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Driving traffic to your website and gaining higher search engine rank positions can be done in several ways and each are important as an overall strategy, however in this article I am going to focus on one main way which is link building.

In specific when planning a link building strategy it is of the utmost importance to realise that not any old links pointing to your site are advantageous. In fact some links to your site can have the complete opposite effect and be detrimental to the performance of your websites rankings.

You need to plan which type of sites you are targeting to build link relationships with and the obvious first starting point on the link building platform is to look for links from sites that are of a similar nature and category as your own.

The saying goes that birds of a feather stick together and this is most true in search engine optimisation as in general most major search engines will tend to rank you higher if you site becomes what is known as an authority site and has many links from sites offering similar and complimentary content matter.

Combined with this criterion is the added fact that these similar content sites to your own should be quality sites that in turn may be well linked to from other quality content sites.

As you will see there is a constant theme emerging here that quality content sites with a similar theme when linked together aid and assist each other to improve their search engine ranking positions and in turn this brings increased visitor traffic.

Moving on one step further in our link building strategy we can improve our chances of increased search engine positioning even more by obtaining links from these high quality content sites in one direction only, in other words to optimise the benefits of these links we need to obtain them in such a way, if possible, that there is no requirement to link back.

One way links from quality content and authorities sites can be considered as the most beneficial links to obtain and are seen by most search engine optimisation experts as the best.

Now of course in general most website owners are unlikely to give you a one way link without some sort of compensation, but there are ways were you can obtain links and these methods should be part of your overall strategy.

Remember that, in my opinion, this should be looked at as a marathon and not a 100 yard dash, in other words working on a strategy to consistently obtain links to your site over a long period of time is far better than having one mad session for a day and then forgetting the whole business to move onto some other interest.

It has been suggested by some people that the longer a website has been registered online and operating the better it is perceived as far as search engine rankings is concerned and with this in mind it would also seem quite logical that the long term link building approach should also fall into line with these thoughts.

Some obvious ways of receiving one way links to your website could include writing articles and submitting them to article directories and also using website link directories.

Of course trends will come and go so you should always be prepared to adapt and look for new ways to increase your link building methods but the main quality you will need is to prepare a plan and take positive action on a regular basis.

Copyright 2008 Terry Till

Find out how you can get instant one way links to your site :

http://www.bidtoplink.com

Webmasters and ezine owners may use this article provided they leave all content and links in full contact and without alteration.

The quantity of links to your site is used by the search engines (like Google) to calculate the importance of your site. This measure of incoming links is called Link Popularity. Press releases are a powerful way in which you can promote your site, service or product while at the same time increasing your link popularity.

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of fine tuning your website to get higher rankings on Internet Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Broadly speaking there are two types of optimization, on-page and off-page. On- page optimization deals with the layout and format of a web page to make it attractive to a search engine. Off-page optimization deals with external factors like the number of people linking to your page. Let's look at off-page first.

Off-page
In trying to quantify the importance of a website, search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms that rank web pages for their quality. The largest factor in determining quality is the number of links to a web page. Links are an almost impartial method of determining how popular a website or a web page is. Or to put it another way, quality websites are the most popular and so have the most links to them. AS previously mentioned this is called Link Popularity. So to improve your standing on the search engine you need a higher link popularity.

Another very important factor in off-page optimization is the text used to link to your site. This is called the anchor text. Adobe rank the highest in the search engines for the words click here. Why should that be? The word "click here" isn't in the title of the page, nor is it in the page itself! So why does a search engine like Google rank Adobe so high for this term? Because many of the websites linking to Adobe used the words "click" and "here" many times in the anchor text of their links to Adobe. You know... Click here to download Acrobat Reader...

Press Releases
A press release is a written communication that you submit to journalists in the media (newspapers, radio, television, magazines, etc.) They are used to make announcements which are newsworthy. The mistake that many people make when writing press releases is that they don't find the angle necessary to make their announcement newsworthy. Press releases aren't for customers or consumers they are for reporters, journalists who will use them as a starting point for a larger story or feature. Press releases written as sales pieces will be completely ignored.

