This is because each link that points towards your webpage is like having a vote saying that your webpage is good. In the same way that everyone who filled out a ballot paper voted for Obama people linking to your webpage are filling out a ballot paper voting for you to be on the top of the search engines. However, not all links are created equal. Some links are worth more votes than others.

Firstly, links that do not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute are the ones that are valuable when it comes to link building for search engine optimization. Nofollow is an attribute that is applied to some links which tells search engines not to bother following the link. You want to get links without this in most of the cases.. Generally advertising and often commenting on blogs have nofollow attributes however almost all posts within blogs and pages on websites do not have this so their link vote is worth more. Google is pretty much against “dofollow” links and they consider these as being paid links even if in many cases people link naturally. I’d say to concentrate on getting both “dofollow” and “nofollow” links in order to balance your link building campaign.

Secondly, pages with a higher importance is the world wide web count for more if you have their vote. It is similar to if The Pope said you were a good person and if some random bum on the street said you were a good person. The Pope is seen as an important figure and therefore his verdict is worth more that the bum on the street. You want to get links from pages which already have a lot of links going to them, from related and autoritative websites.

Thirdly, links which contain the ‘keyword phrase’ people are searching for are considered to be a more specific vote and will cause you to be ranked higher in the search engines for that specific term. For example say I wanted to be ranked high in the search engines for the term ‘dog washing’ I would have the links to my website saying ‘dog washing’ as this would help me for that keyword phrase. You don’t have to use the same anchor text over and over again…this is bad. Try finding a few other keywords to rank for and alternate the anchor text.

Now you know the basics of why link building is it important let me show you a few simple techniques to build these links:

1. Trade Links
You can obtain a link easily by trading with someone else. You place a link to their website on your page and they place a link to your website on their page. Make sure their website is in a similar niche to yours though as this is most effective for search engine optimisation. Google might be against this but they have a very short memory – link exchange is one of the oldest link building techniques on the internet, since Brin and Page were playing the ball wearing short pants. There are two popular ways to do it. Two way link exchange (described above) and three way link exchange which is quite better.

2. Write Guest Posts/Articles
Guest posts guarantee you at least one backlink and sometimes more. Write a good article and get it posted on a big blog/website and you could get lots of exposure and why not some well deserved backlinks.

3. Buy Links
Generally this is not effective as most advertising links are ‘no follow’ but if you find one which is do follow you can pay to get a link. Obviously Google will say this is a big “No-No” and your website might get penalised, but I want to see a webmaster or SEO guy who never bought at least a link in his own life. I bet that even Google bought links when they were no one working from that famous garage. The world is full of idiots, preachers and arse lickers (just have a look at the comments on Cutts blog), they’ll tell you not to do it but they are worst than the average Joe the Webmaster. However if you plan to buy a couple, make sure these are highly relevant for your niche…don’t overdo it…better build the links on a natural way but I reckon a few good, strong links would always be a nice addition to your website.

4. Comment
Though many comments are also ‘no follow’ many blogs have a ‘Top Commentator Widget’ on their sidebar which appears on their homepage which does not have this ‘no follow’ attribute. By commenting often on their blogs you can appear in this widget and get a high ranking link for free. Be warned, this widget is generally renewed every month so it is an ongoing process to stay there as a Top Commentator. This kind of links are usually low quality and they won’t pass much juice, but still…a link is a link…

5. Directory Submissions

Most of the free web directories out there are just crappy link farms so I wouldn’t recommend to submit just about to any directory. Have a look at the quality of sites already listed before you place your link in there. Paid Directories are pretty much better due to the fact that not any shitty website is allowed. Most of the paid directories have a sort of editorial integrity and they charge a review fee. Basically you don’t pay for the link itself but for the time the editor spend in reviewing your website and approve it (or not). If you have a bit of budget I would recommend to consider submitting to a few strong directories out there.

6. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites are traffic magnets (at least the top ones) , with visitors ready to read the latest news, informations and top stories. Not only you’ll get a backlink from there (dofollow or not, depending on the site) but you can also attract quite a few visitors to your site. These links are usually pretty fast indexed.

7. Forum Posting

Forum posting and signatures are another easy way to get some links. Try visiting forums related to your niche, post questions and answer to other people’s questions. It might be easy to become a popular member and apart from the backlink itself, people would click on your signature and you’ll get some additional traffic.

8. Link Baiting

Link baiting is one of the most creative parts of a link building campaign. You’ll have to come up with such an interesting articles, with some cool links so people will quote your article and link to it.

When you start a link building campaign, try getting as many relevant links as you can from as many websites as possible. Don’t use a single technique, just alternate them and your website will grow up nice and steady. Any questions you have…just ask and I’ll try to reply.

