Search engine optimization can be broken down into 2 pieces building quality content for the keywords you are targeting and getting quality, related websites to link to that content. This article is focused on getting quality, related websites to link to your website. After all, you can have all of the quality content on a subject you want, but if no one links to it it will not rank well in a search engine. Getting ranked high for certain keywords in your industry, will bring you continual targeted traffic. This is a vital part of an overall marketing approach for any internet business. This effects the bottom line directly because it reduces the spending you need to do to get traffic.

Posting in forums is arguably the best way to pay for your hosting (you post, host gets money form forums ads), just make sure that you don’t need to post everyday only to maintain your account. Subsidy from paid accounts might be cool, but you need to be aware of constant attempt for conversion from free to paid account.

Posting in forums isn’t only helpful in generating traffic through links, it’s a two way street, whereby you get to meet and hopefully help readers resolve their unresolved issues. If you cannot resolve the issue first hand, you can steer them in the right direction by sharing links to sites that have helped you in the past.

Joining online communities and posting in forums is a great way for you to start networking and talking about your business without the pressure of in-person networking. Forums give you the chance to prove yourself as a knowledgeable person in your field, and as a respected member of the community. Additionally, the high traffic nature of forums make them natural candidates for frequent Googlebot visits, which boosts the PageRank of your site as well as provides some indirect marketing for you.

Now let’s talk about online discussion forums. Not only is the traffic targeted, but if you take the time to analyze your site statistics, you will find that this type of traffic will spend longer on your webpages than other types of traffic.

A name that goes unmatched when it comes to service, depth of knowledge and of course help. You will often notice for yourself that the best forums are really those where the members are passionate about the subject the forum deals with, are successful themselves or at least very enthusiastic about what they do and there is this inherent energy about seeing everyone out there reach the pinnacle of success.

Another way is to provide higher search engine rankings and higher adsense revenue is by forum posting. This technique is most profitable for ranking high in Google. It is a good idea to link many other sites that are related to your subject as you can. You will find that some websites have achieved their top rankings with the help of links from forums and messageboards. So the idea is to find some high quality forums or message boards related to your industry and try to keep posting there. So whenever you post in forums you can post your links in the signature which can help your website to top rank in the search engines.

What Makes an Authority Site?

One of the main characteristics of an authority site is it has more content or pages than any other site in that niche. The search engines love content, so if we give them more content to crawl all over, then they will look more favorably on your blog. Lots of content that has good formatting with proper headings and html tags are an important for the search engines to crawl successfully over your content.

The real secret behind ranking well and becoming an authority in your niche is backlinks. When search engines see one site linking to another they look at this as a vote for the site. Each “vote” is not weighted equally however, because the more links the first site has going to it, the more that site’s vote will count.

How Do You Establish Your Site as an Authority?

One of the easiest ways to begin this is to add more content. The more useful information you can provide to your readers, the more people will naturally link to your posts. If you continuously think of your readers first and search engines second, you will dominate the rankings.

Do some homework and find out what your competitors are talking about. This is a common practice, but the key to doing this well is presenting the information in a new way or perhaps going further in depth. It’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel, just repackage it or make it better.

Now that you know the topics you need to cover, it’s time to create more pages. If you are like most people, then patience is not a strong virtue of yours. You do have other alternatives such as giving the task to someone else or you can hire someone to do it.

How Can My Content Make Me an Authority?

When you write, be mindful of the posts you have already written, and link to helpful posts. This will point your readers further into your site, and the search engines love a site that links to itself. Writing a series of posts on a particular subject will keep your readers engaged and will give you great credibility with the search engines.

When writing your new posts, remember to link out to others in your niche. Not only will they possibly link back to you (giving you that extra vote), but it will also once again point your readers to useful content. It may seem ridiculous to link to your competitors; however the search engines will put more weight on a vote from a page that is related to your page. This is also a great way to build a relationship with your fellow bloggers.

