In the earlier years of search engine optimization, it was all about on-page optimization. Things like the page title, Meta tags, heading tags, comment tags, and anchor text were the only things that mattered. Keyword stuffing could easily get your website to the top of the search engines results page. If I wanted the number one position, all I had to do was copy my competitor s page, add my keyword one more time, and viola I d rank first.

These days, things aren t quite that easy. In order to obtain top positioning in the search results, your website has to gain to credibility or web cred in order to be recognized as important.

Optimize Your Domain Name

As of this writing, appears that the search engines do weight the fact that your domain name has your keywords in it. Problem is, many SEO professionals and amateurs are exploiting this by registering domains with the keywords in it, separated by dashes. Nobody knows how long the search engines will continue to weight this factor, but none the less, it s probably not a bad idea to include a keyword or phrase in your domain name, but don t get out of hand: www.please-let-google-ban-my-site-because-of-all-these-words.com

The number of years your domain has, and will be, registered for also has an effect on search engine rankings. If you have an older domain name, it is generally concluded that the website is not spam and will probably be around for years to come. This makes sense Google should give higher priority to a website that s been around for 5 years, than give the high ranking to a brand new, untested website. It may be a good idea to acquire a domain name that been around for a few years and also contains one of your keywords. The downside is that this option may be expensive. If you don t have the budget for that, Google also seems to give credit for the number of years that the domain is pre-registered. I ve looked at some data, and it seems that if you register your domain for a few years out, Google assumes you don t have a fly-by-night website and you may be entitled to a slightly higher ranking. Given the miniscule cost of registering a domain name these days, it s probably not a bad idea to register your domain name for 3 years rather than 1.

Page Rank

Google assigns each web page a Page Rank based on the number and quality of inbound links you have pointing to your website. You can view your website s page rank by downloading the Google Toolbar. Your page rank will be displayed as a green bar measuring from 1 to 10. Don t worry if you only have a Page Rank of 1 or 2 most websites do. In order to get your number up (4 or 5 is pretty good), you ll have to get other websites to link to you.

Quality Counts More Than Quantity

As soon as webmasters realized the importance of back links, numerous schemes were hatched in an attempt to build up thousands back links very quickly. Google has since caught on, and if your website acquires too many low-quality links too fast, you may get penalized. Here are some tips to obtain the best quality back links:

- One-way links are better than reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are being de-valued because it is not natural linking it s an arrangement between the webmasters. If you can afford it, it may be a good idea to buy some one-way links to your website.

- Get links from pages with a high Page Rank because some of that will pass through to your site, increasing your own site s Page Rank.

- Get links from sites in a related industry or geographical location. I do a lot of web design in my home town of Windsor, Ontario. Therefore, I make sure that I buy or trade links from other web design related sites, Canadian, Ontario, and Windsor directories. Google will see that your site is relevant if you do this.

- Make sure your keywords are included in the link from other sites. If your keyword is included in the anchor text, Google will assume that your site relates to that particular keyword.

- Get a listing in Open Project Directory (DMOZ), if you can. Only the best sites get into DMOZ, and it gives your site a lot of credibility in the eyes of the search engines.

- Don t inter-link your websites! If you think you can just link all of your own websites together and improve your Page Rank, forget it. Google will see that the IP address of all domains is the same, and, either give you little or no credit, or if you have a lot of sites inter-linked, penalize you.

Let last tip I ll leave you with is: make sure to maintain your links. Google, for one, does not immediately give you credit for your links. The age of the link plays an important role, and as the months go by, those links which were maintained for long periods of time will carry a lot of weight. Good Luck!

Paul Coulter owns and operates a custom web design company in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. If you would like to read more web design articles or contact Paul, visit his business’s website: Cost Effective Web Design, Windsor ON

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Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.

With search engine algorithms changing seemingly daily, the quest to rank high in the search engines and stay there is proving to be quite the challenge for most webmasters. One of the more recent popular ways of achieving this is through buying text links on websites that have high PR s (page ranks) on Google and that also rank well in the other major search engines. Is buying text link placement worth it?

