Backlinks are considered any link that is available publicly on the internet that links back to your website. When you use anchor text as the link, this seems to improve the quality. Anchor text is when a keyword or phrase is actually linked to your page.

Example:

This article is about website optimization and the use of directory linking.

In this example, the term “website optimization” is linked to http://www.topspotwebdesign.com .

This tells google that topspotwebdesign.com is a good site to suggest when someone searches for “website optimization”. Had I just used the url, google would not know which keyword is more important for that page and the link would not be as valuable. The link also becomes more valuable when the page that is linking to it is about the same subject. Since this article is about website optimization, this link becomes more relevant and will have more value than the same link coming from a video game site, or other unrelated topics. A third factor that is considered is the page rank of the page with the referring link. The higher the page rank, the more valuable the link is.

Most directories require a reciprocal link exchange. This means that in order for you to get a link, you must also provide a link to their website. These links are checked on a regular basis to verify that the reciprocal links are still live and you should do the same for the sites where your link appears. This can be done manually for just a few links or you can use software that will automatically check these links for you on a regular basis. The more links, the better, so we obviously recommend using the automated process.

If you are interested in directory linking, you have probably heard of link building software that can do this process automatically. In general, we do not recommend using these programs, because the quality of links are very poor and many of these links can actually hurt your site, because they are considered spam. These automated systems also build a large number of link in a short period of time, which is generally considered bad practice for site SEO.

The best way to build links is by manually entering them in sites that are relevant to your own site’s content. If you have a website about Horses, then find other directories or sites that also talk about horses. This practice will ensure the best possible backlink quality and help you build a positive presence in your online community.

One of the fastest and most effective methods of site promotion is with news and syndication. These 5 tips (plus 1 bonus tip) should help significantly with search engine optimization.

1. Syndicate an article at a popular online article site, such as Ezinearticles or GoArticles. These article sites are considered authorities and search engines will naturally rank them higher than pages with similar content. By writing articles on these sites, you can build quality links and produce highly qualified traffic for your site.

2. Submit articles to industry specific websites. Most website publish a blog and would welcome new content. Just make sure you get credit for the article and a link to your site.

3. Submit a press release. Many online news sites and even some printed newspapers will publish your press release, if you make it interesting and news worthy. When sending it, don’t “blast” it out to 100 of places, but write a personal letter to the editor of the site.

4. Keep track of the other news sites that publish your content. Once you know who is interested, offer to write new content for them. The more content you can get out there, the better your chances of attracting new visitors. Trading articles with other webmasters is another popular way to increase your incoming links.

5. Write articles or do studies that make other companies or people feel important. If you can get a large company to promote your content, you could generate 100’s of quality links.

Bonus Tip – Use your friends, family, and social network to gain contents and extra content. By asking these people to comment on your writing, you can add more content and get valuable input on your writing and ideas.

Website, Blog, and Article Content

Write content that is useful for your visitors. Don’t worry about keywords as much as making the content read well and as useful as possible for your visitors. Many people try to pack as many keywords into each page as possible. This is a huge mistake, because the search engines may think it’s spam and your visitors will leave the site because your content doesn’t make any sense.

Popular Keywords

When writing content, you should have a subject that will be interesting to your visitors and still allows you to use your most popular keywords. When I write, I like to write first, then figure out the keywords later. If I am not using any popular keywords, I can always go back and add them where they can logically be used. There are many keyword tools available online, where you can put your content into a form and it will tell you the keywords you used.

Once you know your keywords, pick 4 or 5 and use them in the keyword tags for your page, article, or blog, whichever you are writing. In most cases there is no reason to use more than 6 keywords on a page. Always remember, when writing a web page, don’t waste your content promoting your own name. Your own name should naturally appear at the top of a search engine once you site gets older. When writing a blog or article that will appear on someone elses site, you may wish to use your company name if possible. However, some article sites discourage this practice.

Every page should promote your top 3 keywords in the following places:

Meta Page Title

Title Should contain the three main keywords and be 70 characters or less, or have a natural break at 70 characters.

Meta Page Description

Description should contain the same top three keywords and should read naturally and be a call to action. 150 characters or less.

Meta Keywords

Only use keywords that are most popular on the page. For a normal page, there are only 3-6 keywords that should be used for the meta keyword file. Additional keywords will not help, but they could hurt the page, if the search engine doesn’t think the keyword belongs.

Heading Tags

Use the H tags to promote the top keywords for the page. In general, promote the most important and relevant keyword in the H1 tag. If there are natural divisions in the page content, the H2 tag should contain the most relevant keyword for the content under the H2 headline. Natural divisions of content under an H2 tag should be labeled with H3 tags using the most relevant keyword, and so on for H4, H5, H6, etc., if appropriate for the page.

Bold or Strong Text
At a minimum, use the top keyword in bold text once on the page. Do not use non promoted keywords in bold unless it will benefit the page visitor in some other manner.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is another strong way to promote your popular keywords. When a page on your site uses an anchor text link to go to another page on your site, it tells the search engine that the page it is linked to is more important for that linking keyword. Identify keywords that are not promoted on that page and link those keywords to other pages on the site that do promote those keywords. You should never link a top promoted keyword out to another page. Too many outgoing links can be considered spam, so be careful to keep outgoing links to a minimum.

When building a new web page or writing a new blog, always keep these best writing practices in mind. These practices, along with a strong link building campaign, should help your content reach the top spot every time!

This is not just another automated site review (that you can find anywhere online for free), this is a trained SEO professional who will do a complete site analysis and provide you with the information you need to make your website rank higher on the most popular search engines. If you are not comfortable making changes to your website, we provide these services for you at a very reasonable cost.

But optimizing your website is only the first step. After your site is optimized, you will need to begin a SEO campaign. Without this important step, your site has very little chances of making it to the first page of any search engine. Most people don’t understand this, but simply putting a website online doesn’t mean anyone will find it. With millions of websites online and many of them with the exact same topic as yours, you will need to do something to set yours apart from the rest. A SEO link building campaign or article writing campaign will help you do this.

Always keep this in mind: When it comes to website services, you get what you pay for. If you expect your site to be on the first page of Google, don’t think you can pay someone in India $100 for 1000 links and end up any traffic. These companies are scams and in many cases, will hurt your site more than they will help. Spamming is not a good idea if you want to promote your website.

If you have a site that needs American traffic, then make sure you are using an American company (that is accountable for the work they do) to help you get that traffic!