Google SEO Basics for Beginners

Introduction

As many of us web developers already know, Google is rated by many as the number one search engine in the world. We personally know that our websites get about 90% of their search engine traffic direct from Google searches.
Getting indexed by Google can be a pain, but getting highly placed rankings for specific keywords seems to be the nut that not many web developers without SEO (search engine optimization) experience or seo training can crack.
Today we’re going to give you an informative primer on the basics of search engine optimization techniques — many of which we use everyday to optimize our websites and stay ahead of our competitors.

4 Steps to Better Rankings

We personally believe in the “practice what you preach” approach to all things business related — especially SEO. So, before we continue, here’s a sample of keywords and Google rankings for some of our websites:

Website	Keywords	Google Ranking
Activekb.com	Knowledgebase software	#2 of 4,980,000
DevEdit.com	Online HTML editor	#3 of 9,080,000
MyFreeTemplates.com	Free Dreamweaver Templates	#4 of 93,600

Step 1. Choosing The Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization around is an important first step. General or generic keywords are usually not the best approach, and sometimes it’s better to be a little more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.
For example, let’s talk about www.devedit.com — DevEdit is our WYSIWYG HTML editing component that drops into browser-based applications.
The problem is, there are a LOT of WYSIWYG HTML editors, but how can we get DevEdit to appear in Google’s top 10 rankings? Well, let’s see. Trying to optimize for the keyword “HTML” alone would be a tough task, as it’s too general. There are HTML editors, HTML tutorials, HTML articles, etc.
We need to be more specific, which means:

1. Targeting a more suitable market that is looking for a content editing solution
2. Competing with fewer websites targeting the same keywords
3. Optimizing for keywords that people actually use when performing searches

Targeting a suitable market will depend on your website, as well as the products and services you offer. Try to be specific with your keywords, and remember that people no longer use single keyword search phrases – the average search phrase contains 3-5 related words.
For example, if you’re optimizing for a web development site and you’re located in Sydney, Australia, use keywords such as “web development Sydney” or “web development services Australia”.
To find out how many websites are competing with your keywords — either intentionally or not — simply do a search on Google and note down how many results are returned. In our case, for “online html editor”, we’re competing with 9,080,000 sites. The more sites that are competing for your keywords, the harder it will be to get on the front page.
Alternatively, to get a rough indication of how many people are actually searching for the keywords you want to optimize your site for, use the Overture search suggestion tool. It’s not exact, and doesn’t measure Google searches, but it does give a very good estimate.
The Overture search suggestion tool will also provide you with a list of similar keywords, based on the keywords you enter. This can be a great way to find other keywords to optimize your site for.
As a rough guideline, try to optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.


Step 2. Your URL and Title Tag
Two of the most determining factors in Google’s ranking are your domain name and title tag. For example, a domain name such as:
http://www.web-development-sydney.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming that they had identical keywords and page content.
For some of us, keywords in the domain name look too unprofessional, and we’ve already registered our domain, so it’s too late to change. An alternative — and also a useful tactic — is to add your keywords into the names of your pages, such as
http://www.companyname.com/web-development-services.html
Your title tag is equally as important as your domain name. Using keywords in your title tag can improve your Google ranking significantly. Trying to achieve a balance of professionalism with keyword density in the title tag however is sometimes a little more difficult.
Going back to our example of a web development company earlier, a good title tag would be:
<title>”Company name provides professional affordable web development services in Sydney Australia.”</title>
Usually, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.


Step 3. H1 Tags and Keyword Density
<h1> tags seem to have been depreciated by stylesheets these days, and are not used as often as they used to be.
The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page. Here’s a quick example:

<h1>Google sees this text as more important</h1>
<p>… than this text</p>

By default, H1 tags aren’t the prettiest in terms of formatting, so using a CSS style to override the default look is usually a good idea:

H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }

Sprinkling keywords throughout your page content can also improve your sites keyword density. Keyword density simply means the ratio of optimized keywords to the rest of the content on your page. It is usually expressed as a percentage, and should be between 7% and 10% for each page on your site.
Don’t overdo the keyword density, however, but don’t overlook it either. A good example would be:
Before:

• Company name provides web design and site management services to our clients.

After:

• Company name provides web development services to the Sydney region in Australia

Notice how we use the keywords more efficiently the second time around?