There are various ways to submit free press releases on-line. Some of the popular sites are:


http://www.free-press-release-center.info

http://www.prweb.com

http://www.prleap.com



How can a press release help with building your link popularity?
Most of the free press release services are text-based which means you will not be able to add any HTML tags and so you can't add any keyword-optimized links into the press release. However others like the Free Press Release Center (FPRC) allow you to also supply some keywords for that press release. When that page is viewed by someone, including the search engines, the keywords will be used to create links within your press release back to your website.

This means:
There is a one-way link to your website
The link uses the anchor text of your choice
The link is within a natural context of the press release.

Traditionally, a press release is short lived, it has a limited amount of time make your impact on the media before it becomes old news and is replaced by fresh press releases. Some services like FPRC allow you to buy a cheap upgrade, which means your press release will remain permanently in their system. This means that your in context links with the anchor text of your choice remain permanently for search engines to find and so helping improve your rankings.

When preparing your press release you should optimize it for the keywords which are important for your site, product or company. This means that when someone searches for information in your industry, your press release will be seen as relevant by the search engine.

On-page
There are several factors in on-page optimization. The first is the title of the page. This is almost the first thing the search engine reads when it visits a page. All of the free press release services use the title of your press release as the title of the web page. So when preparing your press release try to put some of your important words in the headline, however don't force them in as then you will alienate your readers (the journalists).

After the title is the heading tags on the page. Like the title of the page, your headline will become the first heading on the page. Again you should optimize your headline.

If you prepare an optimum press release and select good keywords you can gain valuable incoming links to your site as well as gaining exposure through the media.

About the author: Gary Sims has a degree in Business Information Systems from a British university. He worked for 10 years as a software engineer and is now a freelance consultant and writer. Free Press Release Center.

A well-constructed SEO campaign will drive customers to your website, but effective SEO is only the beginning. By following the Reach BCS 'Booster Strategy' you can make sure your site gets the highest visibility and give you an opportunity to communicate directly with potential buyers.

a. Blogs. If a blog has regular updates about interesting stuff, it'll draw in loads of visitors. And if it's hosted on the your site, they're naturally going to click around and explore the products and services. So a frequently-updated, well-written, factual blog about your wares could really serve the site well. It would have to be frequently updated, though, or Google will lose interest. And the topics have to be fresh and interesting so that they're not competing with all the other blogs out there.

b. Link Building. One of the best ways to get a Google position boost is to get relevant quality inbound links from well-respected sites. So for Fitness company this could quite easily be achieved by getting gyms, personal trainers, etc to link to the fitness site from their sites, which I'm sure they'd be happy do if they're a happy customer. We do link building with the directory submissions, but a link from a non-directory, relevant site is worth alot more than a directory one. Especially if you're not linking back. Google sees reciprocal links as obvious attempts to boost site positions, whereas one-way links are usually because one company genuinely likes the other.

c. Reviews. Allowing customers to review products is really beneficial for SEO, because it provides a lot of indexable content which is likely to be jam-packed with keywords.

d. Forum Signatures. If you know your stuff; join relevant message boards and provide useful, accurate advice for questions asked on there. And in your forum signature (which is appended to the bottom of every post), include a link back to the site. It's a good way to build up lots of links while remaining completely honest and un-spammy.

e. 'Viral' Material. The best way to get more visitors is to encourage people to share the link naturally. So anything that you conjure up that people would find interesting is worthwhile. Even if it's just tutorials on using your products but presented by someone well known or physically perfect, people will share the link around to their friends and it'll draw in visitors. In the case of a Fitness company A gorgeous women using the equipment to demonstrate correct usage will find an instant audience on sites like You tube.

f. Encourage People to Stay. Install a message board on the site, so that visitors can chat. It'll build up high levels of textual content and give people a reason to re-visit. You could even develop an automatic discussion thread for each news item, so there'll always be something relevant to talk about.

Aftab Ali

Founder of Reach BCS - Brand Communication Solutions

hello@reachbcs.com

http://www.ReachBCS.com

web design | Graphic Design | online marketing

We could not deny that articles are the food of the search engines. Of course, I am talking about unique articles here and not duplicate content. Unless your website has only a one, two or three pages only, and then you will be needing lots and lots of directory submission and other promotional works to do.

This is also one of the reasons why webmasters continue to develop auto and semi-auto articles submission software to ease that boring copy and pasting task. We are not talking generated articles here, and I am sure, you don't want to put something in comprehensible articles in your websites. These generated articles also are not being accepted in any of the articles directories.