Becoming an authority blog or site takes some time and forethought. With some calculated steps, such as the ones I’ve outlined, you will one day become an authority site. Remember the cliche is true “Content is King”. If you want to be #1, then you have to earn it with top of the line content.

I believe that quality one way link will definitely gives you the advantage. However I also think reciprocal links from very high Google Page Rank website, which have high backlinks and relevant content to your website will also give the same value.

But if you are just starting a new website, I have learned that one way links are always better. Google wants links to occur in a natural way and one way links would imply that a website linked to yours because it liked your quality contents. So one way link building is the logical way to go if you are just starting a new website and wish to build your link popularity.

If I can get one way link on trusted site it would be great but if I had to link back with them I had to check my criteria. The site content must be related to my website and have decent link popularity
on google. It must also contain at least one top 20 ranking for one of my targeted keywords.

The key to success in my opinion regarding links is lots of relevant links. Any relevant links keep helping your ranking, the higher the relevant links, the closer you are to getting a top 10 ranking for your related keywords. The question is all about link quality. As long as you concentrate on quality links, link exchange will rewards you. Make sure to avoid link farms.

It’s far more effective to have 50 good inbound links from popular pages than 500 links from a
link farm stuffed with no relevant and duplicates content.

Always thing about quality over quantity!

To Your Success!

On Page search engine optimization primarily includes placements of keywords on different parts of the website in order to increase its search probability. Keywords can be placed at several points in the website including the content in the website, the header tags, the meta tags and the meta descriptions. The alt tags can also contain keywords. This helps in growing the probability of its search. Here are some important steps which you can carry out in your website as a part of your on-page search engine optimization methods. They might just help you in the process.

When you are placing keywords in your site, you can make use of Header tags to emphasize on the keywords. Use H1 tags for the primary keywords and H2 tags for the secondary keywords. While you are selecting a page title for your website make sure that you are only selecting titles that contain the important website keywords.

Add a lot of quality content in your website. And while you are ensuring that the content is genuine and original do not forget to incorporate a good number of primary and secondary keywords in your website content as well. You can also highlight your keywords in the content of your website underlining or italicizing them to make them distinctively visible.

Including keywords in the alt tags of the pages also helps in the search engine optimization procedure. There are several other on page optimization techniques as well, which you can learn by visiting other top ranking websites and analyzing their site. Search engine optimization is an on going process which will never end. The more you practice them the more tricks you will learn and thereby, help increase the ranking of your website.

Just recently, Google has introduced a critical update to its operation. Nicknamed “Jagger,” the update was done in 3 parts and practically turned the SEO world around. Jagger has made various changes to the algorithms and rules of how Google judges the relevancy and PageRank of a website.

SEO rules are in for a big revamp, and to survive in this world, sites must change with it.

Coping with Change Ensures Survival

Jagger has made changes to three key areas that are crucial in the calculation of a page’s rank. These areas include the lifetime of a website, the calculation of backlinks, and the content and structure of a website.

In order to ensure the present ranking of your website, it is important to understand how Jagger has changed the rules regarding these three areas. That way, as an SEO specialist, you could make the necessary changes and adjustments to your tactics so that you could preserve your current ranking through not just Jagger, but for future updates as well.

Knowing Your Site’s History and Backlinks

The first area concerns the length of time that you have been operating your website. When you are introducing a new website, you could expect difficulties and some obstacles in attaining page ranking in Google. You also have to make efforts in the beginning to optimize a website towards a keyword that is less competitive in order to garner more chances of beating the competition.

However, as time passes, you start building up the necessary links in order to gain relevancy. In this sense, a site becomes more and more relevant as its history builds up (providing that its pages are optimized to be actually relevant with certain search terms), and as your site’s relevance goes up, you gain in rank among Google’s search results.

