Search engine optimization is a complex art form that is often confusing to people that have no experience in the matter. There are so many methods that the search engines use to index and rank web pages that it can be utterly impossible to perfect search engine optimization fully. However, there are techniques used that simplify that task of building backlinks (a crucial aspect of SEO). Backlinks are the backbone of any web site’s popularity and search engine ranking. A backlink is simply a link that points to your web site. The more links there are posted on the internet that link to one of your web pages, the more popular your site appears to be in the eye’s of the search engines that index every link online.

Social Networking and Links

Social networking has changed the way links are used on the internet, because links are no longer only posted by web site owners. Now, utilizing sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and YouTube, people are posting links to a variety of web pages so that their friends, family, and anyone else interested can find the useful content on that page, whether it be media or an interesting article. It is estimated that social networking and social media has increased the amount of links on the internet by more than a third. With these facts in mind it is easy to see why people are now employing backlink building methods that are designed to go viral through social media and social networking.

DoFollow and NoFollow

When search engines index web pages they also index the links on those pages, and depending on whether or not the link has a nofollow attribute, the search engine bot will actually click the link and index the page that it is brought to. If the link is a dofollow link then the search engine will index every aspect of the page and the link, transferring what is known in SEO as “link juice”” to the site that is being linked to. If the link is nofollow then that means the search engine will count the link as a backlink to the specified page but it will not always follow the link and index the subsequent page. The best kind of backlinks to have are dofollow.

Social Profiles and Backlinks

Social networking sites are often called web 2.0 sites, because they give everyone the opportunity to have their own little slice of the internet; their own web page. When you create a page on a site that has a high PR or a high amount of backlinks, any links that you put on that page will instantly be given more “link juice” by the search engines. When you create a Twitter account, you are given a Twitter URL, which is basically a web page.

Although Twitter uses a link shortener to prevent anchor texted links, there are hundreds of other social sites that have a decent PR and allow you to create profile pages for backlinks. In fact, identi.ca used to give members a profile page that had a PR of 6! With this kind of PR, any link that you post towards your  site on that profile page will instantly absorb some of the PR of the PR6 page. Perhaps even more beneficial, the links were dofollow. This is just one example of how high quality backlinks can be built through social networking and social profiles.

Google rates or judges and shows a websites overall likability and this is called page ranking. The more traffic received is a sign of a higher ranked pages, which move your site closer to the top of Google. SERP is an abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page which is where you page rank is displayed. All of the effort put in to the building and optimization of your sight all goes toward the rank of it on the SERP. One of the more used techniques for increasing ones rank on the SERP is a backlink. The backlinks are what makes the website what it is. A backlink’s job in basic is to get more people to come to your website. The more links your site has the more the popularity will increase.

Short and Simple Compared To Long and Drawn Out

There is not just one way to build a backlink for a sight. The majority of website owners do it the easy way and just spam other sites to draw attention to their own sight. While this is always a possibility, most people would refrain from going to a website that is spamming, though it works on occasion. Google also disagrees with spamming as do other competitors so usually its used for last resort. The chances of an illegitimate spam based website having success are very slim and nearly impossible. The smarter thing to do would to be building your website by the rules, instead of the easy way.

Structure and Composition

The best way to bring popularity to your website besides legitimacy is giving interesting information that a user would want to look at. If they like what information you are using the could link it to your blog. The more popularity accumulated the more links you will have on different types of websites and blogs. With the social bookmarking feature it makes it easier to get visitors to recommend your sight to others and different social networks such as Myspace and Facebook.

Promoting and Advertising

Advertising and promoting are other common ways to attract people to your site. There are many different types of ads that can be used and sites that allow advertising to be used on it. Once a good keyword is found or settled upon efforts need to be increased to create more websites. One of the great thing about owning so many different websites is that they can all be linked together, which in the end drives up your SERP rankings and general popularity.

Conclusion

Backlinks are very important issues when it comes to running your own website, especially the quantity of them. Having a fewer number is not as good for the website as a larger number would be. The end result is that the more backlinks and advertising increases your sites popularity which directly affects you SERP.

There is a large debate in the search engine optimization (SEO) community whether utilizing automated directory submissions to distribute articles and web pages across the internet is beneficial. While this debate is continuing, more automated submitter software is being developed and released.

How Do These Work?

Automated directory submission software takes your login information on many (sometimes into the thousands) social bookmarking or article directory sites and logs you in. It directly routes to the submission page and submits an article, blog post or whole web page to that site.

Is This Advantageous

Although most of these websites frown upon their use, they are quite handy and beneficial. It saves hours of time from having to manually input these articles and web pages into another website. It saves further time by signing you up to the site all at once. With thousands of social bookmarking and article directory sites, it can literally take days to submit one article to each.

The articles and web page submissions give you more exposure across the internet through backlinks as well as users simply reading what you have to say. This will entice more individuals to visit your site which could lead to higher sales and conversions (if you have advertisements).

