General Knowledge

One thing that is most important to link building is this: a few high-quality links favors numerous links of a low caliber. That means you have to search for the best links that fit the topic of your website or blog.

1. Reciprocal Links

Explaining reciprocal links is simple: you exchange links with other websites. You link to them, they link to you.

Those websites or blogs have already build a reputation in the search engine’s eyes. The SE’s trust them. When you start a new site, your site is not yet trusted. However, if you have that website linking to you, the engine know that you offer something good too. Generally, because you have good content or if you are their friends. They will easier trust you too and list you faster and better in their results. You build on the reputation of the popular website.

However, don’t think you can scream at a few of these sites and ask them for a link. You have to build a site with a good layout and content first, before they might feel about linking to you.

Here are a few pointers that you have to remember when asking for a reciprocal link exchange:

• Place a link to their website before you ask them to put a link on their website to your website.
• Be gentle.
• Make it as easy as possible for the webmaster to add the link. Provide the URL and the anchor text.
• Give them all the information they will ever need: links page, place of link, pagerank etc.

So, where to find these sites?

Be creative, that’s the keyword. Here are a few spots to get you going:

• Look around in your niche, what blogs or websites are you reading that covers the same subjects?
• Become friends with those webmasters and bloggers. Friends will help friends, right?
• Look on the sites of your competitors: who are linking to them? Find them and contact them.
• Look for sites that have already linked to a page on your website and ask them for a reciprocal link.

2. Social Media

This is the time of Social Media and I am sure many of you have an account on Digg, Delicious, Facebook or Twitter. Great. It’s time to make use of this social media to attract loads of visitors, but it also can be used to attract a number of great one-way links.

So, how does it work?

Hundreds, if not thousands of people in your niche are interested in your articles and content. The larger the number of people that read your article, the larger the number of influential bloggers and webmasters are amongst them. Those people might enjoy your article that much, that they start linking to them. Simply because your article is interesting to their visitors. That is social media.

How can I get that number of visitors from Social Media?

• If you run a company site: start a blog.
• Start writing articles about subjects in your niche.
• Try to fill up gabs that your ‘competitors’ didn’t fill.
• Write great headlines.
• Submit your content to the major social media sites and the ones that are in your niche.

Just remember, to get on the front page of the large social media sites is very hard. With submitting your article to the social media sites in your niche, you will reach the people that are interested in your article. The people that are looking for your content. If your article is good, they will vote for it and a few of them will link to you.

3. Directory Submission

In the past, directory submission was a great and important way to get a number of links pointing to your site. However, in this media age, the search engines are much more sophisticated. They won’t fall for that.

Adding your website to a number of high-quality directories however, can help you get better rankings. Make sure you search for the correct category that your website should fit in. Here are a number of directories that I feel are from a high-quality.

• Google Directory
• Yahoo! Directory
• Web World Index
• World Wide Wub
• The Directory Site

Adding your website to any of these directories makes your website more important in the eyes of the SE’s. Those directories are known for only publishing the best websites. If you get listed, you build your website on the reputation of that directories.

4. Guest Post on Popular Blogs

A popular blog in your niche has a large number of followers and visitors. You would like to reach this people because they are interested in your articles.

One way to reach those people is to write an article on that popular blog. When your request is honoured, you let the people out there know you exists and that you have value to provide. In return, a link and a description of your website or blog is posted above or under the article. When that articles gets a PageRank (and with popular blogs, that usually happens pretty fast), you will get a quality one-way link to your website.

Also, don’t forget the number of visitors that will click your link when your article was interesting enough. It’ll get your name out.

So, anyone wants to write for DivitoDesign?

5. Forum Signatures

If you are very passionate about your niche or subject, you already know that there are a number of great forums out there that discuss everything in your niche.

In many of these forums, you can use signature links. Sometimes these link are no-follow (which means the SE’s don’t value them for the search results), but sometimes they are normal do-follow links. If you are active in that forum and post in many conversations, more and more links from different conversations are pointing to your website. This is a good thing.

Where to find those Do-Follow forums?

