If you’ve been studying search engine optimization recently, then you probably know that having a lot of backlinks for your site is one of the best ways to improve your site’s search engine rankings. If you’re not familiar with backlinks – a backlink is a link to your site from another website. When a site places a link to your site on one of their web pages, it is indexed by the search engine as a backlink to your site. The more backlinks you have, the more popular your site appears to be in the search engines.  Therefore backlink building is one of the fundamental aspects of search engine optimization, and it should practiced by anyone trying to bring more traffic to their website.

Building Backlinks

There are many ways to get backlinks for your site, and most of them are time consuming and bring very little results, despite an inordinate amount of work. If you want to be successful building backlinks, then you’ll need to focus on quality instead of quantity. It would be better to have 10 backlinks on sites that are relevant to your niche and receive a lot of traffic, than to have a large volume of backlinks from sites that are completely irrelevant and/or low in traffic. If you want to reach success with your backlinks, then you’ll need to make them manually instead of trying all of the shortcuts that will only result in low quality backlinks which will not significantly improve your search engine ranking. When it comes to building backlinks you have two main options – you can seek the help and permission of other site owners by doing link exchanges, social bookmarking and advertising, or you can build the links yourself.

Paid Linls

A good way to build your backlink count is to offer other site owners a position on your site in exchange for a position on your site. This way both parties benefit and both parties save time and money. Try to find sites that are relevant to your site and then contact the owner and ask them if they would like to do a link exchange with you. Usually the site owner will not hesitate to put your link on their website, as long as your site is clean and does not appear to violate Google’s terms of service. Many times site owners do not want their link placed on a site that could be conducting illegal or immoral activity, and just as you would like quality backlinks, so would they.

Building Link Farms

Perhaps the best way to build a solid network of links that would be most beneficial to you would be to have a network of websites that all link to each other, with one main website being the focus. These are called link farms, and they are the most profitable form of backlink building. The reason why link farms are far more profitable than any other form of backlink building is because you are the only person benefiting. Since all of the sites belong to you, you’ll be maximizing your chances of keeping visitors viewing your web pages. Instead of clicking away to another website, your visitors will be traveling through a maze of your own websites, not only giving you a substantial amount of quality backlinks, but also maximizing the profit made from each visitor.

Warning: Before building a link farm you should know that Google does not like link networks from the same IP address. In other words, you’ll need to make sure each site is hosted by a different IP address. One of the ways you can do this is to build blogs and micro sites on web 2.0 properties like Squidoo or Hubpages. There are tons of these sites online, and each one is hosted by an IP address that is different from your site. You could also purchase Class C IP addresses from your hosting company in some instances to have all of your own websites hosted on different IP addresses.

In the past, building websites required advanced skills in internet technology and various programming languages. Webmasters needed to be well-versed in HTML, PHP, CSS, and other programming fields, in order to create even a relatively simple website. Many times website owners would have to pay web developers a hefty fee to set up their website for them, and in many cases this still happens today. However, as the the internet has become more user-friendly, and with the advent of web 2.0, website owners can now use what are called CMS (Content Management Systems) to build, organize and maintain their websites. Some of these content management system let users upload preset themes that can be customized easily within a user-friendly interface. One of the most popular content management systems available is WordPress.

What is WordPress?

Although WordPress is actually a blogging platform, it is commonly used to create static web pages and complete websites. WordPress is basically a website administrative interface that lets you control every aspect of the site using tools that even the most novice users can utilize. These tools let you post text, images and any other kind of media quickly and easily without having any programming knowledge whatsoever. WordPress is updated on a regular basis you don’t have to worry about it becoming obsolete at all. WordPress can be installed by a complete novice using tools provided by your web host such as Fantastico or Simple Script.

Wordpress Plugins

One of the most appealing aspects of WordPress is it’s expandability. By using a vast array of plugins, users can do just about anything they desire with ease. New plugins are being created everyday, and they can be installed in less than one minute by even the most inexperienced webmaster. Once installed the plugin resides in the left side of the WordPress interface in the navigational bar, where you can easily adjust the plugin settings and control every aspect of your site’s functionality. Using plugins like the All-in-One SEO pack, you can even automatically optimize your site’s pages for the search engines.

Creating Static Web Pages with WordPress

Since WordPress was originally a blogging platform, creating a regular website can present some challenges to the novice user. The main problem is that the latest post will always be displayed at the top of the main page, which makes it hard to design a website as you would like it. Every time you add a new post, the order of your content will be disrupted since the latest post will be displayed at the top of the front page. This obviously is not desired if you want to have your content arranged a certain way. So how do you fix it? Well the answer is actually quite simple – use a plugin! There is a plugin called StickyOrderer that will let you organize your posts in the fashion want them, and you can do this on every page of your site! Using this plugin alone you can create well organized websites, instead of scattered blogs.