The Consequences of its Use

Since most bookmarking and article directory sites frown upon its use, they will terminate your account with them if they discover this is submission method is being used. Some even employ bots to verify this wasn’t added by an automated article submitter. Also the Google indexing bots could get suspicious if an article or web page is suddenly submitted to hundreds of sites at once. This could affect your PageRank and in turn, traffic.

The SEO Community

The SEO community is torn on the use of this type of software. On the one hand, users believe it gives them more time to improve on their articles and focus on high-quality content. Others believe that manual submissions provide higher-quality backlinks which can improve your Google PageRank score.

While there is a major debate as to the benefit of utilizing these sites, the wheel continues to turn. New contributors to the internet find it difficult to manually submit to so many directories so they turn to these automated programs, thus creating a market. As technology helps everything become more automated, perhaps these directory submitters will be built into websites.

Many people don’t understand the impact their web hosting account has on their search engine optimization efforts. While a web hosting account may seem as if it does nothing more than broadcast your site to the world, the internal workings of the hosting account actually have a great affect on your link building efforts. Link building is perhaps the most important aspect of search engine optimization, as it directly defines your website’s online presence. The more links that point back to your site, the more popular your site will appear to be to the search engines.

Self Link Building

Instead of waiting for others to give you backlinks, you have the option of building your own online link empire. While there are many tools that can help you accomplish this, there are only a few ways that will actually let you do this legitimately without significant repercussions from the search engines. Search engines understand the link building game better than anyone, and the only kind of links that really give your site a boost in the SERPs are links that are hosted on established and relevant sites in your niche. This means that building a link empire by yourself is somewhat difficult because you must have access to a lot of relevant domains. However it can be done by using free web hosting accounts.

Free Web Hosting and Web 2.0 Properties

When I say “Free Web Hosting” I am not referring to the type of web hosting accounts that give you a tiny amount of resources and a shared IP address. These web hosting accounts are practically useless for search engine optimization. Instead, I am referring to sites that will let you create free blogs and min-sites without paying for their hosting services, such as Blogger or Blogspot. With these mini-sites, you can build a backlinking empire within 6 months to a year, by filling each mini-site with relevant and useful content in your niche.

Diversification and SEO

Link building is all about diversification. You need to have your site’s link posted on as many websites as possible, to establish solid web presence. Fortunately, there are hundreds of free blogging sites that you can use to link back to your main site and create a substantial link network for free. These sites are already highly ranked in the search engines, and there a hundreds of them to choose from. You could easily outsource the creation and content creation of these blogs, and within a few months you would have a massive network of blogs that you could use to link to your main websites within a niche.

Conclusion

While the cliche saying is “You get what you pay for” this does not hold true for every concept. In  this case free web hosting could prove to be very beneficial, especially if you have access to hundreds of blogs that are under your control within a particular niche. Imagine having all of this power for free, with only the cost of the content creation being necessary.

Keyword meta tags are an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). Within the SEO community, there are varying opinions on how to actually use the keyword meta tag.

Keyword Meta Tags Defined

Keyword meta tags are HTML tags that store information about a web page but are not visible within the browser. Search engines use this information when they index web pages. The meta tags are located at the head of a web page or blog post. The source code would be presented as:

<meta name = “Keywords” content = “Your set of keywords for the page”>

Meta Tag Abuse

Meta tags can be abused by internet marketers by utilizing the practice known as “keyword stuffing.” This is the procedure of placing as many keyword meta tags onto a page as possible, many which do not relate to the actual content of the web page. This was an effort to manipulate search engine results.

Current Practices

Most search engines became aware of this unethical practice and consequently changed their algorithms to compensate for this method. If there are enough unrelated keyword meta tags on a web page, the search engine simply won’t index the page or even the whole site.

Google’s Response to Meta Tags

Google officially stated in 2009 that it does not recognize keyword meta tags when indexing pages and determining web search ranking. They’ve taken this stance in response to keyword stuffing and created an indexing algorithm that takes into account many different aspects of a web page.

Google also stated that they could utilize this information in the future in case they find a useful method for meta tags. They haven’t used this feature for years so it’s unlikely they will change their policy.

Meta Tags and Other Companies

Although Google is the largest search engine, there are other search engines that continue to utilize meta tags in their indexing. For instance, Yahoo uses a distinct list of keywords related to a specific page. There are also software applications that utilize keyword meta tags such as, Site Search software.

Are Keyword Meta Tags Beneficial?

Although Google states there is no affect of meta tags on search results, it cannot hurt to put them in if planning on submitting the site to other search engines. Since meta tags have a large affect on many search engines, it may be beneficial to include them during a website build.

Meta tags can be a useful resource on other sites besides Google. Since they don’t affect Google, it’s a good idea to include them. Additionally, Google stated that meta tags may be used in the future so it’s better to be prepared than not.