Here is a small number of forums related to webdesign and media that allow do-follow links in forum signatures:

• Digital Point Forums
• Sitepoint Forums
• Webmaster Talk forums
• V7n forums

You can get more do-follow forums in this niche by visiting reading the “forums with link juice“-article.

If you are in a different niche and you wish to find do-follow forums, make sure you become active in a few forums and try it!

Any Suggestions?

As I am not the best Search Engine Optimizer there is, I am sure many of you have a lot more tips that work. I would be happy to hear them, because it will improve my own SEO-campaign, but it’ll also help the other readers.

Please leave a reply in the comment box.

But where do you start? What are the most important factors? Today, you will learn how to kickstart your new website or blog using a few very important Search Engine Optimizing techniques.

Today, we will start with the optimizing you can do on your webpages yourself. Please subscribe to the RSS feed to get the next part on link-building.

1. Structure

Search engines follow links. Links to other sites, but also when you link to your own pages or articles, the search engines follow them. That’s how they notice and index new pages on your site.

This is one reason to organize your articles, categories and pages in a structural way. A search engine (and even more important, your visitor) needs to know how to navigate through your website. It needs to know where to find the information they want to find. If they can’t, the search engine won’t index your page correctly.

That’s why you should make the structure and the navigation on your website as logic and organized as possible.

2. Title

The title of your site is very important for multiple reasons. A good title gives a visitor a clue where he’s located, but the most important value of your title tag is the search engine purpose.

The search engines put a lot of value in these titles. The first words in your title are the most important for ranking higher, but it is also important to grab the attention of the visitor when he is scanning the search engine results. It’s therefore important to put your most important keywords as far upfront as possible, followed by your company/blog name.

My titles usually look like this:

Article title – DivitoDesign
Category “Search Engine Optimizing” – DivitoDesign
Archives “2009″ – DivitoDesign

You can read more on effectively building your title tag structures on SEOmoz’ “Best practices for Title Tags“.

3. Headings

To make your article or website readable and scan-able for your visitors, you should use headings to separate different parts of your content. Headings have the same purpose for the search engines: they need to know what’s on the page too. When using heading tags effectively, you build structure in your article and you put more value on the most important keywords.

There are a number of important heading tags in HTML ranging from very important (<h1>) to not very important (<h6>):

• <h1>
• <h2>
• <h3>
• <h4>
• <h5>
• <h6>

Don’t underestimate the effect of even the <h5> and <h6> tags when you use them correctly (see point 7 for more.)

On my homepage (with multiple rotating article titles) I use the <h1> for my logo. On a single page however, I change the <h1> to a <h2> for the logo, and the article title (which is most important here) gets the <h1> tag.

You can read more on using heading tags on the HTML heading tags guide.

4. Images

Images are a great way to create a better looking article or website. Fortunately, we can also use images to help us in our search engine optimizing strategy.

A <img /> tag has a number of options to describe the image:

• Alt=”"
• title=”"

You have to remember that a search engine is not a visitor, they can’t read the pixels. That’s why we have to describe the image to make sure the search engine knows what the image means. And if we do that correctly, the search engine will display your images in image search queries too.

Here’s how the tag from a picture of a brown bear should look:

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<img title="Brown Bear Example" src="/images/brown-bear.jpg" alt="Brown Bear Example" />

5. URL’s

When people scan the search engine results pages, they always notice three things. The title, the description and the URL. The position of your result combined with those three factors make the user decide to click the link. It’s important to let the visitor understand where he is going to.

Which URL would you visit when you were searching for a Nokia n73?

/reviews/nokia/n73
/?id=34o323&p=2123&product=9238923

I think that’s a clear choice. Depending on which Content Management System (CMS) you use, you will have to options to optimize the URL’s of your content. Here is a tutorial for WordPress and Joomla.

6. Anchor Text

A very important part of linking to other sites and to your own articles is the use of anchor text. If you build a link, they text the visitor has to click is the anchor text.