That's why you really need to work these things out. If you could not be able to construct your own articles, there are lots of freelance article writers out there you can hire or buy articles for a cheap price. When you buy articles, it should be around 400 plus word and can be less than 500 words per articles. This is because articles directories require this number of words per article, but if you'll only just use these articles on your website or blog, then less than 300 words will do.

There's another way to for you to use an article for your web promotion and link building. You can use articles to be submitted on multiple blogs. Of course, you need to include your keywords or anchor text in the articles. In fact, there are already lots of it online. Usually the owner has multiple blog or a blog network where an article should be posted.

This type of article submission, well, this is only my view, might topple some of the article directories out there. This is because the blogs have the ability to be syndicated automatically compared to articles directories which rss syndication is done manually. Not to mention that some internet marketer just copy it and just put the author name and not the resource box. In fact, one of my articles submitted here was copied and posted without my resource box, instead, included my name only as the author.

Both websites, of course, could help build your site popularity online. Just look for relevant blogs or article directories where you can submit your articles.

The author is non-native English Teacher, a blogger and the owner of websites: Free Cover Letter, 99 Cents Blog and blog about Website Review Service

Articles about getting Quality Links have been posted throughout the Web but do you really understand Quality when linking is involved?

Find Out Your Niche

Every business has its own niche and its own market. Unless you are a universal globalized business, you should be able to good use of linking strategies to convert curious visitors into potential buyers. Knowing your niche is your first path to success.

Where They Visit

Now that you know who and where is your market, get ready to do some serious in depth studies. Find out which are the websites that your potential customers normally visit and generate a whole long list of them. By knowing where your potential customers might visit, you can easily target your advertisements.

Shortlisting The Candidates

Now that you got a long list of all the possible websites, it is time to choose which are the ones that are more related to your business and group them into a smaller list. Rank these possible websites accordingly to their Alexa traffic ranks, retain the top 200 websites.

Advertising Or Exchange Links?

Whether you are going to advertise or make links exchange will depend on which type of websites they belong to. Free services, business-orientated, articles, directories or etc.. Naturally, exchanging links and creating some sort of a partnership would eventually be the cheapest and the easiest way out. Alternatively, you can also consider exchanging advertising space with those business-orientated websites which can benefits both parties. Whichever way you decide, getting links from these shortlisted websites are known as quality links.

Rif Chia is the Founder & Private SEO Consultant of EzBusinessNeeds.com with more than 5 years experiences
SEO Web Design
Singapore SEO

Getting quality links to your site from related web resources can be very difficult. It is a time consuming process and requires careful research. There are two ways to build your link popularity; 1 Make your site attractive to webmasters or 2 go out and hunt them down your self.

Getting webmasters to come to you:

Having lots of useful content on your web site such as informative articles, online tools, studies, etc will make another webmasters what to link to your web site knowing that you will not only help their site's traffic and link popularity, but adding content to their own web site.

Sometimes you may even get webmasters that like your site so much that they will link to your homepage or to certain web pages that they think their visitors will find useful because this adds to the usefulness of their own site by providing useful links.

Keep it clean by avoiding tricks (Blocking access via robots.txt to robots, linking out with JavaScript, etc.) meant to keep your site from transferring Page Rank to other webmaster's web sites and link to your links page on every page of your site.

Sometimes you will get requests for link exchanges with web sites that are not related to your sites topic, these sites should be ignored and you should focus on only related web sites.

Hunting link partners down your self:

Type your keyword phrases into a search engine and wait for the results. The web sites you see on the first few web pages of the search engine results should be your main targets and should be looked at. Visit their site to see if you can find the site owners name and email them asking to exchange links, remember to email them at the right email address, don't email the email address that's for support.

Type your keywords or phrases into the search engine and see who links to the sites that come up first. After finding a few sites that link to the sites that rank high on your keyword phrases email them and ask if they would be interested in a link exchange. This is great if you can get both the top sites that rank for your keyword phrases and the sites that link to the top sites because not only do you have the top sites linking to you, but also the site sites that made them get there in the first place.

Some webmasters use link exchange programs such as www.linkexchangeit.com, these link exchange program help you find link partners easier because the sites are cauterized into their related topics, so you don't have to search for them.

Use those rules and you should do just fine! Just remember to take your time and don't use automated software, instead hand pick the sites that you link to.

Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.