SEO Expert's Link Building Tips

If you want your business site to be ranked high on the search engines results pages you have to do link building efforts in order to achieve this purpose. Link building is one SEO effort recognized as very effective for search engine's ranking purposes.

Link building is widely accepted to be an essential part of SEO because with more websites linking to you, you will be considered credible and can get that recognition of high esteem given by peers in your field. With the credibility that you get, you will be given a high ranking in the search engines which will give you more opportunities of getting higher traffic coming to your site.

Knowing what type of links are important to your ranking objectives are also likewise necessary because not all links are valuable and accepted more by the search engines, will thus be the objective and given more focus on.

Webmasters who are experts in SEO link building know this very well and they have strategies to make link building more effective. Some SEO expert views of link building are the following:

The first expert advice is to find those websites closely related to your niche field. Links coming from this relevant website can be effective in your ranking objective compared to those with no relevance at all.

The next thing that you can do after finding this relevant site is to allow them to put a link in your website. Being relevant, this website may also allow your link to be included in their site.

Articles are considered important in building links as long as these are relevant to your site and also the products that you offer. This can be of much help to your SEO strategies because it is free.

Blogs are also effective in link building and make information be of much help to users. Include links in your blogs that will lead viewers to your website.

Be sure that you submit these articles and blogs to popular and high ranked article and blog directories in the web. These directories have many users and followers and you may have great opportunities of getting links from them.

Start using social media in your link building efforts because of the popularity of social sites these days. You may have great opportunities of getting links from followers of social networking sites.

At this time, all those involved in internet marketing and SEO for ranking of websites know very well the importance of link building in ranking their sites for the keywords they want to rank for. Implementing the strategies mentioned will be effective in your link building and ranking objectives.

Search Engine Optimization - A Headstart

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to ensure that it ranks highly on search engines, this obviously gives you greater exposure to more traffic and ultimately will lead to more visits to your website. There is no secret technique to get on the first page, the same fundamentals apply today just as they did in previous years, good keyword research, onsite SEO, fast loading, quality link building, and unique content.

SEO has two major factors to consider: On Page SEO and off Page SEO.

In On Page SEO the content of the website is most important and it should be quality assured and original. Always write unique and original content for your website. If you are not efficient in content writing then hire somebody who is. Keywords are extremely important as well, ideally your domain name should be relevant and include a keyword or keyphrase. If possible make sure that you include keywords in your individual page titles and on every page (ideally in the first and last sentence). Understand that you must not simply stuff in as many keywords as you can, the content needs to remain relevant and make sense. Videos, particularly those from YouTube sit very favourably with search engines, particularly Google. (After all Google own YouTube.) You should have at least one relevant video, ideally on your home page.

Off Page SEO takes a long time to complete and it is an ongoing process. Perhaps the most important off page factor is acquiring back links for the website. As with the keywords the links must be relevant and to reputable sites that the search engines view favorably. If your site has thousands of links to poor quality sites just for the sake of it, this will count against you. As Google always says, write for visitors not for the search engines. Submit the website in search engine friendly directories, social bookmarking, classified ads submissions, submitting websites in engines, article submissions etc. etc. Something to definitely stay away from is buying links through link market sites. These domains have a bad record with search engines and have been penalized seeing as their services are seen as a threat to Google's policy about natural, relevant inbound links.

Link building: One direction links have a stronger SEO value because they are considered more natural. Acquiring one gateway website links to your blog from pages which display relevant text and also have extreme specific webpage rank are certain to give you a boost in search engine rankings.

You have to get involved with social sites and the various methods that make it quicker to share. Place icons, or utilize plugins, offering links for sharing to Facebook, YouTube and also Twitter. Create Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages that link directly to your site. Social networking has now become a major factor in SEO.

Search engine optimization these days is very challenging. There's a lot of competition to consider and you have to also be more prepared when it comes to changing your content. Good content is the foundation of good SEO. You might use the right keywords. You may follow the correct keyword density. But if you end up making irrelevant, awkward content, you just might have readers slowly pulling away from your site. Make sure that what you write is not just good but also highly relevant among your audience. Keep it simple and understandable as well. These are clearly just the basics, good SEO is a science in itself and it takes time, so be patient and keep at it, the benefits of a highly ranking website are obvious and well worth the extra effort.

A fantastic tool I use to take all the guesswork out of it (Seopressor basically guides you step by step, analyses your website, and tells you what key components of your SEO strategy are missing.)