Many webmasters have resorted to using hosting multiple domains to increase their business’s outreach. While using multiple domains to diversify your traffic stream may seem to be an appealing option, the same outcome can be reached using a single domain. How you may ask? Well, with each domain you have the option of creating sub-domains. In this article we will discuss how sub-domains can accomplish the same results as multiple domain hosting, with no additional monetary investment.

Sub-Domains

A sub-domain is a secondary domain to your main domain. An example of a sub-domain would be subdomain.domains.com.In this example, “domains.com” is the primary domain, and “subdomains.domain.com” is the sub-domain. You’ve probably noticed that many websites have a support sub-domain setup for customer support purposes. The reason why sub-domains offer the same advantages as multiple domain hosting, is because the search engines view these sub-domains as separate websites. Sub-domains can have their own separate search engine ranking, thereby allowing you to capitalize on a wider range of keywords for your niche, much in the same way multiple domain hosting would.

Dominating Your Niche with Sub-Domains

Sub-domains give webmasters the ability to create multiple websites within a single domain. Each sub-domain is then centered around a particular keyword, thereby improving the search engine ranking of that particular sub-domain, and ultimately your entire website. Remember that sub-domains are seen as independent websites by search engines, which means that any links that point to your main website from your sub-domain are seen as backlinks! Backlinks are links that point to your website’s URL from other websites. Using sub-domains to create backlinks for your main website is a good way to create what is known as a “link farm”. The SEO benefits reaped from using sub-domains is almost unlimited, as you can have as many sub-domains as you’d like, each one focusing on a particular keyword. For example, if your niche is “electronic pets”, then you could create several sub-domains called “ElectronicDogs.ElectronicPets.com”, or “ElectronicHamsters.ElectronicPets.com”. Now whenever an individual searches for “electronic hamsters”, your site stands a good chance of receiving a high page rank!

Using Sub-Domains Correctly

Using sub-domains to boost your site’s search engine ranking can be a very simple task, as long as you use a bit of common sense when doing so. The key to using sub-domains correctly is to make sure each sub-domain is very relative to the main domain. Meaning you want to make sure your sub-domain is relevant to the niche of your main website. Creating a sub-domain centered around electronics attached to a main domain that concerns dog grooming would obviously not be beneficial.  Setting up sub-domains only takes a minute or so for each one, and most web hosting services allow you to set up sud-domains at no additional cost. For this reason, you should not be afraid to experiment with sub-domains to see what works best for your particular situation. Try gathering 20 relevant keywords t your niche and then set up a sub-domain for each individual keyword. The setup links to your main website on each sub-domain and place relevant keyword rich content on each sub-domain. Wait one week and check your search engine results. The key to enhancing your search engine optimization abilities is to practice with trial and error.

It seems as if the entire world has shifted their focus towards Google and has forgotten about the once ever-so popular Yahoo. Although Google has taken over the search engine industry, there are still a huge group of internet users that use Yahoo loyally, and excluding them form your marketing campaign can be extremely negative towards the growth of your online business. Even if 90% of your traffic is coming from Google, are you willing to throw away the other ten percent due to an oversight in your marketing venue?

You may be under the impression that all search engines follow the same rules when ranking websites but this is simply not true. Yahoo’s search engine standards vary slightly from that of Google’s so it is important to consider the difference when designing your website. The best approach is to build a website that appeases all of the major search engines, including Yahoo. The following information will give you an idea of what Yahoo is looking for.

Link Organization

When it comes to indexing of your website, Yahoo’s crawlers pay extra attention toward the internal structure of the site. Google focuses more on external links such as backlinks, which also matter  for Yahoo optimization, but not as much. In fact, it is possible to have  high ranking site in yahoo with hardly any backlinks! However if your site has  a disorganized internal link structure, then you are going to have a very hard time making it to the top page of Yahoo’s search results. This means you’ll need to devise a site map and submit it to Yahoo for maximum success.

Anchor Text

Instead of simply posting URLs, it is best to use anchor text containing keywords. Anchor texts that contain keywords will enhance your Yahoo SEO efforts by double. Make sure the keyword used in the anchor text is relevant to the page you are linking to.

Keyword Optimization with Title Tags

Of course this trick works with all search engines, but it is extremely important in Yahoo. By putting primary keywords in the main title tags of your web pages, you’ll find that many of your pages gain a very high page rank quickly. Yahoo pays very close attention towards tags of all sorts including meta tags.

