites.

So the notion of an outbound link diminishing your sites value in equal proportion is just complete bubkiss and obviously not the way things actually work. Even if it was true and there was a compensation for on site SEO when an event in a niche happens the site hosting the event wouldn’t just rise in the rankings it would propel everyone else downwards causing more turbulence in the SERPS than what happens in actuality with just their site rising. It’s just simple SEO Theory 101, but sadly a lot of people believe it. There’s also a lot of sites that absolutely won’t link to any sites within their topic in fear that their rankings will suddenly plummet the moment they do. They’re under the greedy impression that they’re somehow hording their link value and that is in some way benefiting them. So with the assumption that an outbound link gives much more value to its target than it diminishes from its host everything in a sense balances out and outbound links become much less scary. This of course in no way says that the consequence to the host is a diminishment of any sort. It’s entire consequence could be 0 or as a lot of other people believe +X (some people think on topic outbound links actually adds to your sites relevancy). I haven’t personally seen one of my sites go up in rank after adding an outbound link but I’m open to the idea or to the future of the concept being reality.

I Practice What I Preach
The Law of Diminishing Values is one of the reasons why BlueHatSEO is one of the only SEO blogs that has all dofollow comments as well as top commentators plugin on every page. Your comments will not hurt my rankings..I’ll say that one more time Your comments will not hurt my rankings. Whewww I feel better

Back To The Question
Before we get into the meat of the question we’ll take a small scale example that we should all know the answer to.
Q: If a host site writes an automated link exchange script that automatically does thousands of link exchanges and puts those links on a single subpage and all the target sites also have their link exchange page setup the same way on a subpage. Will the host site gain in value?

A: I’ll tell you straight up from personal experience. Yes it does. It’s simple to test if you don’t believe me go for it yourself

Now we’ll move up to a much larger scale with a specific on topic example using sitewide links.
Q: If you own two 100k+ page lyric sites with lots of inbound links and very good indexing ratios, will putting a sitewide link to the other site on both raise both in value or keep them both the same?

A: Also from my personal experience, yes both will not only raise in value but they will skyrocket in value by in the upwards of 50% which can result in much higher rankings. Likewise this example can be done with any niche and any two large sites. Cross promote them with sitewide links between the two and see what happens. The results shouldn’t be surprising.

Now, on the large scale to the meat of the question.
Q: If these two lyrics site cross compared all their inbound links from other sites and managed to get all the sites that link to lyric site A to also link to lyric site B to the point at which each increased in links by 100k (same as the number of increased links would of been with a sitewide link between the two) would both sites increase in value more-so than if they did the sitewide link instead?

A: Yes absolutely. This is a bit harder to test, but if you’ve been building an SEO Empire and each site’s inbound links are from your own sites than it becomes quite a bit easier to test and I’m certain you’ll find the results the same as I did.

Conclusion
On a 1:1 ratio on a generalized population of relevant links vs non-relevant inbound links from separate domains/sites are still more effective than a sidewide link of the same magnitude. However! A sitewide link does benefit both sites to a very high degree. Just not to the degree that lots of other sites can accomplish.

Sorry that question took so long to answer. I didn’t just want to give you a blank and blunt answer. I wanted to actually answer it with logic and a reasoning that hopefully leads to an understanding of the ever so important WHY.