The Missing Link - 4 Crucial Types of Backlinks

oogle Webmaster Tools says that in order to gain Page Rank (a way of gaging website authority, PR is gaged from 0-10, 10 being highest) you should have high quality sites linking to yours, which is termed a backlink. A backlink is simply a link to your website from another website.

There are several types of link building strategies and all of them should be utilized to optimize your sites for the search engines which in turn will increase our traffic, so build links everyday

1. Relevant/Reciprocal Link Exchange

Reciprocal links are where you exchange links with sites that are relevant to yours. AS far as Google is concerned relevance equals quality as far as a backlink is concerned.

There are some webmasters who exchange links with any and all sites. But if you have a website about weight loss, how helpful is it for your visitors to see a link to a car auction site? This is a weak link and a useless waste of time and looks lame on your website! Build links for your visitors and not for ranks and your site will be rewarded.

The two most important factors in finding reciprocal link exchange partners are relevance and Page Rank, relevance being first important and page rank second. If you can get both then that's great. If you're site is new higher rank pages are hard to get, so don't worry about it and just look for relevance.

Where you place links on your site is important and can be done in several ways. While many still use a links page, this method is not the best option. These days search engines place less value on links pages and when you think about it, how good is a links page for your site and its visitors?

A better option is to place your links and get the reciprocal site to place links as hyperlinks within the content on your site with relevant anchor keywords. This method looks better, provides a natural flow of links and gets more link juice from the search engines and especially Google.

The key to link building on your sites is to make the link look like a side effect and not the end goal.

2. One Way Links

A one-way link is where you get a link to your site from another site without having to place a link back. Of course, one-way links hold the most juice with search engines.

When your site is new it is unlikely that you will get relevant high PR sites to give you a one-way link, unless of course you provide great content or a link bait (explained below).

Natural One-Way Link Building through Content

One of the best ways to get one way links is the natural link method which can be obtained by posting fresh original content on your sites that is so good it makes other websites want to link to it. Good content, which should all ready be a first priority for your visitors and visitor retention, will facilitate natural one-way links.

Link Bait

Another great way to build one way backlinks is to use a link bait on your site. This is the method of choice to get get higher page rank sites to link to lower page rank sites. Link Bait is basically any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. These link baits could be, information hooks, news hooks, humor hooks, tools hooks like a widget or some helpful tool that other sites can use.

Article Marketing and submitting your sites to Internet Directories are very effective ways to get one-way links.

3. 3-Way Links

3-ways: Site A points to Site B and Site B points to Site C and Site C points back to Site A. The point is to try to make reciprocals look like one-ways, this method really doesn't have much value and I don't recommend it.

4. Outbound Links

Outbound links are the websites you link to or site as references within content. Whatever your niche there authority and other helpful sites for your visitors and and those are the sites that you want to link to.

Some webmasters are so afraid of losing traffic or giving up their link juice that you hardly ever see outbound links on their sites, this is a big mistake.

Outbound links are a necessary part of establishing your authority within your niche and a vital part of your Internet Marketing efforts. They are a vital part of any website/blog and their existence or non-existence can determine whether high-authority, high page rank sites would ever link to you, mainly because if you are not consistently seeking out new information and intelligence within your niche and citing those sources they will view your website as stale and out of date.

Take a look at the authority sites within your niche, they all have outbound links and references. It is impossible to provide really useful information without offering other sites that can benefit your visitors.

In conclusion, it is crucial for any Internet Marketing Campaign to build links everyday. This is the main way that Google can establish authority, relevance and importance to your websites and is at the center of the search engine optimization strategy.
Author: JR Lang

SEO Web Design Techniques to Optimize your Website

It takes more than wishful thinking in order to land one of your pages in the top 10 of Google, but once you understand the criteria of what is involved, you can increase the likelihood for each of your pages if you start with the goal in mind.

Rankings are based on algorithms, therefore if you are operating within the guidelines of the formula, certain results are produced consistently as a by-product of what comprises your pages.

Outlined below are a few examples of Seo Web Design including clearly defined on-page SEO principles known for producing top 10 results. The first component to ranking in the top 10 results in major search engines is:

Meta Tag Optimization:

Keyword stuffing (adding all of your keywords in the title, description and on the page) is a thing of the past. Not only will it blatantly get your red flagged from search engines, the human readers will have such a difficult time attempting to get the gist of your topic, you may as well say "please click the back button and leave my site" to save them the hassle.