Google’s PageRank algorithm judges backlinks using the factor of relevance in mind. It gives greater weight to those links that point to your site from a site that is related to you. This was done before to answer attempts at link farming (a black hat SEO technique) by spam sites, which involve the establishment of sites that are purely intended to point their own sites in order to gain PageRank. For example, if a web design firm posts a link pointing to your SEO company’s site, this link has more weight and importance to Google’s eyes.

With this latest update, Google has given more weight to relevant links that have been pointing to a certain site for a certain period of time. In other words, links that have a long history are given higher value under the latest update. Now, not only does Google count the number of links pointing to your site but it also means it is checking for how long that backlink has existed in calculating your PageRank.

As a direct effect of this update, the tactic of building up links by buying them are no longer as effective as it was before. Since Google values older links more than new ones, this means webmasters that resort to buying backlinks will have to wait (while paying money) for quite a while before these links gain any significant value to Google’s calculations.

Organic SEO specialists’ reliance on the keyword density requirement has been critically affected by the update. No longer does Google give weight to specific pages that are relevant to a single keyword. With the Jagger update, Google is now designed to look at a whole site’s structure and content for relevancy to a certain theme. This totally changes black hat SEO tactics to gain relevancy for various searches by constructing pages that are individually themed for different keywords.

This means that SEO efforts should now be directed towards structuring a site around a certain theme, not just a single keyword. For example, if your website is about cars, your individual pages comprising your whole site should be centered on topics that are related to cars. With the Jagger update, you could see that general directories that use to appear on top rankings have diminished in numbers. Instead, directories for specific categories are gaining prominence among search engine result pages.

Of course these companies have large advertising and marketing budgets that drive traffic to their websites and generate leads, sales, and most importantly customers; and they achieve these results without having to twist their Web-marketing message out of shape in order to satisfy search engine criteria.

Their prime interest is in delivering their finely crafted, focused marketing message to their audience, not to search robots. Last I heard search engines are in the business of selling you their stuff not buying yours. But these companies also know something that you don’t; they have a secret that makes their marketing work without the need for search engine appeasement. This secret is not much of a secret, in fact it is out there for all see; unfortunately most search engine crazed entrepreneurs choose to ignore it and instead look for an easy fix, a magic bullet, search engine nirvana.

Google’s Mission

Google’s success is based on two very simple facts: one, it is the best way to find what people are looking for on the Web; and two, it has parlayed this ability into a series of paid-for services. Pretty obvious stuff until you delve deeper into why and how this works. Google understands the same thing most extraordinarily successful companies understand and that is they know what you really want. The keyword here is ‘really:’ they understand the unconscious primal need to survive, to be the alpha-ape, to be first on page one of a search for whatever it is you do, because in the SEO game, if you ain’t on the leader board you ain’t in the money.

The Google Paradox

Here’s the problem: Google can only be successful as long as they deliver relevant search results to a vast Internet audience. If they fail to deliver appropriate search results people will stop using them and their paid-for services will decline. On the other hand, you as a business executive want access to Google’s vast audience, and the only way you think you can effectively gain this access is to appear on that first search page as close to the top as possible; and you really don’t give a damn how you get there. Enter the search engine optimization gurus, boffins, and Svengalis who provide the promise of survival of the most index-able.

So now we have Google who’s success is based on delivering relevant searches and SEO companies intend on manipulating this ability to place their clients on page one near the top. Google of course being a smart bunch of guys foils the SEOs by constantly changing their methods and algorithms and trumps them by placing paid-for results in the most prominent places. And the game continues, bringing in huge profits to Google and wonderfully large fees to the search engine optimization experts, leaving you paying the shot with little to show for it.

Just as an aside, I can tell you that most of our website traffic and subsequent inquiries and worldwide clients come from Google searches, and our website is mostly Flash, concentrates on Web-video and audio, and basically ignores most search optimization tricks. We rely on providing our audience and Google with relevant material.

Back to Basics

The lesson here is clear: sound marketing practices based on the way people think and act should be your number one priority, not blind faith in the manipulation of some constantly changing mathematical formula that is increasingly playing second fiddle to paid-for placement.

