Fundamentals
#1: If you think the phrase “content is king” is a cliché, think again. Content is value in the SEO industry; even if you have invested on all the technical SEO you can get your hands on, without quality content, your rankings won’t budge.
#2: Quality first, not quantity. If traffic means your reputation gets abused and vandalized by nuisance visitors, then it’s not worth it.
#3: Focus on catering to the needs of human beings, not search robots.
#4: Google is a bit overrated so don’t be gung-ho on it. Google may be the biggest search engine, but focus your rankings on other search engines too, like Bing.
#5: Don’t be overconfident. Ranking well means your competitors are working round the clock to beat you.
#6: Never attempting to trick search engines. Search engines always have a way of catching up with cheats.
#7: Do not use SEO as a stand-alone campaign. Integrate it with your advertising and social campaigns.
#8: Don’t hesitate to link up with good, authoritative sites. The Internet is built for relationships and fostering good relations with other sites can get you quality inbound links.

Targeted keywords
#9: Target relevant keywords. Also: don’t experiment with popular but less relevant search terms.
#10: Try localized optimization in order to drive more relevant traffic toward your website.
#11: Target highly specific and niche keywords.
#12: Monitor how the volume and quality of your search terms are driving traffic by using Google Analytics.

Website
#13: Internal link building is crucial so use highly descriptive anchor tags to emphasize to search engines how relevant your site is.
#14: Tone down on Flash animations; they are not entirely useful to SEO.
#15: Page titles are a relevant on-site factor so construct title tags using target keywords.
#16: Don’t rely heavily on meta-tags; search engines aren’t as impressed by them.
#17: Provide alternative text to images so make it accessible to visually-impaired users.
#18: Provide an XML sitemap to aid indexing and to troubleshoot indexing issues.
#19: Use unique content. If you must replicate, rewrite the text and give attribution to the original source.
#20: If possible, your headlines should feature keywords and use h1 and h2 tags to improve layout and relevance to search engines.
#21: Make sure your header tags are well-organized. Use only single tags to avoid penalties.
#22: Every URL should be descriptive and not functional, i.e. use www.anydomain.com/here-is-an-example and not www.anydomain.com/117665.
#23: If you have a page that features interesting links, do not call the entire page “Links” as this may be mistaken for link farming.
#2; Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to guide your optimization.
#25: Use Webmaster tools to check and fix broken links on a regular basis.

However, there are situations when these elements won’t be giving optimal results. It may be possible that the site is still not able to attract more incoming traffic that it is supposed to do. In this case, your site may still be lacking the necessary fundamentals that are needed before it can fully benefit from search engine optimization. The following sections will guide you through several basic aspects of your site that you have to scrutinize.

The Need for More Quality Content

Before anything else, your website should be carefully well-planned when it comes to site content. Content is one of the biggest determinants of SEO success. To make sure that your site is prepared for an SEO campaign, you have to fill your site with great content. And when we say great content, it means that you have the responsibility of giving the site fresh high quality content that can attract a reader’s interest and more importantly, a search engine’s attention. This requires constant effort; you have to update your site with unique content regularly. You have to focus on quality and quantity. This will surely get a search engine’s attention.

Search Engine Friendly Content Management Systems

Your site should be able to receive all the content its needs without difficulty and in an organized manner so that it can get picked up and indexed by search engines such as Google. You can only do this if your website has organization among its various pages. Using a content management system will certainly help. A content management system, or CMS, enables a user to crank out content and deliver content to a site efficiently and effectively so that it gets noticed by a search engine. It makes the pages within your site search engine friendly by adding permalinks or search engine friendly URLs. A CMS also allows you to edit or modify a URL to reflect the keywords in your title or topic.

There are available content management systems out there, such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, all of which allow you to assign tags or tag clouds to your posts. In turn, this will enable you to establish categories within your site in which to organize your content. Also, using a CMS permits you to control a title tag and meta content description of your pages.

Fixing Internal Navigation Issues

A content management system, as described above, can help you avoid several internal navigation problems you might encounter. If you don’t have this tool, your pages would scatter all over your site, leaving your site disorganized especially if your site has tons of material. It would give search engine crawlers more difficult time to index your site. As a result, your site would not be recognized and ranked by a search engine properly.