Don't stuff your keywords in the meta tags, keep your title on topic and short and sweet succinct title always works better than trying to stuff every possible keyword under the sun in one long / truncated title.

There is nothing more unattractive than words getting cut off in mid sentence, or even worse having to look at the dreaded pipes | keyword stuffing | stuffing even more keywords | even more ridiculous keyword stuffing, etc. No name calling here, but if you are using still using this technique for search engine optimization, it's time to cut the mullet and move into 2007 where things have changed a bit and people actually click on the title based on the emotional response they receive from the message.

In this way, it's not always having to be first on the page that matters (despite popular opinion), it's who's title is the most compelling that gets the click.

The Description Tag:

Depending on the strength of your website, you can rank for a keyword that is (a) in the title of the page (b) on your pages (in the body text or links) or (c) in the description tag alone. It's more about the overall combination of these on-page factors that determine the ranking potential within each search engine, as they all have their own criteria for awarding relevance and relative positioning when a query is executed.

Your web page description should be concise and try to use actual search terms in your description (something most SEO companies won't divulge). Any SEO worth their salt knows, that if you want to rank for a specific term, having the "exact match form" of that key phrase in your title and description increases your ranking potential for that term.

Keep the keywords with a higher priority closer to the front of the sentence and try not to go over 250 characters. This keeps your pages focused as well as makes each of the words more potent for ranking. The more words you use, the less potent they become. So once again, the short and sweet version works wonders for a two-fold purpose (1) the visitor, because it indicates to them what they can expect once they arrive and (2) the web bots and search engine spiders, that place a great deal of emphasis on the words in the title or in description data.

Optimizing your Hyper links:

First of all a hyper link for those who are unfamiliar with the term is a fancy way to say link that includes the URL (universal resource locater) otherwise known as website or web address inside. Links can be used for internal purposes (within your site otherwise known as navigation i.e. link architecture) or for external purposes such as linking to another website you enjoy or endorse.

If the links are leaving you website and going to another site they are considered forward links or if your website receives a link from another site they are called back links. In either capacity the way that the strength of a link is assessed is from the anchor text or text comprising the link states. So, instead of using click here for a forward link an optimized version of that would contain a keyword which carries tremendous weight in search engines when referencing what the topic of the page the link leads to, as well as add addition ranking potential to the page that the link is located on.

Hyper link optimization plays a major role in SEO. By understanding the role that links play in search engine optimization, you can understand how to improve the rankings on each of your respective pages, by following a few simple guidelines.

If you can envision your website as an island, the only thing bringing in traffic are the bridges that connect it to the surrounding land masses. Without those bridges (inbound links) to connect it then then how fruitful can you expect it to be?

If you have links coming into a page, say 20 for example and 30 links leaving that page, you are in essence dispersing the link juice or ranking power for that page to the 30 pages you link to. Having a good internal to external link ratio is one of the foremost aspect of SEO, but realizing that you should try to keep your links on topic and use keywords you wish to rank for in the text of the link to make the most of each link on your pages.

Optimization of Alt Tags | Alternative Text Tags:

Since web bots and spiders can not parse the data in an image or flash to determine what the image is, Alt tags allow webmasters to create a clear description of what the contents of the image are. If you have an image showcasing your company headquarters an ideal way to utilize the alt tag from this image would be a company name headquarters, city, state. This way you could obtain the maximum value for this image as a contributing factor to your overall rankings with regional references as well as using the company name to reinforce your brand.

In the past, this was one of the most abused forms or search engine optimization and fell more along the lines of search engine manipulation. Companies would stuff every keyword possible in the alt tags in over inflate relevance for their keywords instead of simply creating content with value. Filters have been added to search engines to eliminate websites utilizing such tactics, but you would be surprised to note how many webmasters still use this technique. Fortunate for us and unfortunately for them, it nearly results in penalties in rankings every time pushing them lower on the totem pole for achieving top 10 rankings if even top 100 results.

Optimization of your Website Content:

Optimization of your website copy otherwise known as content or words is the most important factor for ranking. Without going into too much detail, it is safe to say that the higher quality of content your pages have, the better they rank in search engines.

The reason is simple, think of the web spider as your friendly neighborhood reporter who is always looking to be the Johny on the spot to report the latest and greatest headlines to the web at large. These programs are more than just reporters, they have been designed to emulate human behavior and crawl through your pages much like a real human would. They follow links, take notes and even more so, if they like your content they come around more often to see if you have refreshed your data.

