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You probably already know that quality back links are the currency you need to earn Google’s trust and to achieve higher search engine placement. But how do you get them? Despite the fact that most SEOs say link building is their least favorite activity, getting quality back links might be easier than you think. Here are some tips to get your link building campaign started.

• Give testimonials for products and services you enjoy—As businesses continue to look for ways to build trust with their online shoppers, a growing number of websites are publishing testimonials from satisfied customers. Is there a product or service that you really enjoy? Submit a testimonial to the company with your name and a link to your website. There’s a good chance they’ll place it on their website and give you a quality back link.

• Guest post on other blogs—The benefits of guest blogging are numerous. First, whenever you have a guest post published on another blog, the blog owner will give you a link back to your website (tip: Try to use keyword-rich anchor text in these links). But guest blogging is about more than just link building. It also exposes you and your company to a new audience, and it helps position you as an expert in your field.

• Get interviewed on a podcast—Like blogging, podcasts have significantly increased in popularity as they’re an easy way to engage and inform your target audience. No matter what industry you’re in, you can rest assured there are dozens (even hundreds or thousands) of podcasts dedicated to it. Reach out to the owners of these podcasts to see if they’d be interested in allowing you to share your expertise with their listeners. Once again, this will earn you a back link, and it will establish you as a leading expert in your industry.

• Have your press releases picked up by quality outlets—With the advent of free press release publishing sites, every company can easily publish press releases online. If optimized properly, these press releases tend to rank well, and they can be effective for link building. But you should also set your sights higher. Don’t just settle for having your press release published on a free site; try to get it picked up by well-respected news sources as well. A link from a major newspaper or trade journal will be of far higher quality than one from a press release distribution website.

• Examine your competitors’ back links—If you’re looking to launch a link building campaign, it’s only logical to see what the competition has done. Analyzing your competitors’ back links is as simple as going to Google and typing “link:www.yourcompetitorssite.com” Chances are, you’ll find they have links on websites that you can get a link from too.

• Submit your posts to blog carnivals—Blog carnivals are essentially online magazines that pull content from the best blogs in their niche. There are blog carnivals on every topic imaginable. Find a blog carnival that covers your industry, and submit your best posts to them. If your post is republished, you’ll reach a wide audience while earning another quality link.

• Look for mentions of your company without links—Have you performed an ego search lately? An ego search is where you “Google” your name or the name of your company. You might be surprised at what comes up. One thing you’ll probably find is that your company is being mentioned on a website without a link back to your site. If this is the case, contact the webmaster with your web address so they can add the link.

Which link building tips would you add to this list? Share your best strategies in the comments!

I’ve been researching this topic quiet a bit and I thought I would share what I have found.  This list is meant to be fairly comprehensive of what the current discussion points are.  This is not a “Live by these rules” list.  If you wish to leave comments to debate these points, real world examples of your experiences would be great. Enjoy!

1.  Hosting on a shared I.P. versus unique I.P.

On shared hosting plans, there could be hundreds of other sites getting their hosting on the same I.P.  Let’s say one of these sites gets flagged as a spammer in Google system – after all, you never know when you are sharing I.P.’s with gambling, porn or pharmaceutical sites.  Guess what?  The I.P. now throws up a flag in Google’s system and your website is on the same one! This can have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings.

2.  Hosting locally versus hosting anywhere in the world.

This one has two schools of thought. Some marketers believe that it doesn’t matter where you are hosted.  There will be no adverse effect on search engine rankings. On the other hand there are those that believe, as Google focuses more and more on personalisation, where a website is hosted will be one of the factors it uses to determine relavancy to each individual searcher.

If you are optimizing a site to a local version of Google; such as UK, it is in some people’s opinions better to register the same country TLD, host the site with a company whose servers are based in the same country and get some quality backlinks from the same TLD sites.

3.  Host using Linux Apache MySQL PHP versus windows hosting.

Linux hosting offers availability of free software, usage of htaccess and mod-rewrite and ease of community support. There is a general consensus on the web that windows hosting is much more restrictive and difficult for webmasters, especially bloggers, who are trying to get the most out of their websites on the search engines.

4.  Buying Year-In-Advance Hosting or more versus auto renewal every few months.

From a search engine’s perspective, buying hosting for a 1 year commitment tells them that you are probably not a fly-by-night spammer. If you plan on trying to achieve authority status in your niche, you might as well pony up 5 years worth of hosting.  That will surely send the message that you are here to stay and most sites are still kicking and screaming 5 years later anyways.