Persuasion Techniques

The ability to make money on the Web is not based on traffic but rather on your ability to communicate. High volume expensive traffic that leaves your site within seconds serves no financial purpose. You should be spending your marketing dollars on methods that grab visitors’ attention and deliver a focused, informative, entertaining and memorable marketing message that resonates with your audience’s unconscious desires formed in the primitive reptilian portion of the brain.

The Lustication-Justification Process

Sales are generated by creating what Clotaire Rapaille, the reigning superstar of market research, refers to as the process of lustication and justification. Lustication is the psychological trigger of desire that makes your audience want to buy your product or service, while justification is merely the rational excuse used to expend resources.

Decoding the Motivating Triggers

Rapaille’s work is all about decoding the motivating triggers that prompt a purchase. Once found, the job of the marketing effort is to stay on code. The major research effort is to get past the excuses, the justifications, the rational left brain thinking that appeases the accountants, engineers and programmers, and to get down to the nitty-gritty, the elements and primal coding that make us tick.

Rapaille believes words carry more than their literal meaning and are ripe with unconscious associations, not a surprising revelation since all communication whether verbal or nonverbal is based on the associations we make over a lifetime of experience. These shared associations form the basis of the code we are looking to play upon in our marketing.

Where most corporations and advertising agencies use focus groups as an exercise designed to cover their collective asses, Rapaille takes a different approach. As a trained psychiatrist, he organizes his version of focus groups in stages. During the first stage he allows his subjects to gain a sense of accomplishment by justifying their reasoning through logical and rational thinking that he completing ignores. In the second stage, he pursues the more relevant hidden aspects of desire, and that’s the ultimate sales trigger he’s looking for.

An Affordable Solution

Most businesses certainly can’t afford the fees of someone like Clotaire Rapaille, but if you free yourself from conventional thinking and the need to justify and rationalize everything you do then maybe you to can find the hidden triggers of desire that form the code you need to base your marketing on.

Humans have two fundamental needs, survival and improvement; these essential requirements are subdivided into our need for food, shelter, reproduction, acceptance, community, status, and knowledge; these are motivational triggers for everything your audience does and for every cent they spend. While you’re knocking your brains out competing for top spot on a Google search, the big boys are delivering what people really want, and laughing all the way to the bank.

If you want your share of the Internet pie, you best discover what really satisfies your audience’s hunger, because that’s the basis for a marketing message and website presentation that works.

In order to determine how well they should rank, Google uses a complex algorithm to analyze web pages. The manner or formula that Google uses is a well-guarded secret. However, it is public knowledge that one consideration is in the number of pages that link to a particular page or backlinks.

The internet is full of information concerning backlinks. It is however, controversial as to the manner of how individuals get their links as well as almost everything concerning page rank. Some individuals get their backlinks by purchasing them for others or a link broker; however, Google discourages this type of practice to do so.

Google holds its stance, that a page rank should be naturally popular and not artificially stimulated by outside sources. The page rank, according to Google should reflect the true interest and relativity of the page according to specific search terms.

Of course, some contend that this type of method of determining the page rank is great and worthwhile, whereas there are others who consider this as an overbearing, sinister motive on Googles part.

Although, the argument continues concerning the rules of Google, the backlinks hold importance in ranking web pages. If you are into marketing online, page rank is an essential issue to you and your sales.

Page ranking is vital, since it can increase the traffic you have for potential clients. If your page falls below the first page of search engine results, it will influence the amount of internet traffic your site entertains.

Each link does carry its own difference in quality, since it is not only the number of backlinks on a site, but the quality of those links as well. Yet again, this is an area of controversial debate.

Reciprocal links can make a bad impression where page rank is concerned; since this is when different, sites trade links to improve the page rank of their web page. Google passes over reciprocal links. In other words, pages that contain reciprocal links will not benefit from page rank, so it is a big waste of time.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, Google is more in favor of one-way links. These links lead from one site to another website, with no reciprocal links involved between the two sites.