Purpose the primary purpose of buying a text link on a website that ranks better in search engines than yours is to receive a backlink to your site, without having to reciprocate a link back (as this dilutes the quality of a link). This backlink counts as a vote for your website and especially if coming from a site that is credible to the search engines, helps your site establish credibility as well. For example, a website has been online for three years and currently has a PR of 7. Your site is three months old and has a PR of 2. The 3 year old website places a link to your site from their homepage. As this site has history and is therefore established, this vote from a PR 7 website holds a lot of value. Compare this to a site linking to yours that is only a year old and holds a PR of 1 it makes sense that you would want links coming from older sites that have high PRs. The higher the number and the better the quality of backlinks your website receives, generally the higher your rank on the SERPs (search engine results page).

Not only are text links great for search engine purposes, but if placed well, can actually drive traffic to your site. And whose website nowadays couldn t use more traffic? Enough said.

Those are the benefits behind purchasing text links. But what are the disadvantages?

1)Cost it s not uncommon to pay $100 monthly for a 3 word textlink on a PR 6 website. If you do choose to go this route, choose your text carefully and budget wisely.

2)Relevancy to search engines if you re running a homemade toys website and have a popular online pharmacy website linking to yours, this won t be as relevant as say having Mattel linking to you. Remember that search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated and they can tell whether two sites have complimentary, competitive, or completely unrelated website content.

3)Limited link length - rarely are you given the option of selecting more than three words when purchasing links. You may have difficulty coming up with only three keywords relevant to your website, so this can often prove to be a difficult task.

4)Page is already populated with other text links online auction sites that have sellers auctioning off website text links are notorious for selling textlinks on websites that already have 50 more on the same page. Look for sites that limit the number of textlinks sold.

5)Search engine spam your site linked on every single page of a 3000 page website using the same keywords and url can be considered spam to a search engine. If you choose to purchase multiple text links on multiple websites, make sure your linking text varies.

The lesson is to be simply cautious. Using a textlink broker to find relevant and complimentary websites to buy links from can prove to be highly beneficial just do your research first. Would a $100 monthly textlink investment be better spent on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, or will the long term benefits of buying a text link outweigh a temporary influx in visitors? Return on investment is key whichever route will yield you the highest ROI should be your ultimate determining factor.

About the Author
Veronica Dubak is an SEO expert, internet entrepreneur, and the owner of the successful SurveyBounty.com free online paid surveys directory. With a comprehensive listing of market research companies classified by region, and background information on the online survey industry, SurveyBounty.com is the legitimate source for online survey information.

TechTags Plugin [ internet marketing | seo | search engine optimization | web site optimization | internetoutfitter ]

Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.