SEO Tip: Use YouTube As A Keyword Tool

Other than being successful in the field of SEO as a venue for getting more site traffic through multimedia, YouTube now gives SEO a new advantage. That advantage is through keyword research.

You can actually use YouTube as your keyword tool for selecting target keywords for different sites. It can help you find relevant data of topics and keywords that you may not be aware of.

It is easily accessible and is free compared to other software and applications that offer the same service. The best feature of YouTube, making it better from other tools, is that Google prompts its users to give a description of the topic which these searchers are looking for.

Titles, tags, and explanations make it easier for the whole system to look for a particular content or video. This can give you a lot of information about the topic that can be very valuable to the reader.

Along with the data stated on descriptions, there also several related searches or videos that will appear on the right side of the page. You can easily click on these videos to give you more information.

From the specific keyword search alone that you type into YouTube, you can get a lot of searches. You get more related searches from related keywords and topics that will display on their searches.

Take for example you are searching on how-to or do-it-yourself videos. When you search them, it gives you several videos that contain these keywords and that could be a whole lot of searches right there.

When you are done scanning through all those how-to videos, you can get ideas on which are really big hits and you can also jot down the ideas on the video and the description box to help you. After jotting them down, you can search further on other keyword targeting tools of your choice which ones are the best keywords for your content.

The tags on these videos can also be your source of information for great keywords. So you might as well jot them down too.

You can easily use this together with other keyword tools. The important thing is you know where to start from; you know which words will most likely get a good audience.

YouTube is a worldwide phenomenon and with your searches you can get information from a wider audience which you can narrow down with other keyword tools that will give you a more specific search of which keywords you should target for search engine rankings.

So it's safe to say that YouTube does not only enable you to share informative videos to your audience. You can also use this as a tool to know what your audience is interested in the most.

What Is Anchor Text and How to Use Anchor Text to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Have you ever read text on the internet and along the way came across clickable words which when you clicked on them led you to another webpage, blog etc? These words are converted into anchor text by the author and usually show up as being hyperlinked. The procedure is to highlight a word or group of words and then insert a link or by means of inserting simple HTML code to convert specific words into hyperlinked text.
The reason for creating hyperlinked text is to give readers an idea regarding the content matter that they expect to find if they decide to click on the anchor text. In this manner, anchor text is a neat way of allowing the reader to go to another site without displaying the site's URL (which might also be long and unsightly and might give no indication of its content). Another reason is that you might feel that the information on a particular site will be beneficial to your readers as it complements, reinforces or could be used as a reference for your own content. Finally, linking to other content by means of anchor text could help readers understand a certain topic or sub topic better instead of providing an explanation yourself.
The words chosen to be your anchor text should be targeted keywords common to your content and the external content you wish to link to. Avoid the use of generic words such as "click here." For example, if your main content is about dogs and you have a paragraph related to dog training, then you would use "dog training" as keywords and other keyword phrases containing "dog training" within your paragraph to link to another source describing dog training.
Anchor text can boost your search engine rankings as follows:
1. When linking your internal pages within your site, refer to your pages by using keywords that are descriptive of the page you are linking to.
2. Designated text containing external links to link to other websites or blogs or forums etc should be indicative of the content on the pages you are linking to.
3. When linking to your home page or internal pages from external sources such as articles and other sites, refer to them by using meaningful keywords. Moreover, be creative in your choice of keywords. Do not just repeat the same keywords over and over again.
4. If you are asking webmasters to give you links to your site, provide them with the HTML code to control the anchor text they display on their respective sites.
5. In all cases, make sure the anchor text makes human reading sense and not just insert phrases that are not sensible or unreadable.
Boosting your search engine rankings is very important for your website, if it is not to remain buried in search engine results. Anchor text is a simple yet very effective way of doing so and will really help your site achieve increased search engine visibility.

