Links – the official currency of SEO-land In this article I often use the words credibility, authority, confidence, reputation, etc. I may be inconsistent with my use of words, but they all refer to the same thing – this abstract currency that flows among sites that link to each other. When page A links to page B, page A gives page B a fraction of its authority. If page A has too many outgoing links, it will end up with little authority. Similarly, if page B has few links but receives many links, it will end up with a great deal of authority. Keep this concept in mind when you read the new few sections of this article.Incoming Links The value of an incoming link depends on: The content of the linking page The link text The content immediately around the link The number of links on the page The position of the link within the content (header, footer, main body?) How well the content of the linking page compares to that of the target website If you’re considering purchasing incoming links, I strongly recommend you consider all the points above before reaching for your wallet. Incoming links cannot damage your rankings. SEs understand you can’t control who links to your website so you will not be penalized if you receive links from bad neighbourhoods. They will simply be of no benefit to you. The only problem is when you link to a bad neighbourhood (see external links below). External Links External links are an important aspect of quality content. It’s always good to offer a few links to related quality content. But beware of whom you link to. Incoming links cannot damage your reputation, but an outgoing link to a bad neighbourhood can very much do so. A link is a ‘vote of confidence’ to the page you’re linking to and you definitely do not want to give your precious votes to poor quality websites – quite simply – it makes you look bad. Reciprocal Links I’m well known to be sceptical when it comes to reciprocal links (probably because of this article ). One true, sincere incoming link is much more valuable than a thousand reciprocal links. If you read the ‘Incoming Links’ section above you’ll understand, but here’s why: Reciprocal links Link is usually on a page with poor or no content Links are normally considered poor quality because the content surrounding the link is unrelated Content of linking page is almost always unrelated Linking pages normally have dozens if not hundreds of external links Link pages normally have low PR because of the number of outgoing links So basically, reciprocal links give you a tiny share of something that isn’t worth much in the first place.One-Way links on the other hand… Link is on a page of quality content Content is related to the link Content of linking page is related to your website Linking page with have a minimal amount of outgoing links, usually just yours. Article pages can only improve their PRs because they get traffic, they get bookmarked and linked to by people (used as reference). So basically, you get a big share of something that’s very valuable will only get better! I’m no genius but I know what I’d go for… So one-way links are a win-win situation. “Oh yeah? How the hell am I going to get incoming links genius-boy?”, you say. Fear not my friend, read on and you shall find the way…

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing. Visit his website, one week marketing review, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

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Why Directories Are Important

Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons:

- Listings within major directories provide “context” to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, “blue cats”).

- Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.

- Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.

- The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape – once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

Submitting to Directories

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

- Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a $299 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and $600 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high, unfortunately.

- Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.

- Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing-only directory (such as MarketingWHO.com) and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

- You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if it’s worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if it’s at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing review. Visit his website, one week marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

Before you start optimizing your site for search engines, there are some tools that you should arm yourself with. These tools can become your best friends when it comes to SEO, especially when you’re just starting out. The first and most important step in any search engine position campaign is recognizing which keywords you should optimize your site for, and there are several pieces of software that are useful for this, including Wordtracker, Optilink, Zeus, and Agent Web Ranking.

WordTracker’s keyword research service is the only one on the Internet that provides a comprehensive database of the most popular keywords in a particular industry. It can help you recognize associated keywords that you may have never thought of. One of the differences between WordTracker and other tools is that it can spot subtle differences, for example singular and plural keywords, or often-misspelled ones, and tell you which versions are more popular.

Optilink has become very popular in a short period of time because of the power it gives you over search engines. Every site that links to you boosts your ranking, especially if its content is relevant to yours. Optilink helps you to come up with strategies to improve your link structure and get a better ranking. Here are some of the things it does:

1. Analyzes the link structures of your top-ranking competitors.

2. Tells you why your competitors rank well, so you can try to copy what they’re doing.

3. Tells you what kind of rankings you can expect if you adopt similar linking strategies.

4. Helps to monitor sites you’ve exchanged links with, to ensure that they’re still linking to you.

Zeus has an excellent way of increasing the link popularity of your site — by exchanging with other sites that are related to yours, giving you a head start on your SEO. Zeus does the work for you, identifying sites that it thinks you should try to exchange links with. If you look for the sites yourself you’ll often find it’s not worth the time, but an SEO tool like Zeus lets you do it instantly. Once you’ve got links, you can manage and maintain them automatically.

Agent Web Ranking helps you to check your sites rankings – this is good to see how your SEO efforts are working. Many people just optimize and submit, thinking the work is done, but they’re wrong. You need to continuously check your site’s rankings, and Agent Web Ranking is a reliable and quick tool for doing this.

The only real problem you might have with any of this software is that search engines can change the way they display their results, breaking the tools until their authors update them. This means that most position reporting software gets outdated very quickly. It’s not that much of an issue, though, as most software is provided on a subscription basis with updates included, rather than bought only once.

If you really want to stay ahead in the SEO industry, you should try as many different tools as you can. By paying attention to what tools others are using and learning how they work, you will have the edge in the SEO market. So get out there, and download these SEO tools of the trade!

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: one week marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: one week marketing. Visit his website, one week marketing review, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

Maneuvering the business process and ensuring the right proportions of profit earning are the fundamentals of all types of the business, whether it is small business or the large corporate. Internet marketing is no exception. Online businesses employ a number of techniques and strategies to increase the positioning of the website in the improve Search Engine rank.

Search Engine Optimization is also referred as SEO is the process of achieving the best organic ranking with the help of some specified tools in the Search Engine result pages like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and many more search engines and thus to enhance the web traffic for a website. Search Engine is rather a complex and on going process which normally takes bit time to show off its result of driving the traffic for the website.

As there are enormous numbers of techniques to optimizing the website, web masters use only the uphold techniques for the Search Engine Optimization Management. One of the primary things that business profession takes into account to summarize the tools for achieving the great search engine listing is the keyword which the web spiders use for extracting the related information. Many search engines index a page based on key word phrases and oftentimes add value if the key word appears within a certain concentration range. The caveat here is that many search engines will lower the web page ranking if the keyword appears too many times since this is alleged as an attempt to trick the search engine. Keyword search engine optimization uses not only keyword concentration but also keyword placement. Many search engines place higher emphasis on key word phrases that are placed in web page titles and HTML header tags.

Another method of SEO is to increase the number of links to the website being optimized. Most Internet Marketing companies design their algorithms with the supposition that a page that is highly allied to is more likely to offer quality content then one that has no links to it. Many web masters had taken advantage of this assumption by using link exchange programs to increase the number of links to their site. For this reason, many search engines now bring down two way links in favor of one way links.

Meta tags are one answer for the higher Search Engine rankings. The page title and the actual content are more important for the search engine ranking than the Meta tags. Visitors are also driven by the organic Directory submission services. People often mistake with the Directory submission and Search Engine Optimization being the same. Directories have the exaggerated part in increasing the ranking in the search engine rankings by sending a huge number of traffic.

Written by Ricco Richardson
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