Link Development takes a major role in having your web site rank well in the search engines. Many web masters as well as SEO companies overlook how important it is to have a good link development campaign going for their web site. This article consists of 3 major topics; What is Link Development, Finding Link Partners and getting the max. potential from each one of your links, and Proving the power of Link Development which are meant to give you the basics of running a good campaign that will boost your rankings in search engines.
What is Link Development?
Link Development, also known as Link Popularity, is a term used to describe getting other web sites to link to your web site. Remember the popular kids in high school? Well lets just say that in most cases popular kids got noticed way more, they usually were social chair or prom queens and kings, top athletes and the list goes on. The point is, the popular kids got noticed while the not so popular kids didn’t. This is the same concept that search engines go on. If you are popular, then you get noticed and how search engines decide whether you are popular or not is by how many web sites link to you and how popular those sites are.
Hopefully that isn’t a painful analogy that brings up memories of your high school days. So now that we know what Link Development is, lets talk about how we start a link development campaign.
Finding Link Partners!
There are two types of link partners to go after, one is a one way link. This is a directory, forum, or web site that links to your web site without you having to link back to their web site. You can buy links now from web sites like: www.textlinkbrokers.com, but I am not to sure how the search engines feel about buying your popularity. The second type of link is a reciprocal link, which means that if you put a link on your web page pointing to them, then they will put a link on your web page pointing to you, the perfect “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.
So now how do we find one way links? Well first off, the easiest way is through the search engines. If you are doing link development for a real estate site, google: real estate directory. There are plenty of directories out there that allow you to add your site for free. Next you will want to look up real estate and find forums, so that you can find posts that relate to you and add a reply giving some useful information while providing a link to your web site. Please do not spam your link on forums, only place a link when it makes sense to. For example if you are a Real Estate agent in Vancouver BC, Canada and you come across a post saying, Where can I find real estate listings in Vancouver. Then add a nice reply and your link at the bottom. Finally, never forget about your friends and family, explain to them that by having a one way link form their web site to yours it will help you boost your search engine rankings.
It seems that reciprocal links do not have as much weight on the search engines as one way links, but are much easier to get. The reason they are easier to get is because you are helping the other web site get better rankings while they do the same for you. So there are a few general rules you should follow while doing reciprocal link development, first, try not to exchange with your competition as you will just make it harder for you to come up before your competition. Second, only exchange links with relevant sites. By relevant we mean that the site you are linking from and to should relate to your web site, an example of this would be if you are a real estate agent, you would want to link to mortgage brokers sites or home renovation sites not children’s video game sites, however if the site is in your locality you can link to them and mention in the link that they are a local business/web site. Finally, always be honest and truthful when sharing links, do not put up a link and then take it down a week later, if you agree to sharing links, stick to your guns.
Finding reciprocal link partners is actually easier than you think. One of the best things to do is find out who is linking to your competition and ask them if they would also like to trade links. To do this, in google type: link:www.competitionswebsite.com. This will bring up a list of all the web sites that have linked to that site, then just find the web masters e-mail and send him/her a polite e-mail asking if they would like to exchange links. Do this for every major competitors web site and you will have links coming at you left and right. Another great resource is a free web site called sitesell. What this site does is lets you enter your information into their database, including your e-mail, web site and what keywords best describe your site, then it finds you people with the same keywords and sends them an e-mail asking if they would like to exchange links. I have received hundreds of links this way. I suggest you sign your self up right away at: http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/.
Now that you know how to find link partners lets look at what your links should look like. Now this is only what I do and it seems to work very well, some may disagree and I can understand not everyone wants to exchange links this way. Personally I think Google has become to smart to just accept links that follow this general concept: Anchor Text - Description of link. How I exchange links is within a paragraph. For example:
Real Estate in Vancouver is a booming industry. With the 2010 winter olympics happening in Vancouver people are very interested in Vancouver Real Estate. Joel Carcone is an experienced realtor ready to help you make the right investment in Vancouver.
By having it in a small paragraph that gives the web site that is linking to you more text that is relevant to your site, it is going to make the link weigh more when the search engines count it as a vote. Lots of software out there will not let you do this and require a strict: link - Description, formation. Do not skip over these, they just won’t count for as much.
Finally, Google ranks sites based on their algorithm and gives them a rank between 0 and 10. The higher the PR the more important Google believes the web site is, thus giving more weight to sites that link to you with a high PR.
The Power Of Link Development!
Link Development should have a Cape and a big “S” on its spandex suit as it has so much power it is unbelievable. The following examples are not intended to offend rather show you that link development can make a huge difference without even having the site optimised for the keyword.
To prove the power of link development we are going to use president Bush as an example. If you look up the following words in google, George Bush’s White house Biography are the first to show up. I urge you to try this, read over the biography and notice that the words “failure”, “worst president”, and “worst president ever” do not show up in the biography at all, but if you look those same words up in google, you will see that his biography comes up first for all 3 of those words. Now this is an extreme case and is known as googlebombing, but this does show the true power of link development.
If Link Development can make a site that is totally unoptimized for those keywords come up first in a search that has about 213,000,000 sites competing for the word failure, imagine what a good link development campaign could do for your site that is optimised and ready to be found on the internet.
If you are thinking of getting SEO done to your web site, look into companies that do Link Development as this is a powerful way to gain rankings for your web site as shown with the example in “The Power of Link Development”. Make sure that when asking about link campaigns that SEO companies follow an ethical approach to Link development, you would not want to wake up one morning to find your site dropped off the rankings because of unethical link development practices.
About the Author
Daniel Cedar is a Web Strategist for Elite Beat Enterprises. He is an expert in Search engine optimization and Link Development Campaigns that follow strict ethical codes based on Google’s guidelines of Search Engine Optimization. Visit Http://www.elitebeat.net

TechTags Plugin [ internet marketing | seo | search engine optimization | web site optimization | internetoutfitter ]

Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.