Knowing this it is important to write your pages for humans, since they actually pay the bills, but also to understand that you can create compelling text for the search engines to index as well. This is accomplished through word density, which is another fancy pants way of saying how many times a word appears on a page, and how close it is to other keywords that you have outlined as important within the document (using your links, titles and descriptions).

To add even more emphasis to a group of words for on page optimization, you can employ the header tags h1, h2, h3, and so on to reference the priority for those phrases or keywords on your pages. We explore specific uses of header tags at a later time, but the purpose for now is just to provide an overview of the basic elements involved in SEO Web Design.

Content truly is king, so the best way to grab the attention of the Google bot is to write world class content and sprinkle in optimization tactics for optimal effectiveness.

Site maps - What they are and how to use them:

A site map is essentially an index of the pages comprising your website. There are two different types of site maps;

(1) An HTML site map that is used for human visitors to find relevant pages and (2) an XML site map that is designed for spiders to connect the dots and find your entire website when it is performing indexing to create a snapshot of the contents.

Every page on your site should have 2 things in order to be taken seriously from the major search engines. Your site map and your privacy policy. Another thing you might wish to note, that if your physical street address is missing in action (in your contact page) on your website, your listings will probably have the same effect from Yahoo and some of the other engines. Penalties come in different shapes and sizes, so to avoid them it is better to be proactive and incorporate these three elements right from the start.

An HTML site map is nothing more than the link to your page with a brief description following it. This alone can affect where and how your page is ranked in the grand scheme of things. An XML site map on the other hand is something which is placed at the server level that spiders and web bots access (much like your robots.txt file) when looking for data to report back to the web.

I think that about wraps it up for this overview of the basics fundamentals of SEO Web Design, stay tuned in the future when we outline specific ranking strategies and methods that you can apply to your pages to optimize them using the principles that search engines are keen to respond to. The last thing you want to do is omit creating engaging content, after all, what good is SEO if after they arrive they just click and run as a result of lackluster content. But that is another article in it's entirety.

About the Author:

Jeffrey L. Smith is an seasoned search engine optimization strategist and founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Web Design Company in Chicago. Jeffrey has been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings fresh optimization methods and marketing solutions for businesses seeking organic search engine placement.

Simple Ways To Get Free Traffic by Wong Chendong

Setting up an offline business require a lot of things to be done. One well known example is the need of a large amount of capital. In order to make money it require money as well. But with the advance technology of the internet, there are many ways you could find to help optimize the potential of your offline business as well as online business in generating traffic. There are many ways to easily and quickly jump start your traffic flow.

The first and most important step you must remember is to have a proper mindset and alot of eagerness. Many fail in this important step and give up easily going back to their comfort zone. Do not let this happened to you as you must understand that building long term traffic is like you growing up. Am sure you have walk through life that is unhappy, but you still live on everyday, is the same to building long term traffic.

The second step you must have is the drive and perseverance to do alot of hardwork and research to generate even more free traffic for long term business. The hard work you need is only one and that only one is the "TIME", do not expect to get hundreds to thousand of traffic in just a short time because the truth is you won't.

How happy and excited will you be if you could drive targeted free traffic to your site everyday? There are many sites that contain articles with tips and guide lines to driving free targeted traffic to your site, to be honest with you those articles has too much traffic solution and in terms will make an amateur marketer to have confusion and information overload. What am going to share in this post is two type of traffic ways which is proven by many top marketers and guru that it is a guarantee way to build long term free traffic to your site, of course if you want to get fast traffic, you can use PPC which am not going to share in this post so let's get started right now to the main topic. Online Forums And Communities

Online forums and communities are the first free traffic method you should take advantage first. The great advantage of using online forums and communities is that you can target groups of people that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. It is a great way to get in front of a large group of targeted audience.

Once you account has been created, make sure you read the rules in the forum and communities before you play around or you will get backfire by angry people who will try to shut your website down. Remember to make good use of the signature box that is provided. In case you don't know what is a signature box, it is a place where you could include a direct link to your website which will get you free traffic when someone click it. There are few forums which allowed you to put up to 5 links which is good for you to have your other sites to get traffic too.

The next step you need to to is to build creditability. Do not advertise your links, especially affiliate links. Try your best to be active in your market, this is important because people will start to notice you. The best approach is to post significant replies in a meaningful threads. By sharing knowledge that you are expect in will build not just creditability for yourself but also good reputation too and trusted by many people in your market.