You can optimize your anchor text so that your visitor and the search engine know where the link is leading to. You have to do that with the use of keywords. Here are two examples:

• To visit the article, click here.
• Click here to visit the article on Search Engine Optimizing

The first link doesn’t have anything specific that describe the page you are heading when you click the link. The second one explains your visitor and the search engine what happens: you will visit a page on Search Engine Optimizing.

You get the point, try using as many keywords when linking as possible. Click to read more about Keywords & Anchor text.

7. Mark Important Keywords

If you have written an article or your site’s content, you are not done. You have to optimize your text for your visitors and for the search engines. Visitors scan your text and read the piece of content that grabs their attention. How can you grab the attention? By using italic text, strong and bold text, underlined text, images, blockquotes and more.

The search engines use some of these attention-grabbers to get the most accurate results for all the keywords. That’s why it is important to highlight the most important keywords. You can use a number of attention-grabbers that serve search engine optimizing purpose too:

• italic text
• bold & strong text

You can also delete all the style declarations from the <h5> or <h6> tag, so that you can use these tags in your content. After you’ve did that, you can use these <h5> or <h6> tags to highlight the keywords in your content, and the visitor doesn’t even notice!

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h6{    padding:0; margin:0; line-height:0; font-weight:normal; }

8. Meta Tags

Meta tags are not very important for search engines to rank your website. It is however very important to get good results from the search engine results pages once you are listed. These visitors needs to be pulled in via three things: your page’s title (point 2), the URL (point 5) and your page’s description (this point!).

That’s why I suggest adding the following keywords to all your webpages on your site.

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2
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<meta name="description" content="The brief description of your site. This will be displayed in the search engine results pages. 150 CHARACTERS " />
<meta name="keywords" content="maximal, ten, important, keywords, here" />

Next Part: On Linkbuilding

Not only the search engine optimizing techniques on your own site are important, there is a lot more. We will be discussing many: link-building, keyword-research and a lot more. Please subscribe to our RSS feed to keep updated.

One big difference between a blog and a website is the way visitors can interact with the blog author. Bloggers allow all their visitors to leave a comment anytime. If they asked a question, simple say they enjoyed the article or when you don’t agree with the author’s opinion. That’s the power of the blog.

I have to admit, getting comments is one of the greatest things you can get when you are blogger. You get the confirmation your visitors are actually there and they aren’t just a number on your statistics software.

But allowing comments isn’t everything you can do to get user interactivity on your blog, many more options exist. In this article we will go through the solutions I think works best to improve user interactivity.

1. Contact Form

You should always try to make things as easy as possible for your readers on your blog. People are lazy and busy and if they can’t find something right way, they will simply leave.

The same thing with the contact form: if they can’t find that page in one click, they are usually gone. If you make it easy to find your contact information and web-form, you will receive more thank-, opinion- and comment-emails. That’s always great.

In some cases you could even add multiply contact forms to your blog to improve the number of emails you get.

My plugin recommendation is Cforms II: the best contact form plugin available for WordPress.

2. Polls

Adding a poll is a very good feature to add when you want to improve user interactivity. Many people read your article and move on, because they don’t have the time to add a opinion through the comments.

With a poll however the user only has to click once to leave an opinion and they will do that easier. You can also use the poll to gather valuable information about your visitors!

A good solution to add a poll to your WordPress blog is the WP-Polls plugin.

3. Shoutbox

If you have a free spot in your sidebar and you want your visitors to contact you even easier then hitting the “contact” button, consider using a shoutbox on your blog.

In a shoutbox a user can “shout” what they would like to tell you or the other visitors. Your visitor usually only has to add their name, email and their message, so when placed on a easy to find spot, it’ll really stimulate user interactivity.

You can find a live example of a shoutbox on Jeffro2pt0. To add a shoutbox to your WordPress blog, the following plugins AJAX Shoutbox and WP-Wall are recommended.

4. Community Forums

If you want to have a conversation or extensive discussion, the comments under your article aren’t the right place. That’s where your forum software comes in: you can separate the discussion from the other comments.

Forums were developed to let people talk to each other and therefore ideal for these kind of conversations. It can also become a place where visitors come to discuss and talk about niche-related news.