The favoritism of these one-way likes is quite simple really. Many consider that, a website that has many links leading to it is providing information that others may consider high in value.

Therefore, a page rank will reflect that other individuals think it a good website because of the number of links that lead you to that particular website. Whether you agree or not, the reasoning for this is compelling, while many leading SEO experts consider backlinks and the quality of those links to hold consideration in the calculation of a page rank.

The true issue is however, that many online marketers need to learn how to go about finding valuable and valid links for their websites. There are two basic methods, which are DIY, Do it yourself or OS, Outsourcing.

The do it yourself method is demanding and time consuming, although it features considerable merit for many reasons. However, it simply means taking the time to build good relationships with other websites, since this will aid in increasing the natural page rank. This is what Google looks for when ranking web pages.

Link building by Outsourcing are a process you can use through an assortment of agencies that specialize in this technique. Many online businesses claim the ability of being a matching service. This permits you to get backlinks from various other web sites. They match you up with other web sites they have in their database of related content.

However, there are risks involved with outsourcing since you have no real control of the method that links are created for your website. Therefore, it is in your best interest to study the practices and polices of any type of link building program. When it comes to outsourcing your link building to others, it is best to practice the art of caution.

On the other hand, social networking is quickly becoming a very popular technique for acquiring inbound one-way links to your website. It is however, an experimental method at this time. However, many individuals report that this method brings considerable success and quickly improves a page rank.

Backlinks are only one of the contributing factors out of hundreds of factors that determine page rank, according to Google. Google has no intention whatsoever in giving away its secret information, since it feels this would compromise the integrity of Google and its search engine results.

What is obviously significant and well known is that Google ranks pages according to the quality and number of backlinks as a central factor. Online marketers should pay special attention to such details as they would any other faucet of their business enterprise. This is something to consider carefully with any type of marketing strategy.

You should always be careful and take your time to focus while creating your web pages and website, so that they are search engine optimized. Although, backlinks are essential, they are only one portion of how well your page is ranked in the search engine results.

Optimization for search engines should always hold a forefront in your thoughts and planning, when writing your blogs or building your web pages as well as writing articles to use in a marketing program. In order to do the Google dance it is imperative that we all learn the first steps to enjoy the success of having our web pages within a top page rank.

But before you think you need a 10 to be considered important, consider this: of the billions of sites on the web, only a handful-literally-have a PageRank 10. Google is one. Yahoo is another. Even some of the most visited sites like AOL, EBay and Amazon aren’t perfect. They have a 9. While the popular social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube are ranked 8.

Those are among the elite sites that drive millions of visitors to their sites each day. A more standard quality PageRank is anything between 4 and 7. You want your site to be at least a four, and you only want to link to sites with a four or higher.

If you’re just starting out, you may only have a rank of 0. This could mean that a Google spider hasn’t crawled your site yet, you have no or few links to your site or you violate the search engine guidelines at Google. To increase your visibility in the search engines, you need to increase the number of quality sites that link to you.

Google sees each link to you as a vote for your page. The more votes you have, the more valuable Google considers your site. But if you vote for people more often than they vote for you (which means you have more outbound links than inbound links), your value begins to decrease.

And the number of votes isn’t the only thing that Google considers. The rank of the page casting the vote is even more important. If site A, a PageRank 7, votes for you by linking to your site, that vote is weighed more heavily than a vote from site B with a PageRank 1. The 7 helps increase the importance of your page; the 1 detracts from it.

Only it’s not quite that simple. Content also counts in the linking game. If that 7 site links to you but has content related to sports when your content is related to knitting, that vote does nothing to help your PageRank. Google has text-matching techniques to find pages that are relevant and important to rank the weight of your links.

Having links to your site on other sites in your niche is therefore important, but if you are just getting started, be sure all of your pages are linked back to your home page. By doing so, you are beginning to take steps toward increasing your PageRank and consequently increasing your visibility in the search engines.