When people start to trust you as an expect, they will start to look up for you, which from there, you can actually start to self-promo or advertise your links or affiliate links. The trick and technique is to post as many post as possible to let others to know what you are good at and how you can help them.

Within the forum or communities you can also put a contest to give out something or gift which in terms make good relationship with them. As you know friends are always the best customers. When you have build good relationship, you will benefit of being able to earn some back links which will give you better page rank in search engine, which in terms give you free traffic flow. You see, using forums and communities could even win great customers and even get partners to join venture with, so many benefits, don't you think is the most powerful way and guarantee way to have long term free traffic flow? Writing And Submitting Articles

Article writing is a good way to drive traffic too. Writing articles to provide tips, guide lines, good service and knowledge to other people will give your site the necessary mileage your traffic flows need.Once again remember to make good use of the resource box when submitting articles. In case you don't know what a resource box is, it is actually a box which allows you to put a link or a brief description of yourself or your sites

In order to let readers to click your link, you will need to write something they are looking for or interested to read on. To be honest with you, the best is to write what you have expertise on. There are many product that allows you to submit articles to multiple directories, but it has proven well for me, so think twice before you spend money on those products.

Again if your articles are good or it is something people are looking for then you could even get back links, which could actually increase you page rank, in other words giving you free traffic. You see, I know writing articles is hard for some people out there but don't worry, you can always outsource to someone else to do it. Submitting takes alot of time, this is the time that you need to take it, am sure it will benefit you alot for long term business online. By applying the two simple methods I mention above, soon you will get great amount of traffic flowing into your website without spending a cent.

About the Author

For More In-dept Secrets Of Making Money Online That Top Marketers And Super Affiliates Never Told You About Go To This Blog Now ---> EmpireDotCom.com

Why Page Rank is Important in Building Traffic???

Why Page Rank is Important in Building Traffic

Google PageRank is important in building traffic to your website for a number of reasons. Before we discuss why, here is quick heads up on how it works.

Page Rank is based on links between your site and other sites, in fact specifically between web pages, since it is links between individual pages rather than complete websites that interests Google. That is because Google lists individual pages and not domains. There is a formula that Google uses to determine the value of each link to your site, which is based on the PageRank of the web page providing the link and also the number of other links leaving that page.

You can see the page Rank in the Google PageRank bar on the Google Toolbar - it is the green bar that shows a numerical value of 0 to 10 when you hover your cursor over it. This value is logarithmic, which means that if it takes 10 links to reach PR 1, then it takes a lot more to reach 2. If Google uses a logarithmic factor of 8, as it might do (nobody knows), then it will take 8 links to your site to get to PR 1, 64 to reach PR 2, 512 to PR 3 and so on. This is very basic, since, as I have stated, it also depends on the PR of the page providing the link and the number of other links leaving that page.

Here are the top 4 reasons that in my opinion help most to generate traffic and make you money:

1. The higher your Google PageRank, then the higher Google is likely to list you in the search engine results pages. Google take the view than the more other websites link to yours, then the more relevant your web page must be to the topic in hand, otherwise they wouldn't link to you. In fact, the links are to specific pages in your site, not to the site as a whole, which is why it is called 'Page Rank' and not Site Rank.

2. The higher the Page Rank, then the more relevant other people will consider any particular page on your website to be. They will feel more confident that if they visit your site they will have their questions answered and find the information they are looking for.

3. A high Page Rank shows that you have a high number of links on the pages of other websites. There is then the possibility of others clicking on these links to get to your website.

4. The higher your Page Rank, then the more people will want you to link to their website. That means that they too will be likely to visit your site. They will also offer you a reciprocal link if you want one, and that too will provide you with more exposure online.

There are some factors you should keep in mind that could affect your Page Rank. The way your domain name is presented is very important. Take at look at these domains: www.mydomain.com, www.mydomain.com/index.html, domain.com, domain.com/index.html

They are all different URLs that will lead somebody using them to your domain. However, search engine spiders see them all as different URLs, and if you use different ways to write your home page URL, then they will all be listed separately, and all be given a different Page Rank. Thus, the page rank for any one of them will be weaker than your page would have been if you had used only the one way to express it. Get into the habit of expressing your domain in only one way.