There is a way to do it and that is by posting something thoughtful. Now, the most common question that comes to mind is “How do I post something so meaningful that even when I insert my link, the blog owner would just ignore it regardless of my limited knowledge in that field?” It is simple… Go to the forums and ask questions or just lurk around reading people’s posts. This would give you an idea of what to write on and how to write it.

Remember that forums are a complete goldmine because this is where you have everyone interested in a particular topic. There aren’t so many time wasters there. The second option you might have is do a quick search on the topic, look for what no one has previously said, and say it. Avoid stupid one-liners like “nicely said,  You can visit my website for blah blah blah” and you will find your links left on the blogs and forums.

Also in terms of relevance to your site niche and content, it would be much better to look for related resources. If you have for example a medical website, try to find medical related blogs and forums. There is a word saying that “any clean link is a good link”, agree with that but apart from the general backlinks you build, you will need backlinks related to your niche. Avoid the low quality, spammy websites and don’t post in there – the last thing you want are backlinks coming from untrusted sources as all these will create a bad neighbourhood  around your website…

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

Keywords

Keywords are those magic words which  appeal your site to search engines. These also guarantee good page rankings. Since these are an  valuable component of website search engine optimization you need to ensure each page of your site has a good array of strategic keywords evenly spread out. Many  SEO’s conduct intensive keyword research programs which help to analyze which keywords are the most popular and can  get you greater visibility online.

Copywriting

The content on your website not only needs to be  unique and related to the site  niche, it also needs to be search engine friendly. Website search engine optimization relies on effective and search engine friendly copywriting to attract better page ranking online. Your website copy needs to exude professionalism while also ensuring that keywords are generously sprinkled in the articles.

Meta tags and title

The title of your web pages is what will attract search engines to your site. That’s why it’s important that not only is the title interesting and catchy, but it also has relevant keywords in it. That way the search engine robots that crawl sites get to access your site instantly. Website search engine optimization is all about being accessible to search engines. Even your site Meta tags need to have these keywords well placed.

Knowing your competition

Many website search engine optimization service providers will do an in-depth  professional analysis. This is because in order to stay ahead of the competition you need to know where you stand. That’s why it helps to find out which keywords are currently being used by your immediate competition. It will also enable you to learn from their mistakes and fine tune your site optimization efforts with better efficiency.

Link density

The page rank and popularity of your  web site will depend on the number of links as well as the kind and quality of links on your site. In fact most of the popular search engines of today distinguish successful and not so successful sites by the density of links on their sites. Therefore as part of your website search engine optimization program you need to ensure active procurement of associated links to your site. By improving the link density you get to improve the relative placement of your site in search engine results.

High quality links

It isn’t just sufficient to have a large volume of links to your site. It’s also equally important in website search engine optimization to have good quality links from reliable partners. Therefore, it is essential to test the strength and effectiveness of each link before incorporating it into your site.

The first step into SEO is to create a site that allows the bots from the search engines to crawl. A web page is as good as offline if it does not appear in the search engine’s index. It is advised to use clean and static urls for a page rather than lengthy url with complicated parameters.

It is stated clearly in the Google Webmaster Guidelines that they do not index urls with session ids. In addition, they will not index pages that require user authentication as the bots visit pages like a general user. Search engines also cannot guarantee that they will index all the dynamic urls. Therefore, in order to facilitate the search engines in crawling all the pages, static urls are always preferred.

The second technique is to create a site that holds unique and fresh content. Search engines like to index fresh content. A frequently updated site will find the bots returning to visit at a shorter interval. Adding unique content regularly will also help other users to find the site more easily as these pages will add on to the respective domain’s search index in the search engine database.

Third technique is equally important as it ensures that search engines can crawl every page in a site successfully. Having a text link navigation system is highly recommended for SEO purposes as it is almost guaranteed that the bots will visit all the pages via the text links. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash navigation system, as the bots will ignore them. Implement a Google Sitemap is also recommended, as this will help the search engines to find any pages that may be missed during the crawl.

After implementing a search engine friendly navigation system, the Webmaster should focus on the keywords allocation and place the targeted keywords in appropriate places. Of the entire HTML markup, the most important tags to take note are the title and the headers. It is advised to have a different title for every page and to adopt a proper hierarchy of headers so that search engines know what are the content that the pages are focusing.

The final step towards a good search engine ranking is to attract organic links. Organic links are natural links from content related pages. Google only takes into account of these natural links when ranking and indexing pages as stated in their guidelines. Although linking from the unrelated pages does not hurt its rankings, they will not help either.

The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a website for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a website is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a website is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your website gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your website and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any website.

One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.

Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as “mesothelioma” or “home insurance loan” to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your website and most likely not return. If you create a website where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your website, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines.

Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your website for a longer period of time.

In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful website is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.