Step 4. Links, Links and More Links
And this leads us to the toughest part of the Google SEO process — back-links. Back links are websites that link directly to your website. The general principal is the more back links you have, the higher your pages will be ranked, as your website must be good if so many other sites are linking back to it.
If you run a web development company, then adding a simple link to the bottom of each of your client’s websites, such as:

<a href=http://www.yoursite.com>Web development by Company Name</a>

… (With your clients permission of course) can help boost your back links, which will help boost your ranking position in searches.
Submitting your site to dmoz.org, Yahoo! and other directories is also an important step to increase the number of sites linking back to yours. Do remember however, that setting up back links takes time. I w
ould recommend emailing 5-10 websites each and every day to request back-links or partnership links (keeping in mind that the sites contacted should be relevant but not competitive) e.g. – If you sell chocolate, partnering with a company that sells Roses may just be a good idea. Within a couple of weeks, you should have a good 100 or so sites happily linking back to yours!

Conclusion

Google can be one tough search engine to crack. Hopefully, however, in this article we’ve provided you with enough basic tips to get started optimizing both yours and your clients website.

Top 10 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips

Please enjoy these award-winning Top 10 SEO Tips for webmasters and website owners. Too many people make the mistake of spending thousands of dollars on just Pay-Per-Click (Sponsored Ads) campaigns before they realize that most people click on the non-sponsored listings more than "Sponsored Ads". There are several hundred techniques to achieve higher ranking in the search results, but these Top 10 SEO Tips are in my opinion the most valuable and timeless. They are also current, as I'm making a point to update this list respective to changes in search engine algorthims.



The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation and practical application with hundreds of client websites, mostly with final results of achieving higher ranking within the first page of search engine results. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please visit our new Blog Marketing Toolkit website, download our free eBook, or give us a call.

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Even if you do get top placement for a broad keyword that isn't what most users are looking for, Google will calculate the number of times users did not select your listing, and the number of times they returned to the search results to choose a different website. Trying to beat this calculation is futile and more often then not, just a huge waste of time and energy.
Therefore you should invest some resources into finding the best keywords; those that turn searches into purchases or leads. Buying Sponsored Ads and paying for high end design and usuability is best place to start. However, there are several SEO tools and SEO software available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords; most of which are offered by the search engines themselves and are completely free.
Here is a core principle of the Top 10 SEO Tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous, creating categories, and drilling down to create small clusters (or silos) of keywords. The results will always return new suggestions and ideas, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of. In the Sponsored Ads, these clusters become your ad groups. With your SEO, they become the directories (or taxonomy) of the content you'll want to have on your website.
Behavioral-targeting and using Long Tail Keywords are an excellent way to get higher ranking quickly for keywords that generate sales, and will have longevity to them in the search results. Poor keyword examples would be: kindle, nike shoes, roommate new york. Here are some examples of keywords that are ideal for SEO:

• Buy Used Amazon Kindle Online
• Nike Shoes Kobe Mens Size 10
• Find a Roommate in NYC

 

SEO Tip #2: Discover What Your Competitors are Doing

It's a fact and one of my Top 10 SEO Tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have, will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them. Your analysis of competitors should include these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the search engines
• Quantity AND quality of incoming links (prioritized)
• What keywords are in the title of linking page?
• % of links containing specific keywords in the link text
• The Google PageRank^™ or MozRank of linking pages
• The popularity of the linking domain and the linking page (measured by links & mentions)

Aside from using some of the awesome SEO software mentioned on this website, here are some things I personally do when researching a competitor:

• Click the link to their Site Map page and see what keyword you find in the links
• Get a savvy web person to find and parse their XML Site Map to find keywords in page names
• View the HTML title and meta tags of your top competitors to compile a list of needed content

 

SEO Tip #3: Write Very Linkable & Sharable Content

An article is not a sexy thing to look at here in today's online marketing world. Generic content can't be slapped together and thrown online with the hope that it will get high ranking for the life of that page of content. Think about the book the Long Tail that I linked to above. I do because the content was meanful and useful to me in my career as an SEO Expert. The content could have these attributes if it has any hope of earning and sustaining higher ranking in the search engine results (many of these came directly from Google):

• The content is useful
• The content is original
• You can't help but link to it
• There are supportive facts and references
• There's enough detail that nobody can memorize it
• Something fun or interesting is included (like video)
• It's not just blah, blah, blah, content
• There's enough call to action to invoke engagement
• There are visual examples, charts, and references
• You had multiple contributors who all link to the content
• You thank or compliment someone who shares it with others
• You have an offer, discount, or promotion included
• How To's and tutorials are a great way to get people to link
• Create a controversy
• Answer questions
• Conduct research & discuss the results
• Get involved with social media
• Create lists (Top 50 Link Building Techniques, etc)
• Get a blog and establish yourself as an authority
• Run a service or create a product (ie: Firefox extension)

 

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your Title and Meta Tags

HTML titles and meta tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them and what happens when you optimize them. The meta "keywords" tag won't be discussed in to much detail here, since Google has announced that they do not use the meta keywords tag in their ranking criteria. Because Google has 64 percent market share in search, that should be enough to convince you to not spend a lot of time on this attribute.