Remember: to make a forum successful on your blog you need to have a large visitors base.

This article will tell you exactly how to integrate forums with your WordPress blog.

5. Community News

Community news is a feature that is popping up at some more places lately: it allows visitors to promote their own articles in the sidebar of your blog.

If you don’t have the time to fill your readers’ hunger for more articles, let them provide interesting articles for their fellow readers by adding the news items to your sidebar.

Frank Verhoeven has just released the Community News plugin that
allows your visitors to add their news to the sidebar or page.

6. Voting

Usually, people have their opinion ready about an article, plugin, theme or website. Why not use this fact and let people rate that stuff with a voting system?

This way you make it very easy (same principle as with polls) for people to give their opinion about something, just with one simple click.

To add a voting system to your WordPress blog, you could use the GD Star Rating plugin.

Do you have other tricks?

There are loads more ideas and tricks in the world that could improve the user interactivity of your blog, so if you would like to share some that could help me or the readers, please do so in the comments!

Keywords in the Title

Using the right keywords in your title tag can produce the results you are looking for. If people search on a relevant keyword your descriptive title tag will seduce people to click on your link. A title is the first thing the searcher sees in a search result and if that title includes the keywords they are looking for, they might click the link.

But what is the right title format? You should always use the most important keyword(s) in your title because that’s where people are looking for. For example, if you article is about webdesign and colors, you could name your title “Effective Colors In Webdesign”. You have written an interesting title, and you used the most important keywords.

HTML

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<title>Effective Colors In Webdesign</title>

Keywords in the Description

A searcher will see a description in the search engine results right under the title, and it’s a important factor that makes people click your link. You should also include you most important keywords here as well, but make the description an explanation of your title. If people aren’t sure your article is helpful for them, use the description to convince them.

Keywords in the description doesn’t help you rank better, it just gives more information about your page to the search engine user.

What is a good description? Let’s go back to our example: “Effective Colors in Webdesign”. We could use “With this article you will be provided excellent examples on how to use colors in webdesign. Colors which are effective and awesome to see.”. If our example article is about this subject, it will give you an explanation of the title, right?

HTML

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<meta name="description" content="With this article you will be provided excellent examples on how to use colors in webdesign. Colors which are effective and awesome to see. " />

Specified Keywords

You can specify the keywords you would like to have your article ranked on. The search engines use that (together with the keywords in the title and description) to determine what you page is about. The META keyword tag doesn’t work in Google, but Yahoo! still uses this tag. It doesn’t do much, but everything can help.

I recently learned you should use every keyword you add to this META tag only once, because a search engine links every keyword to each other. Back to our example, the following META tags do the same for your article, and the first one isn’t very good. The second one is better.

Wrong

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<meta name="keywords" content="Effective color Webdesign, Effective color, color webdesign, webdesign color, colors webdesign" />

Correct

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<meta name="keywords" content="Effective, Color, Webdesign" />

Keywords in Content

Usually this shouldn’t become a point a searcher will notice, but a search engine definitely does. Keyword density is the ratio of keywords against the total number of words in your content. Your content should have a maximum of 5% keywords on your whole article. Five percent is not a low percentage: 1 on the 20 words should a keyword.

Anyway, you shouldn’t forget you are writing your content for your readers. Just don’t stuff your article full of keywords if that makes the story uninteresting to read. You should use keywords where they fit in and here’s another thing, if you use too many keywords you will be punished by the search engines for keyword stuffing.

Keywords in Tags

Search engines see the HTML of the content and they mark some words surrounded by tags as more important then others. h1, h2, h3 tags will tell your visitors they are the title of an article, the chapters or the sub-chapters. The search engine scans a page in the same way and therefore those h1, h2 and h3 tags will be marked as more important. Read more about heading tags here.

But there are more more-important tags. strong and italic(em) tags are more important then your normal paragraphs, because they tell your visitors they are more important. Those words jump out of the paragraph because there is more weight on them. The search engine values those words in the same way: they are more important. Many other “special” tags are valued different by search engines.