Common SEO Mistakes Revealed And What You Should Do

Setting up a website for the first time and building one from scratch may not be so easy. There are SEO rules to follow so your site would not end up as a futile attempt despite using hard work trying to build content. Some people spent years trying to build a website hoping to earn from the AdSense camp. However, it takes a little more than just hard work. It takes passion to do the right thing, know the right thing and setup the absolute right thing.
An example is shown here about how a site can be built critically wrong from the beginning. Say if you install WordPress or other blogging tools within a physical folder on the root level on your site, it would cause terrible search engine confusions. This way, your site would probably be seen as two separate sites causing difficulties for the search engines to crawl your site. This renders your domain unable to earn natural and correct incoming links. The search engines would identify physical installation folders as separate sites altogether and hence would not be able to record the correct number of sites linking in. When your site has not enough incoming links, Google will not PR your site. Without PR, it is difficult to earn your site massive traffic through searches.
You should have at least WordPress or other blogging tools properly installed. It is the way to easily manage your site allowing you to easily publish content and install useful plugins for free. Know that if you are going to use flat files on your site, you would not be able to handle the amount of work required to make every piece of the puzzle fit together. There are things like RSS feeds, posts, categories, analytics and etc. that you would be required to look into as the new dynamics in today's media rich websites. Without them, your site will not go very far.
So install WordPress or other similar blogging tools at the root level. Check for some of the coolest plugins available and install them for your site; most of these plugins are contributions of the generous WWW community. So, if it is possible, I think it is great to make a heartfelt donation to their contributors.Do not overlook the importance of these metatags. See them as the way people may address you as the person you are. If you are Mr. Brown, would you want others to know you as table lamp? Same with your posts as the search engines identify your pages by first looking at your title tags, descriptions and keywords.
After that, they will check your page content against what you placed within those tags, if they do not match, you get the idea; Google or other search engines may render your site as having less relevant content. For example, if your title tag states "Happy hamsters at home", however your content is about sports cars, what do you think the search engine algorithms would identify your page as? It probably would write off that page and give your site a very low ranking. Overall, the search engines do summarize the overall content of your site. This is why if your topics are set wide apart, it may be difficult for the search engines to rank your page according to your domain categorizations based on your niche of specialty.

A Guide For The Best Practices In SEO

From the time of its conception up to present, SEO practices have been evolving; adapting to trends and changes in the movement of the market. This continues on and on as long as the market remains dynamic.

SEO best practices comprise of secure strategies in building a constant and natural traffic to your site on a long term basis. You can group them according to: (1) expertise; (2) architecture; (3) implementation; and lastly, (4) marketing or link building.

Here is a guide for the best practices in SEO:

Expertise - you need to master the content of your site to get a steady and growing stream of interested visitors. You need to offer your readers something very valuable to read and possibly link to. An example of this would be a free report or a short manual.

You can write high quality articles that concentrate on your field of expertise. Create something that's unique, interesting and valuable to your followers.

The information that you share can be a major source of information and news which can be linked to different websites. Always aim for high quality content that will make you newsworthy.

Build trust and rapport among your readers by giving them good content. This is stronger than just publishing content where other sites can link to.

Architecture - this creates the structure and purpose of your website. The information on your website should follow a certain structure in order for it to be strong even through tough competition.

Keyword mapping is very essential to establish your information architecture. Your ranking also relies on the keyword and its placement on your website.

You can use tools to map out and search for target keywords. You should be able to map out your keywords not only on one of your web pages but throughout your website in a way that the pages coordinate very well with each other.

Also design your website that will make it easy for your readers to navigate through the whole website.

Implementation - you have to meet the needs imposed by search engines.

You have to make sure that navigation is easy and purposeful and that it can be crawled by using text links. Also, maximize the number of clicks to important content of your website by putting only the highly relevant ones.

Pages rich in SEO content should be implemented for search engines to crawl. You should also include link related content and meta description tags to your site.

Marketing - link building is very much important to get people to advertise you on their site and vice versa. Getting people to link to yours is very essential in getting more people to frequent your page.

Link building is not randomly asking various sites to link to yours and vice versa. You should link only to sites that are highly relevant.

5 Questions to Ask Your Web Designer About SEO

I dug around a little recently because I wanted to see how many small time web designers really knew how to optimize websites for search engines. (By small time I don't mean people less talented than large firms, but really just free lancers and localized firms - because some local people I found put some of the large firms to shame when it comes to talent.)
After some research, I found that a few in different parts of the country do. But a lot don't. In fact, a lot seem to think that search hasn't changed much since 1998. This was very disappointing to me because I've been very impressed at the level of quality and affordability some of these small firms have when it comes to web design, but then they just fall short when it comes to search.
The fact is, SEO and web design are not the same thing. It's normal to assume that they are; you go to a nice looking website and you immediately imagine that it's bound to be more popular over the long term than a site that looks horrible - like the Druge Report. The two require different skillsets and it's not surprising that some of the best web designers don't have a clue about search and some of the most talented marketers get freaked out when they see HTML. If you want to make sure your site is visible online, here are some questions (and answers) that you can ask the person running your website.