Optimizing Your Homepage Title

There are different theories about how long your homepage title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO tips for the title on anything other than the homepage would be to keep the title under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some (including myself) argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion. Let's take a look at Amazon and Ebay homepage titles:

• eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices
• Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
• Local SEO Services, Local Search Engine Optimization, Mobile Search, Online Advertising for Local Businesses | LocalSplash.com
• Buy.com - Computers, Electronics, Digital Cameras, Books, DVDs, Music, Games, Software, Toys, Sports

 

Optimizing Your Homepage Meta Description

Same best practice applies here. Get those top terms into a description that isn't spamy and is a clear indicator of what your website is about. Below are the meta descriptions from eBay and Amazon.

• Buy and sell electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, digital cameras, and everything else on eBay, the world's online marketplace. Sign up and begin to buy and sell - auction or buy it now - almost anything on eBay.com.
• Online shopping from the earth's biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, jewelry, tools & hardware, housewares, furniture, sporting goods, beauty & personal care, broadband & dsl, gourmet food & just about anything else.

The rule of thumb here is to get your most important keywords into your homepage title and meta description.

 

Optimizing Subpage Titles and Meta Tags

Let's take a break for a moment and discuss Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Bounce Rate. When you perform a search in a search engine, what shows up in your web browser is called an impression. When you make a selection, that selection is called a click. Google and other search engines record each impression and each click to help them understand which listings are being clicked on the most. They also record patterns (so stop thinking about getting all your friends to search for and click your listing). If the majority of normal search volume selects your listing, you'll have a higher CTR and higher ranking; same applies for Sponsored Ads by the way. That being said, if a healthy percentage of searchers return to Google's search results (called a Bounce) and select a different listing, your CTR value will be reduced and ultimately so will your ranking.

To get and stay at the top of the search results, you need to be the most attractive listing in the search result, and you need to provide enough content to prevent the searcher from leaving your website to find a different listing.

This one SEO tip could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well. If you ever forget this SEO tip, just perform a search in Google for "title tag principles", where you'll find my listing invoking these principles. Told ya I was good at this stuff, didn't I? Here's some sample syntax: <title>Call to Action, Keywords, & Value Proposition (under 66 characters)</title> <meta name="description" content="Differently worded call to action, keywords, & value proposition (under 160 characters)" /> <meta name="keywords" content="one to five keywords separated by commas" />

 

SEO Tip #5: Optimizing Your Headings and Subheadings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page (page structure). Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include ONLY ONE H1 tag when assembling your page, and optionally using one or more subheading (H2-H6). Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

<style type="text/css">       h1 font-size: 18px;       h2 font-size: 16px;       h3 font-size: 14px; </style>

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

 

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

Using the title attribute is a direct method of telling the search engines and the user more information about where a link will take them if they click through it. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to those who are visually impared. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads title and ALT attributes. Sample syntax might be: <a href="http://www.top10seotips.com/seo_software.htm" title="SEO Software to Help You Get Higher Search Engine Ranking">SEO Software</a> The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the title attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually impared. Here's how you might use ALT attribute in an image tag: <img src="http://www.top10seotips.com/images/logo-top10seotips.jpg" alt="Top 10 SEO Tips - Search Engine Marketing Tips and SEO Software Featured by SEO Expert Steve Wiideman">

 

SEO Tip #7: Optimizing File Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media. You also may receive visits from Google Images and other media search queries. More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. For fun, try this query in Google (copy/paste): "ebook site:.com filetype:pdf". You'll find all you can eat eBooks (you're welcome). Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute). You may need to contact your IT department or webmaster to rewrite your page URLs if your website platform is non-accommodating to custom URL nomenclature.

 

SEO Tip #8: Tell the Search Engines What to Index

I may take a lot of heat from the other SEO's out there for this one, especially because Google and other search engines have already helped reduce the amount of duplicate content indexed. However, I do enough search queries that begin with "site:" to know that duplicate content is still a major issue. Worse, I see a lot of files showing up in the indexes that should be hidden from the world (case in study: all the free PDF's you're probably still downloading from SEO Tip #7).