So, putting keywords in special tags will only value those words as more important, which is great for you if it’s used correctly.

Keywords are important in Search Engine Optimizing

You have learnt why keywords are important for your search engine results. The secret is to use keywords in a responsible, yet effective way to use the search engines in your advantage. You should do that!

If you find any more ways to use keywords, don’t hesitate to add a comment to the conversation.

In this article, a part of WordPress that isn’t fully search engine friendly gets discussed. I am talking about Category pages, Tag pages and Archive pages. Google is still punishing wordpress blogs for having the so-called duplicated content.

What is duplicated content?

I think it is pretty easy to guess. Bloggers publish their content online, which means it is freely available for anyone interested. That’s the great thing of the web. But unfortunately, when it is accessible for that many people, the change exists people steal your articles and publish it on their own weblog. You hate this, but you can not do anything about it. Good for us, Google will punish them for you and will give the blog a rank penalty. Or even delete them from the search results.

You have a good idea what duplicated content is about, right?

But, what does that has to do with me?

Everything. No, I don’t mean you steal stuff. The WordPress blogging platform you are using have apart pages for the archives, categories and tags. Usually, in any of those pages, an excerpt of the original article is given to give your reader a general impression what your article is about.

Great thing, make people interested in your articles! Keep your visitors as long on your websites are you could, but don’t forget about the search engines! They do not like duplicated content, right? So, why are we using the exact same texts in 4 different pages?

By default, WordPress doesn’t have the functionality to provide a solution for this problem. To make your blog as search engine friendly as possible, we have to solve this problem. Or we might get in trouble as people talking about this issue here.

We know the problem. What about the solution?

The solution is not that hard to find. We need to tell the search engines we don’t want certain parts of the weblog shouldn’t be indexed. Of course, we have some HTML codes available doing the job. Add the following line of codes between the <head></head> tags.

Make sure you only add this line to the pages you don’t want to get indexed. It isn’t a good thing to block the search engines from your complete weblog!

Do you think a plugin is better for you? The guys from SEOlogs.com have developed such plugin. This plugin is very simple, it adds the <meta> tag to the parts of the blog you don’t want to get indexed.

Today, you have greatly improved the search engine friendliness of your blog!

This time we are going to talk about the heading tags you can use in HTML. To give you an example: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. These tags are used in HTML to define a heading or title.

The advantages of using heading tags?

Heading tags are used to create split content in parts to make things easier to read. It gets easier for the visitor to scan the document for the more important points of the article. A article with great use of heading tags could keep users reading on.

But there is more. Another great advantage of headings is the power it has in search engine optimizing. The search engines have accepted the use of headings and will give more value to this text in an article. A keyword-rich heading will significant improve your search engine visibility.

Which heading tag to choose from when looking from the SEO-aspect?

You have the choice between h1, h2 and all the way up to h6. The standard font-sizes vary between large and very small. h1 is the largest, and h6 is the smallest. The largest is the most important one and should be used only once in a single article or website. Using only one keyword-rich h1 tag will tell the search engine what your article or page is about.

The h2 tags should be used for sub-headings. To give you an example, this tag should be used to redivide the content described in the h1 tag. The content split by the h2 tag should be redivided by the h3 tag and so all the way down to h6.

Of course, a h1 is more important than h2 or h6. But a proper use of h2 and h3 tags will definitely improve the search engine visibility of your web page as well as a using h1.

A real example, please?

I have created an example which explains where to use what heading tag. And I’ve added some information behind it, to make sure you understand the meaning of each tags and what their purpose is in websites and articles.

In my opinion, it is the best to use the tags in the way of the example, when you want to make your website a bit search engine friendly.

Questions?

Shoot your questions at me via the contact page or drop your comment below.

What is a permalink?

Well, how should I explain permalinks. The best way should be with a example.

http://www.divitodesign.com/2008/03/how-you-should-write-quality-permalinks/

The colored and underlined part of the whole URL is the permalink. The other part is just the domain. Everything that is typed after the domain is your permalink.

Why is this permalink important?