5.  Get Mod-Rewrite / htaccess

Google is funny about duplicate content caused by accessing a domain by www. and the non-www. version of your site. Google Webmaster Account addresses this issue by selecting a preference of either www. or the non-www.

Or

6.  Have your web host provide basic HTACCESS and MOD_REWRITE and write the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301]

7.  Make sure your site is hosted on a server with maximum uptime.

This one is a no-brainer.    You don’t want search engine failing to crawl your site because it is down.  They won’t be able to index your newly optimized pages that will cause you to rank higher in search results if your site is down.

Hope this was insightful.

If you are thinking how important SEO is to your overall website marketing strategy? Well don’t worry, We have put together a list of 18 website where you can find useful SEO tools that will help you to rank your website higher on search engines. Internet Marketing tools are designed to assist you in configuring your website for search engine optimization. All these 18 websites has one of the best Online SEO tools on the web to help you to optimize your website.

1. Free Search Engine Optimization tools from SEObook.com

2. SEO Chat Tools

3. SEO tools from WebConfs

4.  This SEO Tools page has links to the best SEO Tools on the internet and these tools.

5. Free and Pro SEO tools from seomoz

6. iWEBTOOLS has frequently used web tools . Tools ranging from a rank checker to HTML encrypter.

7. Check the ranking of a web page in Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK

8. Free SEO Tools by SEOToolSet

9. Webmaster and Search Engine Tools

10. Free SEO Tools from Raven Internet Marketing Tools

11. Free Internet Marketing and SEO Tools from Webuildpages

12. Free SEO Tools from SEOlogs

13. Free webmaster tools and resources

14. A Large selection of free SEO tools

15. Search for copies of your page on the web.

16. SEMRush Rank – is a rating of web-sites based on estimation of the following indexes

17. The Mike’s Marketing Internet Marketing Tools Directory

18. Free Webmaster Tools & Search Engine Optimization Tools

Please Note:

1. Unfortunately iWEBTOOL’s main system crashed recently. The current server is still unstable and they are trying our best to get everything back to normal.

2. Raven Internet Marketing tools was formerly sitening.com.

3. SEMRush Rank was formerly SEOdigger.com

Please leave you comment about these tools and comment if you think we have left out any other important SEO tools here.

Post by Eric Brantner

The key to becoming truly great at online marketing is to constantly push yourself by getting out of your rut and trying new techniques. Many of us have gotten so caught up in following the same old formula over and over again that we never evolve. Sure, we get consistent results with our websites by playing it safe, but truly great results come when you push yourself out of your comfort zone, forcing yourself to stop relying on the typical SEO/ internet marketing crutches.

What follows is a list of 7 challenges that can ultimately help you sharpen your SEO skills.

1. Promote a friend’s website without changing its structure- If you provide SEO services to outside clients, you understand why this challenge is important. There are those clients who are stubborn and who don’t want you to mess with their site too much. They restrict you from fully doing your job, but they want the same great results you normally produce. This will challenge you to find unique ways to make their site visible in the search engines without altering significantly.

2. Generate 15 links to your lowest performing content- Let’s face it, we don’t always hit home runs with our content. In fact, sometimes our articles just plain stink. But what if you have a client who needs inbound links and doesn’t want you to write new content for them? You need to find creative ways to generate quality links to even your worse content. This doesn’t include spamming in forums or blog comments either.

3. Overhaul your website- Again; this pulls you out of your comfort zone. It can be easy to fall into a rut of designing every page with the same general look. Comfort stifles innovation. For this reason, I challenge you to completely overhaul your website. Include an element in it that you don’t usually use (video, graphics, interactive elements.) The more you push yourself, the better you’ll become.

4. Follow 5 new blogs and guest post on them within a month- Guest posting on other blogs is beneficial for several reasons. It builds new connections; generates inbound links; improves your site’s visibility; and it establishes you as an authority. The goal of this challenge is to help you find a completely new audience and to build great relationships in a short amount of time.

5. Follow 5 new blogs without promoting yourself- The reason for this is simple it’s not always about you. You don’t have to constantly be promoting yourself. Become an active member on 5 new blogs without ever promoting yourself. You’ll find that you can learn new things from others, and that it feels good to not have to be constantly marketing your site.