Search Engine Optimized URLs

Make sure all of your site’s URLs contain relevant keyword. If you are using a good content management system then this step will be done automatically. A good way to optimize URLs to be search engine friendly is to place dashes between words on key phrases. For example, instead of using the URL “ example.com/lookatthislink” you could use the URL “example.com/look-at-this-link.” Using this simple trick will boost your search engine ranking in Yahoo greatly.

Quality Content

Yahoo places a high priority on the quality of the content. This means that stuffing your content with keywords and writing about anything will not work, in fact it will be very detrimental towards the ranking of your web page. To be successful ion Yahoo you’ll need to use quality content with the correct keyword density and placement.

Social bookmarking has become one of the best ways for website owners to draw attention to their site exponentially. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of social bookmarking; think Digg or Twitter. Any social site that users can place a link to a certain page on is considered a social bookmarking site. People use these sites to share information or media that they find to be useful or entertaining with their friends and family. These sites make browsing the web a fun and exciting experience because people can find out what is new and interesting without trying to find it themselves. By placing your site on a social bookmarking site, you’ll not only receive direct attention to your site immediately, but you’ll also receive search engine optimization benefits as well.

The Connection Between SEO and Social Bookmarking

Proper search engine optimization requires the use of many methods combined in a collective effort to bring as much traffic to the site as possible. The more traffic your site gets, the more popular it appears to be form the perspective of a search engine. Therefore website popularity is almost like a snowball effect, as the popularity builds the page rank rises and it becomes a progressive traffic generating cycle. Social bookmarking lets you expose your site to a wide group of people, many of which run their own blogs, which are indexed in the search engines just as regular websites are. If someone links to your site on their blog, they are creating what is called a backlink for your site. The more live backlinks your site has on the internet, the more popular it appears to be, and the more favoritism it will receive from the search engines. Perhaps the most important connection between search engine optimization and social bookmarking is that your site can receive popularity before it is ever indexed in the search engines, which ironically is an excellent way to get your site indexed!

Utilizing the Full Power of Social Bookmarking

Since there are so many social bookmarking sites online, it would be foolish to target only one of them. However submitting your link to each one manually can be a time intensive process. Fortunately there are ways to accomplish this without wasting time completing repetitive menial tasks. You have two options; you can outsource the work to another person, or you can use an application that will complete the task for you with very minimal input. The first option is almost self-explanatory – simply hire a freelancer, tell him to sign up to as many social bookmarking sites as you’d like, and then tell them to make a post about your site. You can also pay many freelancers a few pennies each to visit your site and vote it up using the social bookmarking buttons on your site. The second option is a bit more tricky but costs less and is equally effective if done correctly. Simply find an application, or have one made that will complete the aforementioned task automatically. You can find out about applications like these at online forums or by doing a simple web search.

Final Thoughts

While social bookmarking sites are a great way to market your site, they are also inundated with other marketers and spammers, so it is important to remember that this is a numbers game. The more amount of work you put int, the more results you’ll see. The key to improving search engine optimization with social bookmarking is consistency.

Having a useful content management system is a great way to boost the productivity of your online business. Once you become familiar with the administrative interface you can gain supreme control over your entire website, accomplishing tasks in minutes that could normally take hours. You can update your site every day in just a few short clicks, and you can even assign tasks to your workers form within the main interface of your content management system. Using one of these systems as-is is a great way to increase your efforts towards building a successful website, however adding web applications to an already qualified content management system is a sure way to boost productivity beyond comparison.

Creating a Website on Autopilot

Creating and maintaining a website without a good content management system can be a hassle. However simply using a content management system with the included features is not enough to completely streamline website management. There are actually ways to setup a website, put in a few hours of work and let the content management do the rest. By installing highly capable web applications, users can gather content form website automatically via RSS feeds, spin the content automatically, add related pictures, video, or audio to the post and schedule daily postings at any desired frequency. All of this can be done by setting a few preferences and inputting a few RSS feeds into the right web application. To make sure your content management system will be able to accomplish tasks like this, it is important to find out what the most popular web applications are for any prospective content management systems.

Marketing with Web Applications

Content management web applications not only help you build and maintain your website, but they’ll also assist you in marketing your website to a larger audience by automatically handling SEO and viral marketing tasks. For example, there are social bookmarking web applications that will automatically submit every post on your website to a wide selection of social bookmarking sites as soon as they’re posted. There are also web applications that will spin content to be as search engine optimized as possible.