1. What code do you use?
Non technical people probably don't know much about code. That's ok. Here's a quick break down. EzineArticles is stored on a computer called a server that's connected to the internet. When you access the site, you use an internet browser which is referred to as a client. The client submits a request to the server which serves up files. Some of these files are interpreted and produced by the server, while others are manipulated by the client. Both the browser and the server determine what's displayed on your screen.
When a search engine crawls EzineArticles, it doesn't use a browser. Any files that are executed on the client's side aren't run. It's as if they don't exist to Google. A lot of websites are coded using mainly client side scripts - JavaScript and Flash. Javascript is run by the browser, Flash is run by an additional program you have to download. A lot of images can be a problem too. Though these images are accessed and visible to search engines, search bots only rely on text to make sense of what they're seeing. I've seen entire sites built using image files; it makes me cringe.
Your web designer should be using HTML, PHP, or a language that outputs static text documents whenever they're accessed on the server. If they're not, your website can't be optimized for search.

2. Will you submit my site to search engines?
There are some services that charge you a nice sum of money to submit to search engines. Some promise submission to Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Others promise submission to "200+ search engines." More still say they'll submit your site multiple times.
Don't pay someone to submit your site to a search engine. If anyone highlights search submission as a featured service, it should be a sign that you shouldn't depend on that person for SEO. They might be a great web designer, but search marketer they are not. Search engine submissions may have worked several years ago, but these days it doesn't matter. My website was listed in major search engines without any submission on my end because other sites linked to mine. Search engines followed those links, then indexed my content.

3. What do you charge for robots.txt and XML sitemaps?
I've seen services that charge you to generate robots.txt and XML sitemaps. I look more favorably on them than submission services because these files do you some good. Robots.txt is a file named robots.txt that's placed in the home directory of your website (so eBay has one at http://www.ebay.com/robots.txt) that tells search engines what to index on your site. They're a good way for blocking out sensitive directories and areas you don't want people to have access to. XML Sitemaps are text documents formatted in XML (Extensible Markup Language), a semantically tagged language for documents. They are nothing more than long lists of pages on your site.
Most programs used to create websites these days automatically generate a robots.txt file for you and have easy to add extensions for XML sitemaps. If for some reason you don't get either right off the bat, you can find sites online that will generate both for free.
However, neither should be relied on as a primary SEO strategy. All these documents do is direct search engines to either index or not index individual pieces of content. Though a sitemap verified with Google, Yahoo, or Bing will trigger faster updates of search indexes, it doesn't do much to raise your individual standing on results pages. If someone tries to sell you these files as an SEO strategy, you should be a little concerned.

4. What standards do you follow?
A web designer worth their salt will be able to answer this one without a problem. Your solid designer will tell you they have valid CSS (usually version 2) and some kind of valid HTML. The W3C, or the World Wide Web Consortium, is an organization of people who discuss best practices for information on the web. They've come up with recommendations/standards for how HTML (text) and CSS (styles) should be formatted. At the very least you want a standards compliant designer because a bunch of jumbled code can actually confuse search engines or slow them down. Being standards compliant will reduce the time it takes to load your page and reduce the risk that your page will appear funky on other browsers. Both of those are good for retaining visitors and page speed will help your rankings.

5. What's your price structure for SEO?
This is important. If someone charges you a flat fee for SEO work, don't pay it! SEO takes time. It's not something that can be set up and left to run itself. You need to monitor trends, publish content, generate links from other sites, perform keyword research, and try to increase site performance. It's a process that's suitable for a full time employee or a consultant you pay by the hour to accomplish specific goals. There are too many programs out there that promise you a number one spot on Google for some one time fee. These are scams and the people who run them are lying to you.
More generally speaking, and this (like some of these other issues) extends beyond just web designers, anyone promising you some secret way to game the system or a shortcut to success is lying to you. If there really was a secret way to beat search engines and this person actually found it, they wouldn't tell you. Whatever you'd pay them for that knowledge is minuscule compared to the amount of money they could make exploiting the secret on their own.
Most people mean well. Depending on how long they've been in business, people who make these mistakes probably assume they're offering legitimately helpful services. Make sure you research alternatives before settling with anybody.