There are other ways in which poor use of your website URLs and also injudicious linking policies, can harm your Page Rank, but the main point that should keep in mind is that the your page rank applies to each page individually, and you get a share of the Google PageRank of the page that provides you with the link. If that page has a PR of zero, then you get nothing.

In giving my reasons for page rank being important in building traffic, I should stress that it is not one of my more important ways. However, Google takes notice of your PageRank, otherwise why would it bother giving you a Page Rank in the first place. For that reason alone it is well worth building up as many links back to your webpages as possible, not just for the traffic, but also to keep your website in the public eye.

It is the Home Page that is highest listed on most search engines, and also the page is given the highest PageRank, so if you can persuade others to link to your home page in return for a link from a page internal to your site, then that would be a good deal, and is what you should be trying for.

Don't ask me though, because I would a link back from your highest Page Ranked page!

About the Author: Page Rank is an important property of your website, and for more information on internal and external linking strategy check out Pete's website Improved Search Engine Rank where you will find many other SEO tips.

Free Search Engine Traffic?

Want Free Search Engine Traffic? Choose the Correct Keywords!

If content is king, make your keywords your servants! It's pretty simple; good keywords bring lots of traffic, bad ones don't. If you want that free search engine traffic, the first thing you need to do is to find out what exactly it is that people are searching for in the area that you are interested in. Then you pick key words that relate to your topic of interest, and that people are really searching for. You can have the best content in the world, but if you optimize for the wrong keywords you still won't get that sought after traffic.

For example, let's assume I am going to build a site about water heaters, and I want people to come to my site. I need to find out what kind of information about water heaters that people are looking for so I can build pages optimized for the keywords that people are really using.

The first thing I do is go to a keyword tool to do my keyword research. There are a number of keyword tools online, my favorite is Wordtracker. Others include KeywordDiscovery, and the Google AdWords suggestion tool There is simply no substitute for doing your keyword research. With these tools you can put in a seed word or phrase, and the tools will provide you with lists of related keywords and keyword phrases that are searched for, and how many times per month they are searched for. Using these tools there are ways to estimate the size of the market for products and services, ways to optimize you web pages, find new niche markets, and much more.

With Wordtracker I find quickly that many more people search for "tankless water heater" than search for water heater...which surprises me. Nearly as many people search for "hot water heater" as search for "water heater". Wordtracker also informs me that there are far fewer websites trying to be ranked high for "hot water heater" than for "water heater". Ah-Ha! I'll be sure to optimize a few pages for "hot water heater". In fact, I find that the terms "tankless water heater", "tankless hot water heater", "tankless water heaters", "electric tankless water heaters", and "tankless heaters" all have more people searching for them than "water heater".

Single word keywords are very difficult to get high rankings for, so it's wise to shoot for longer keyword phrases. Three and four word phrases are what I use most often.

After finding out what information people are looking for, and what keywords they are using to find that information, you can build the appropriate pages and optimize them for those keywords that have significant traffic searching for them.

Now that we have our keyword list and we are ready to build our pages, where do we put the keywords?

The first and probably one of the most important places to have your keywords are in the title tag. This is one of the tags in the head section of the html code of your web page and lists the title that is displayed in the web browser. Internet Explorer displays this tag in the top bar of the browser window. It's very important that you always write for humans. The search engines are getting smarter and smarter, and they are looking for sites optimized for humans, not search engines.

Get some of your keywords into the keyword meta tag, not crucial but it won't hurt.

Make sure you have some keywords in your Alt tags for your images...don't overdo it though. Write it for humans, but try to work a few keywords in if you can. Alt tags are displayed as a popup when you pass your mouse over an image.

The Description Meta Tag is still a valuable place to use your keywords. Many search engines will look at the description Meta tag for keywords to compare against your body copy. Yahoo uses your description tag as the description of your site in their listings. Consider the description tag just like it is named, a concise description of your site. Keep under 50 words.

Your body copy is obviously a very important place for placement of your keywords. Remember, write for humans. If your keywords don't appear in your body copy, you won't place high in the search engine results for those keywords. Work your keyword into the text appropriately. Select one or two keywords and make the page specifically about those keywords.

Use your keywords appropriately for humans on your site where you can. This will increase your search engine effectiveness.

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About the Author: William Lund has been a webmaster since 1998. His website provides free information about website design, development, promotion, and monetization. For more about keywords and other website topics visit: Lund One Web Marketing and More. Mr. Lund Also has a blog: Pondering Everything.