A quality permalink is important because it could give you a couple extra keywords and therefore improve your ranking. In the results keywords are bolded. Look below for an example (search query; Overflow CSS)

As you can see; the green URL has a bolded area as well. This means the words in the URL are also counted as keywords. Conclusion: Google thinks keywords in permalinks can be used to improve your visibility in search engines.

When I look at my own search behavior, I usually look for the title and look how many parts of the entry are bolded. How more, how faster I click the link. Those extra keywords in the URL are going to help you improve to guide the searchers onto YOUR web page.

Many of you are using WordPress and guess what: The options to change your default permalink exists.

Ready? Set. Go!

This guide has been written when using WordPress version 2.1.3. Future versions of WordPress shouldn’t change much in the approach.

1. Log in to your AdminCP.
2. Select Options
3. Select “Permalinks”
4. Take a look at the image below. You should select the “Custom, specify below” radio button:

As you can see, my permalinks are built on the /year/month/post principle.

5. Type the tags you’d like included in your permalink. More tags can be found on the wordpress permalinks page.

You do not only improve your search engine visibility with this SEO trick, you will also improve your accessibility. Your users know exactly where they are when they take a short look at the URL. Quality permalinks are better than the WordPress’ default ?p=123 ones. Now you understand you have an important task to do to improve search engine results placement, as well as guiding those searchers to your website.

Introduction

I had a problem a couple days back. My blog should be moved from http://www.divitodesign.com/blog to http://www.divitodesign.com/, but I didn’t know how to do this a proper way: a search engine friendly way. Of course, I didn’t want to get any penalty’s for duplication content or any other nasty stuff. I searched Google, and I found a interesting way to do this. It works fine and I’ll explain it to you in this tutorial.

Why not redirect via HTML?

Why should you use .htaccess to redirect? Why not use the simple HTML redirect? For the normal webmaster, the HTML way is much easier because you don’t know anything about the other one. It might be easier but this isn’t really true. Take a moment to learn and it gets even more simple then the HTML one!

So, why not use HTML redirects in search-engine-friendly pages. In the past, HTML redirecting was used by spammers to deceive the SE’s. This black-hat-search-engine-optimization trick is called Cloaking. As you all know, the search engines aren’t stupid and today a HTML redirect gets a penalty. Therefore, we are going to use an other and better way.

Explaining the 301 redirect

The redirect we are going to use is the so-called “301 redirect”. Normally, when someone visits a webpage they’ll get code 200 (green light everything is OK). We have moved this original file and we want the visitors of the old page to not see a 404 code (an error page). Because simply they will not come back. More important; the Search Engines are visitors as well and when they see a 404 error, they’ll delete this webpage from the search results. We are going to tell the SE’s the page is moved permanently and tell them its new home (with a 301 code).

Step by Step

Make sure you are on a Apache server, this method will not work on a Windows based hosting solution.

- Create a new file in the root directory of your website. You should name this file “.htaccess” (don’t forget there shouldn’t be anything before the dot).
- Open the file with a plain text editor like Notepad
- Add the following codes to the file:

Redirect 301 /old/directory/file.html http://www.website.com/new/directory/file.html

Explanation

Here is a small explanation. Redirect will simply do the redirect. 301 tells the search engine the page is moved permanently. /old/directory/file.html is the path to the old file. Do NOT use “http://www.website.com”, it will not work. http://www.website.com/new/directory/file.html is the URL the new page is located.

Conclusion

Now you know how to do this little trick. I guess it is even more simple then the HTML redirect. I hope you’ve learned something in today’s lesson.

So what’s the basic idea behind Off-site search engine optimizing? Google always wanted to provide their users with the best and most relevant search results. So they developed a system called PageRank. This system splits important websites from the not-important ones. It tracks the important websites by finding out how many websites are linking to the site. Example: When one site, On-site optimized for the keyword web articles, with 1000 backlinks, will be ending up higher on the search query web articles then a website, optimized for the same keyword, with only 10 backlinks. Do you understand the principle? If not, read Wikipedia.

What’s included?