 

Optimizing Your robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website". Hopefully, you've already moved all the excessive JavaScripts and CSS styles into their own folders on your website to reduce the filesize and load time of the pages on your website. If you have, adding a simple "Disallow: /js/" to a file called the robots.txt will tell the crawlers not to bother with files in the JS folder and to only focus on your content, as opposed to non-important source code. Here's an example of the robots.txt file from this website:

 

Redirecting Duplicate Content

For consistency, it's better to have one version of each page to get all the inbound links and earn all of the points with the search engines. This means telling Google and Bing (in their respective Webmaster Tools) to only index the www.-version of your website (or the non-www version if you're "one of those types of people"). You can also use your Windows Server or a file called the .htaccess file on your Apache server to permanently redirect one version to the other. Next, add a new tag to every page of your website to prevent other versions of the page from appearing in the search results. Just think about all the different ways we display content. There are often "Print View", "Flash Version", and pages with reviews, ratings and comments that append page URLs with strings such as &rating=5, &view=print, etc. To correct this issue, we add a Canonical Tag to every page of the website. Here's the syntax: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.top10seotips.com/seo_tips.htm" /> Finally, you should round up all those domains you bought and make sure they are pointing to your one main website with a 301 Permanent Redirect. Bruce Clay created a way to this efficiently which he called an IP Funnel. I've been the victim of this so many times being an SEO Expert. More than once, I've found myself scratching my head trying to figure out why a website would not get Google PageRank^™, only to find out later than an older domain held by the client had been displaying the same content and had been the one Google gave the credit to.

 

SEO Tip #9: Feed Search Engines Static and XML Site Maps

 

Optimizing Your Static Site Map

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank^™ works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the site map, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips. It used to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a static site map can truly be.

 

Using XML Site Maps

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website. For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad. Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing will be using one standard for site maps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.8</priority> 

   </url>

</urlset> 

 

SEO Tip #10: Use Checklists and Validators

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images. Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's Top 10 SEO Tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile, so I recommend trying Xenu's Link Sleuth, which you can find on our SEO Software page. Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool. A new, unbelievable tool just came out that does much better than some of these older ones, and that is the Qualidator Site Analyzer tool, which you can also find listed in our SEO Software page. The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I know of for this (now) is my own SEO Audit List, which contains website-level SEO validation, webpage-level SEO structure and keyword optimization, and off-page SEO strategies you should have in your arsenal. You can also use WebsiteGrader.com and other online tools. However, they aren't as inclusive (yet) as my Audit Checklist.

 

Other SEO Tips

If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my newest Free SEO eBook, entitled: SEO in a Day. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links. You may also enjoy our blog at SEOSteve.com. Thanks for stopping by!

 

About the Author of These SEO Tips

Steve Wiideman, is the author of many popular online publications, including his Free SEO eBook, SEO in a Day. His prior work included The Four Layers of the SEO Model: How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. Wiideman holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in E-Business Management and was one of five students to win the Career College Association's GREAT Award in 2006 (Graduate Recognition for Excellence, Achievement, and Talent). He has also earned Congressional recognition for representing California as one of 5 national winners of the award and for the work he has done helping entrepreneurs transition to the Internet. Wiideman still plays a major role in helping students understand ecommerce and internet marketing best practices. Over the last decade, Wiideman has written dozens of articles, eBooks, and online publications. He has been featured as an SEO Expert in many popular magazines and has worked with an enormous portfolio of large, medium and small business clients.

» » Save & Share These Tips « «

<a href="http://learn-seo-for-free.blogspot.com/2011/02/top-10-search-engine-optimization-seo.html" alt="Read Top 10 SEO Tips for Higher Search Engine Ranking">Top 10 SEO Tips</a>

The Importance of Backlinks

If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines. 

What are "backlinks"? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. 

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.

.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality. 

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink. 

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine's algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let's talk about reciprocal linking for a moment. 

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map. 

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don't have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don't practice black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won't be discounted. 

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain: interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you. 

There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few. 

Another tool to help you with your link building campaign is the Backlink Builder Tool. It is not enough just to have a large number of inbound links pointing to your site. Rather, you need to have a large number of QUALITY inbound links. This tool searches for websites that have a related theme to your website which are likely to add your link to their website. You specify a particular keyword or keyword phrase, and then the tool seeks out related sites for you. This helps to simplify your backlink building efforts by helping you create quality, relevant backlinks to your site, and making the job easier in the process.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like "click here" which probably won't relate in any way to your website, using the words "Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten" is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink. A good tool for helping you find your backlinks and what text is being used to link to your site is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something incorporating relevant keywords. This will also help boost your quality backlinks score. 

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.