Enhancing Appearance with Web Applications

The right web applications will also help you enhance the appearance of your website by making the changing of templates and other design factors simple and quick. In fact, there are many web applications that are specifically created to automatically improve the appearance appeal of your website. Some applications can even schedule template changes for you, to create the most diverse experience possible for your website’s visitors. There are also applications that automate the tedious tasks involved with adjusting template attributes such as font size, color, and style. Using these kinds of applications is a good way to save time and money on the design of your website.

Final Thoughts

While having a content management system that doesn’t include any web applications may suffice for many online business owners, having the right web applications will undoubtedly boost anyone’s productivity. In the world of online business, productivity is the single most important factor.

The art of search engine optimization is made to seem like rocket science by many SEO “experts”. However, the truth is search engine optimization can be learned by anyone with an hour or two of extra time per day. Successful search engine optimization can be achieved by focusing on only two aspects of page ranking; high quality backlinks and correct keyword usage. To master the two aforementioned attributes all that is needed is  bit of persistence and the following knowledge.

Domain Name Keyword Usage

One of the easiest ways to gain page ranking for your site is to choose a domain name that is close to or identical to the targeted keyword.  For example, if your targeted keyword is “ basketball goals,” then it seems the best name you could possibly have would be basketballgoals.com. However many SEO experts note that search engines give credit to sites with dashes between words, so if your primary option was taken, you could also choose the domain name basketball-goals.com instead. The most important thing to remember is that your sites name should be memorable.

Keyword Density

As mentioned earlier, keywords are one of the most important factors of search engine optimization.  However, the way the keywords are sued are just as important as the keywords themselves. Keywords should be used at a density of 3-5% of the total content. Keyword optimization is best achieved when the keyword is used in the beginning of the text, in the middle and within the last twenty five words of the content on the page. Keywords should also be used strategically within the design of the website, as in title tags, meta tags and anchor texts.

Simple HTML Coding

Search engines index the internet using crawlers, which comb your website for content. These crawlers do a good job of indexing text coded in basic HTML format but cannot effectively index Flash and Javascript content. Therefore, keeping your site encoded with simple text initially will let your site receive a higher page ranking.

Optimizing URL Extensions and Linking

Using keywords in URL extensions is also a good way to target search engine queries. Make sure you separate the extensions with dashes as we mentioned earlier. You also want to get a lot of incoming links from other websites, particularly sites that are authoritative in your niche. However before you being searching for backlink opportunities from other websites, it is a good idea to link your site together internally. The more internal links you have pointing towards your homepage, the better your chances are of the homepage showing up in search engine queries. Using a site map to index your internal links is a good way to optimize your site as well. It is important to submit your site map to Google once you have finished making it.

A good content management system (CMS) is an integral part of web site creation and maintenance.  One item that is often overlooked when it comes to choosing a CMS is how effective it is for search engine optimization (SEO).  Pixelsilk is an excellent CMS program that was created with SEO in mind.

Located in Bend, Oregon, Pixelsilk has been in the business of building internet programs for corporations since 1995 and added SEO to their business in 1997.  Combining the two practices brought about the birth of Pixelsilk.

Features

Going beyond simple CMS functions, Pixelsilk brings several features to content management that most programs don’t:

• Full HTML control
• Interactivity with social media applications
• Open architecture and framework
• Real-time search engine optimization advice
• Theme and navigation flexibility

All of these features are critical in keeping up with the competition when it comes to search engine rankings.  Pixelsilk effectively adds on SEO tools without subtracting any of the standard features one would expect in a good CMS program.

Specifications

The Pixelsilk program is a proprietary web-based application.  This means no software downloads are required and one’s web site can be administered and accessed from anywhere.  While the program itself is proprietary and not open source, the framework is open and can be developed through the company’s client and server APIs.

Ease of use

The administration interface for Pixelsilk is much like any other CMS interface – blocked sections of commonly used admin tasks and easy to read pages.  Administrators can add specific user and group roles and modify and create pages just like most standard CMS programs.  The beauty lays in specific sections and tabs that help users create keywords and phrases, optimize for searchable page titles and even in giving on-the-fly advice to further SEO effectiveness.

Cost

Web sites wishing to use the Pixelsilk software must host through the company’s Single Domain Pixelsilk solution which starts out at $149 per month.  Self-hosted solutions are available but the company needs to be contacted and consulted with for further information.

At first glance, the monthly cost may seem a bit high.  However, what must be taken into consideration is that not only is a CMS offered within this monthly charge but hosting and search engine optimization tools to boot.  If one were to price out each of these services individually, the monthly cost does not seem overly prohibitive.

Downside

There is one downside to Pixelsilk.  The company web site really doesn’t give potential customers the ability to check out what’s under the hood unless a personalized walk through demonstration is requested.  The company would fair better if it allowed access to a very scaled down version of the CMS administration panel with test administration abilities incorporated.