- Create great content
- Link exchange
- Directory submission
- Forum signatures

Create great content

I think great content is a good way to create a great website. You can be the best in SEO and let your website rank high on the search engines. People will find your website, but what if they don’t find anything useful for them? They will leave right away and might find a website with more information. I think you should find a balance between SEO work and content writing. After all, you are writing your content and/or articles for your visitors (well, I am).

There are enough websites out there who are looking to provide the best resources for their visitors. People with those websites might find your article an interesting add-on for their website and visitors and add a link to your article or website. There you have a quality backlink, because you’ll receive a link from a website with the same subject. Another thing that’s great from such a link is that it isn’t a link exchange, but a one-way link. SE’s will see those links as a greater valuable one.

Link exchange

You definitely aren’t the only website out there with the same subject. Why not make use of this and email the owners of the other sites, with the question to do a link exchange. You’ll add their links to your website, and they’ll add yours to their sites. What’s the problem with that? As you read before, one-way links are more valuable as a link exchange, but this is a great way to receive links to.

So, how can you do this? Well, search Google or any other search engine with the subject of your website! When you find some, send them a professional looking email and ask for a link exchange. But, you should be realistic. Large websites might not be interested in having your link on their website, because you don’t have much to offer them for now. But you can try it right? You might be lucky and get a link from someone with a Pagerank 6 website.

Directory submission

Another way to get you a few backlinks is to add your website to directory websites with pagerank 4+. Of course, the higher the pagerank, the better your backlink is. Don’t get too excited: there are free directories, as well as paid ones. Paid ones usually have the best ‘deeplink’.

Let me explain what ‘deeplinks’ are. As the word suggest, they are links ‘deeper’ inside the website. Example; When you have the homepage and you should click on the category ‘Web’, and after that you go to the subcategory ‘Web development’. The homepage has pagerank 6, the category ‘Web’ has pagerank 3 and the subcategory ‘Web development’ has pagerank 1. Page 5 of this subcategory has pagerank zero. Page 5 of this subcategory is a good example of what a deeplink is.

Your link on that page does a little, or doesn’t improve your pagerank at all. Google might not even spider the link and it’ll not call the link a backlink to your website.

What you can do to get a couple good directories is to find someone who wants to do it for you. They usually have a good and complete list of directories where you should add your website too. After they manually added them to the directories, you’ll get a report on what they did. It’ll cost you almost nothing, 5$ for 200 directories submissions, while saving you a lot of work.

Forum signatures

I’ve picked up a great tip lately. I know it was handy to be using forum signatures for Search Engine Optimizing. You might have been to forums in the past, where you enjoyed hanging out and posted often. Digg up your username and password! When having 2000 posts, they all include a signature. When you add a link to your website in your signature, the forum will automatically update the signature on all those pages you posted on. You can understand, when having 2000 posts, this will make a whole lot pages linking to your website.

When you didn’t have any of these accounts, why not make an account on a couple communities and participate in all different subjects. The best is to find communities with the same subject as your own website. This increases your knowledge in that subject and when you use a good signature, with a couple links, it’s good for your own website too. You might even get some extra visitors from those signatures.

Conclusion

As you can read, these are a couple smart tips to help you boost your Pagerank and search engine position. Of course, there are a lot more techniques, but these are great to start with. When you have enjoyed reading this, read my article on Onsite Search Engine Optimizing as well, because that’s a good attentions point too. Thanks for reading and watch out for the next one.

First I’ll give you some information on offsite and onsite SEO and later on I’ll give you some tip how you could improve your websites.

What is SEO?

My definition of SEO is all the work you do to get your website a high(er) search engine ranking. The difference between offsite and onsite is guessable in my opinion. Onsite is making enhancements to your HTML or PHP web pages. The reason for this is very simple, of course, you want a search engine to recognize the important content (titles, keywords) when crawling your site.

If you didn’t optimize your content and design, the SE will collect insufficient data and this might mean you don’t get the visitors you are looking for. Alright, we continue on the offsite term. Offsite SEO isn’t something you do on the page, but its main goal is to make sure SE’s think your site is an important one.