6. Write an SEO e-book your mom would understand. Quiz her at the end- I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard SEOs say My parents don’t even understand what I do for a living. If you can’t even explain to your own mother what you do, how can you clearly express the value of SEO Company to a prospect? Write a brief e-book over the basics of SEO, and quiz your mom at the end to see how well she understands it.

7. Get a press release published in a reputable newspaper or trade journal once a month- Online press releases have completely changed the entire press release process. With self-publishing, you no longer have to fight with editors to get your press release in their newspaper or journal. As a result, the internet is flooded with boring, poorly-written, keyword-stuffed press releases. Try to bring back the art of press release writing by getting one published in a reputable newspaper or trade journal once a month. This will make you focus on writing quality pieces that truly engage others.

There are several more things you can do to become a better internet marketer. How do you challenge yourself on a daily basis? Share your challenges with us in the replies you just might help someone become a better Internet marketer!

Post by Eric Brantner

Most businesses make the crucial error of hurriedly launching a poorly constructed site for the sake of having something online. It’s only after the site starts performing poorly that they begin to realize something needs to be changed. This is usually when they start searching the internet for solutions, and they learn about SEO.

What happens from here is they usually try to tweak their existing site into one that’s more SEO friendly. When they fail to see any considerable spike in traffic or search engine rankings, they say that SEO is bull****, writing off the entire industry as a scam.

The reality is simple tweaks to a site not built for SEO just doesn’t cut it. Instead, they should have followed these 7 tips for optimizing their site before it ever went live.
1. Competitor Analysis- Regardless of what business you’re in, you need to know what your competition is up to. How can you expect to outperform them if you don’t know what they’re doing? The most obvious first step to competitor analysis is to see what keywords they’re targeting. But it goes beyond that. You also need to understand their linking strategies, their off-site SEO, and other steps they’ve taken to achieve top rankings.

2.Keyword Research- Keyword research is the bread and butter of SEO. Think of it as the foundation for your entire site. Without good keyword research, your site will never make the splash in the search rankings that you want. One mistake companies often make is to try to target keywords that are far too broad to rank well for. For instance, if you sell windows, you don’t want to target just windows. Instead, you should focus on specific phrases like  hurricane proof windows or energy efficient replacement windows.These are the keywords that will bring you highly targeted traffic.

3. Content Optimization- Contrary to what you might have read, SEO friendly content doesn’ t have to be keyword-stuffed, unreadable passages. Unfortunately, thats exactly what tends to pass as SEO copywriting these days. In my mind, content is properly optimized when your readers don’t even notice the keywords peppered throughout the copy. Aside from the use of keywords, the rest of your copy should adhere to the traditional rules of copywriting. This includes a strong call to action, short passages of text, and benefits-driven copy.

4.SEO Friendly Design- This goes back to the original point of this post. One reason optimizing after your site has gone live doesn’t work is that it wasn’t designed to be SEO friendly in the first place. Your page needs to be designed so that it’s easy for the search spiders to crawl through it. Although the search engine’s ability to crawl flash websites has improved, it’s still far more effective to employ CSS on your website. Additionally, your pages need to be designed to load quickly so that your bounce rate won’t go through the roof.

5. Conversion Driven- Is there anything worse than visiting a website that’s impossible to navigate and that includes almost no contact information? If your website isn’t conversion driven, it doesn’t matter how high you rank in the search engines because you’ll never get any sales. You need to lead your customers down the path to taking the action you desire. Make your call to action easy to see. It should never take more than one or 2 clicks for a website visitor to become a customer.

6. Interlinking- Interlinking is important for both SEO and navigational purposes. In addition to your main menu bar, you should also interlink to other pages on your website throughout the body of your content. These links shouldn’ be in there just for the sake of adding links. Any time you include a link, it should make sense to helping the reader move forward through your site. Additionally, you should make your anchor text keyword rich. This helps both the readers and the search engines get a better understanding of what the target page is about.

7. Usability Review- Before launching your site, the last thing you should do is review its usability. Sometimes, it’s easy to get so caught up in building your site for the search engines that you overlook the human user experience. Review your site to make sure it’s easy to navigate and that the content makes sense. Give your website visitors a simple to follow web layout, and they’ll be likelier to stay on your page longer.

What other tips would you add to this list? Tell me what SEO strategy you follow before launching a new website.