Conclusion

It’s not easy to find a CMS solution that is both simple to use and incorporates much needed SEO tools.  Pixelsilk does this splendidly and at a fair cost.  When considering the overall cost of web hosting, web development and SEO consultants, the monthly price being asked by Pixelsilk ends up being a good business bargain.

You’ve found the perfect web hosting company.  Your web site has been created and is running beautifully.  SEO was a top priority so you’ve done everything you can to ensure your web site is one of the first ones discovered in an online search.  Now what can you do to bring in more visitors?  Believe it or not, social media can dramatically in this regard.

The announcers

Within the tangle that is social media, there are sites who’s sole purpose is to get information out there for all to see.  Sites such as Digg, Delicious, Google Reader and StumbleUpon are just a few of the information bookmarking sites available.  To incorporate a very simple “all in one” click-enabled button to web site visitors, you can use scripting available from AddThis.  This service supports over one hundred fifty services available on the internet and makes it easier for visitors to share what they find interesting on your site with others.  AddThis also allows you to enable tracking so you can analyze the performance of your sharing button.

The broadcasters

Another simple social media concept to consider is micro-blogging.  Sites such as Tumblr and FriendFeed work in this capacity.  Instead of writing out a brand new page or entire article with regard to topics or products found on your web site, you can post out small “snippets” with links pointing back to your site.  This is a great way to engage people in quick conversations about your content without having to host it on your web site itself.

The branders

Along the same concept of micro-blogging, sites such as Twitter and Identi.ca can also be beneficial to getting the word out about your web site content.  Some big-wigs in their own league use Twitter on a regular basis.  Comcast, Chevrolet, Southwest Airlines and Wachovia are just a few of these companies.  Some, such as Comcast, use Twitter as a support tool and have greatly improved the public relations of their business simply by offering this as another way to contact them directly.  Identi.ca is very similar in concept to Twitter with the exception that it was created to enable anyone to have their own micro-blog program within their web site.  It can also be configured to cross post to Twitter so, in essence, you can kill two birds with one stone by enabling it on your web site.  A word of caution, the installation and incorporation really requires quite a bit of web development knowledge and would be best left to those adept in this area.

The end result

Whichever style works best for you, your business and your web site, social media is definitely worth investigating.  Using one or all of the types within your web site or in your daily business dealings can help ensure you not only let the public know about your web site content but also enables potential visitors and customers to be able to contact you directly.  Nothing could say “hands on” any better.

Back when SEO (Search Engine Optimization) first came on the scene, there were no hard and fast rules.  It was a bit of mayhem and a lot of “every man for himself” types of attitudes to get one’s web site to the top of the search engine listings.  Since this time, search engines have become a lot more sophisticated and many of the things that use to work may not be allowed any more.

Cloaking

The practice of cloaking is accomplished by making it appear as though the visitor is going to a specific site but in reality reroutes the visitor to an entirely different and often unrelated web site.  Search engines send out bots that have the sole purpose of detecting such cloaking.  If it is determined that a site is using the practice of cloaking, the search engine will ban that site.  These bots are unnamed and come from undisclosed IP addresses so it’s just about impossible to try to trick them.

Duplicate content

Grabbing content from another site and placing it within your own web site is considered duplicate content.  Not only can this be considered a copyright infringement but it can also be a double-edged sword.  There may be a site or sites out there that have copied your content resulting in both your site and the offending site being banned by a search engine.  If you do find that your content has been duplicated, contact the search engine that has banned your site to explain the situation.  And always keep in mind that you want your site to contain original content created by you.

Invisibly stuffed keywords

You’ve possibly seen this on more than one occasion – a site with an odd and massive blank space (usually located at the bottom of the web page).  Keywords and phrases are duplicated over and over again with the font color being exactly the same as the page background coloring.  Or, as an alternative, the same keyword or phrases repeated, placed at the bottom of a web page but in very tiny text.  Either way, search engines have evolved to the point of easily detecting this practice and will ban the site accordingly.

A plethora of javascript

A little known bad SEO practice is the over usage of javascripting.  Most sites will use some form of javascript within their pages so this one is a bit tricky to solve.  Search engines are not designed to read javascript at this time, though this may change in the future.  It’s better to be safe than sorry in this case and to use as little javascripting as possible.  An effective way to do this is to create the javascript in a separate file and then utilize and include function within the header of your web page.

Conclusion

SEO is an integral part of ensuring your web site’s success.  If you’re currently using the above described practices, you’ll need to rethink and relearn good SEO practices.  Correct the mistakes, use what you’ve learned and you’ll prevent your web site from being placed on search engine banned lists.