There are some common search engine principles that are used to activate the search engine. For starters when you use one of these engines, it first sends out a spider whose job it is to collect as many documents with the related keyword as possible. A spider can be compared to a web browser; however the difference lies in the fact that the web browser shows all of the information of a page while the spider has no visual components. It works with the HTML code of the page.

The next program that you will encounter is the crawler. It helps to find the links on each page and it is with its help that the spider knows where to go. Following these links, the crawler can find documents that were previously undetectable within the search engine. Then it is the indexer that analyzes each page and each part of the page, like headers, text, special HTML tags, etc. These three programs collectively constitute the common search engine principles.

There are some crawlers that are better than the ordinary crawlers. These crawlers do a deep crawl on the website to access as many pages as possible which contain the keywords that are mentioned within the search engine. These deep crawlers can also gather pages that have yet to be submitted, as well. However, it is always better to search on larger engines; as the larger the search engine, the higher the number of pages that are listed on the website. There are some search engines that can follow frame links, and others that cannot. So it is better to use search engines that follow frame links as it provides for complete search of your web page.

Crawlers are found in crawler-based search engines where the listings are created automatically. However, there are also human powered directories where they depend upon the data produced by humans for listings. There are hybrid search engines that work on a combination of both of these. Some of their searches are created automatically while some depend upon people.

Search engines have a large database that is used for the storage of downloaded and processed pages and is usually referred to as the index. Next in line in common search engine principles is the results engine. This is the program that extracts the search results from the database to rank pages. It is through this program that the order of the pages that best match the users query is arranged. There are also ranking algorithms that have to be followed to arrange the web pages in an orderly fashion.

The next important part is the web server. It is the web server that is responsible for all of the interactions between the user and other search engine components. The web server comes with a HTML page which has an input field and it is through this input field that the user can actually specify the exact query or information he/she is searching for. The web server has another need to fulfill as well, and that is to display all of the search results related to the needs of the user in the form of a HTML page.

By following the common search engine principles and organizing your website according to these principles, you can surely place your website in the top listings of the search engines.

First things first, you should have your keyword picked out and ready to go. Once you’ve got that you can proceed to optimizing your web page.

It’s also recommended that you have a rudimentary understanding of HTML.

Title Tags

The first thing you should do is include your keyword inside the title tags. The title tags are the first elements right after the head tags.

It’s best that you include some other related text after you input the keyword. If my keyword was SEO I’d input something like SEO – Tips And Tricks For Optimizing Webpages

You can also add the title element to your outgoing links. Local links should also have keyword related title elements added on to them.

Header Tags

Header tags are in my opinion the second most important part of on page optimization right after optimized content. Header should be placed right before the content of your website. You should always place your keyword in header tags with a few other words relevant to your content. Also, always bold your keyword in your header tags.

Extra Tip: Use other relevant text related to surround your keyword with. Search Engines will sometimes penalize you for using a certain word or phrase to much.

Bold Your Keywords

It’s always a good practice to add bold tags to your keyword when in your content. Your keywords should always be enclosed in bold tags whenever they come up in your content.

Image Alt Tag

If you can swing it, your keyword should be included in the alt tag of one of your images.

The ALT element can be added to an image if it isn’t already. If you need help with this part of on page optimization then I suggest you look it up at htmlhelp.com. It’s a great website that has taught me html from the bottom up. It’s very useful to learn html when you are doing business on the internet.

Extra Tip: Try to use an image right after your header tags. It looks better in the search engines eye. Also, try to lay off the flash effects and javascript elements.

Keywords In Your Content

You should always include your keyword in your content. It’s always better if you keep your keyword density around 3-6%. Keyword Density means your keyword should make up 3-6% of your content. Content should always be unique and relevant to your website.

If you follow all of these steps and techniques you should be on your way to ranking over your competitors. Remember, on page optimization isn’t the deciding factor when it comes to rankings. Build your links and create good content for best results.