What is Offsite SEO work?

There are different ways, but the most used is link building. When another ‘big’ website links to yours, SE’s will think your page is important. The more links your website gets, the higher your rank is in the search engines. The best for your website is to do both offsite as onsite SEO.

In this article I’ll show you some smart and easy things you could do to improve your page structure. What I show you here below is what I use myself too. Remember, a browser and search engine isn’t a real person!

What isn’t really a subject on SEO, but what is very important for your webpage, is validating your webpage. You first should make sure your site looks perfect in all browsers. You can validate your xHTML here and your CSS here.

Subjects

- Make good use of keywords
- A good title and site description
- The use of H1′s and H2′s tags
- Add ‘title’ tags to links, ‘alt’ tags to your images

Make good use of keywords

When people search on search engines, they search by keywords. If you don’t have enough keywords or even any at all, they will not find you. Don’t use too many either, SE’s can give your website penalties for that. Always try to blend in your keywords in your content. We’ll talk on that later when we get to subject ‘H1 and H2′.

I’ll give you a code you should use in your webpage. A Meta tag. Use this code to point out ‘standard’ keywords for that webpage.

Don’t add to many keywords in the Meta tag. You should use only your most important keywords. This tag should be added between the tags on your webpage.

But the best way to use keywords is to use them in your content. If you are writing a article on Doctypes, you should add keywords like ‘Doctype’ or ‘DTD’ to your content. The search engines will look through your page, and sees a lot of those keywords. This way, search engines can better determine the page is important.

A good title and description

A good title is important too. Let’s say you are looking for web design books, and you search for it through Google’s SE. In this example, result #1 is a website that sells web design books, but the title and description says this:

Title: ‘Writing books, business books for sale now!’
Description: We are selling all different books, from writing books to business.

Result #5 has some other title and description.

Title: ‘Web design books, most subjects available!’ Store name
Description: We are specialists in web design books. We have most books in stock.

What do you think? Do you go for #1 or #5? The most people will go in this case for the one with the better store description and title. This happens all the time on all different subjects, so it is important to have a good title and description.

Usually, I build my titles like this:
Description with my most important keyword or tagline – Sitename

The codes you should use to add a title to your site are these:

Place these codes between the tags.

If you want to add a description to your website too, add the following codes, between your tags too.

The use of h1 and h2 tags

As you already read, your webpage always should have titles and that your content includes keywords too. But there is another way to let SE’s know what a page is about. I’ll explain why to use h1 or h2 tags. h1 h6 tags are headings. H1 is the biggest, and the smallest. H1 defines the most important heading, in our case, the most important keyword. Using h1′s on your page, you’ll tell search engines this is the ‘content heading’ and one of the most important lines of content.

Therefore h1 should always include your head keyword. H2′s is the most important heading after h1. You should use these in your content as ‘subheadings’. The keywords that aren’t your websites top-priority should be included in this heading.

Add ‘titles’ to your links and ‘alts’ to your images

When someone rolls over your link, they will not see any ‘description’. When you roll over an image, you might see an ‘alt’ text. When you want to call for an ‘alt’ on links, you should use ‘titles’. This title is better for your website’s accessibility and is a great for search engines too.

Think of it this way. You are getting an extra free keyword you don’t even see on your webpage! The SE’s won’t recognize it as an extra keyword, but they see it as clearing up what the link is linking to.

If you want to add a title tag to your link, please follow this way:

SEO Lesson

You see you have got 3 times the word SEO now. If this was your keyword, you simply have one extra in the link its ‘title’.

This same trick goes with images. Now, don’t use a ‘title’, but use an ‘alt’ tag instead. When you know roll over an image, it’ll clear up what the image is about to the search engines. And you get your extra keyword(s).

You’ve hit the SEO jackpot three times.

Conclusion

If you haven’t thought of points like these before, study this article. It’ll help you develop your websites as they become visible in the search engines. Remember, you should do offsite SEO work too. Let me know what are your thoughts on this subjects, and possible improvements.

Thanks for reading!