Also, aside from a CMS, you can use Xenu to help you solve internal navigation problems. Xenu, or Xenu’s Link Sleuth, is a link-checking software that can help you verify your entire website for broken hyperlinks. It provides you a detailed overview of your website’s internal linking structure and diagnoses any problems related to it. This will surely help you fix your site’s broken internal link so you can create a new XML sitemap that you can submit to Google and help your site get indexed by the search engine properly.

One Homepage Policy

It is important that a search engine like Google can only find your website in one location. It is possible that your site can be in multiple locations or URLs. However, it would give your site some SEO problems if you are not careful with establishing your home page URL appropriately.

For instance, your site home page can be usually seen in http://www.mywebsite.com. However, you can also type in mywebsite.com without the preceding WWW in the address bar and your same home page will also appear. Actually, there can be other ways to type in your URL, like adding a trailing slash or none, among many others:

http://www.mywebsite.com

http://mywebsite.com

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.html

http://mywebsite.com/index.html

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.htm

http://mywebsite.com/index.htm

http://www.mywebsite.com/default.asp

http://mywebsite.com/default.asp

Ideally, all of these URLs will all lead to the same home page. However, even if it seems that they lead you to one place, there’s a problem with how the address bar and search engines interpret them. For instance, if you key in your URL mywebsite.com without the WWW and you are lead to your site, there’s a possibility that what appears in the address bar is still the non-WWW version of your URL. Now there lies the problem.

A search engine reads URLs very literally and does not make any distinction with how you type in a URL. Search engines consider the given links above as different pages since the URLs are different, even if they seem to all work out to point to the same page. Without doing any corrections, you now have multiple duplicate pages on your site. Search engines would interpret it as different sites with link and thus, splitting up all the link juice and PageRank values which would be more effective if focused on one site.

To solve this issue, you need to be prepared for the possibility that multiple URLs can be used to direct to your site. First, you have to select your preferred primary URL for your site. The preferred URL for a homepage is www.mywebsite.com. Then ensure that every variation of the URL ends up leading to your primary URL and uses the same URL structure. For the Google search engine, you can do this using the Tools section of Google’s Webmaster Central, where you can assign your preferred URL.

Next, you need to setup 301 redirects for those URL variations. There are other ways of redirects to other URLS that are not your primary, like JavaScript or meta redirects, but they could give you more complications. Using 301 redirects is the surest and safest method for the SEO process. A 301 redirect is permanent and maintains search engine rankings. It also passes the search engine ranking score of the URL variation to your primary URL, helping your main URL appear and gradually rank in search engine results pages. Lastly, you should also check your site navigation to make sure that your internal links will also point to your primary URL.

When it comes to choosing your URL, it’s up to you how your URL looks like. You can opt for either the www or the non-www version, to have trailing slash or none, and opt for any top-level domain (albeit .com is the most commonly used). The important thing is to designate one and be consistent with it.

The Importance of a Smooth Link Structure, Site Architecture, and Hierarchy

To make the most out of your SEO efforts, you should also consider how your site is built and how you design your site’s navigation. How you lay your foundations like a website’s architecture and its overall linking structure will also determine the success of your website and your business bottom line. If your website is confusing to navigate, you will lose visitors. Not only that, search engine spiders will also have a difficult time crawling over your pages. Therefore, this will hurt your site’s search engine rankings badly, since the way your links are structured is also given significant weight aside from the anchor texts present within your pages.

Building Your Site like a Silo

It is important to make sure that your site structure makes sense, meaning that your website allows all your visitors to find what they need conveniently and search engine to index all your pages properly. Make sure that your site navigation is search engine friendly as well.

The best way to optimize your site, make it more search engine friendly, and attract more targeted visitors is to establish a solid website architecture, or a “silo website architecture.” Silo structured websites will surely give your site the needed boost in the search engine results pages.

A silo—for this discussion—simply means “category” or categorizing. Silo architecture is a vertical page linking design that organizes your content into structured themes while the content of each page, including titles, headers, and URLs, all synergize to reinforce the overall theme of your site. It is the method of linking your pages and designing your site so that all major search engines can be easily drawn to your site. Through this structure, you create distinct sections for each category that are all related to the overall site’s theme. Cross-linking between silos or categories should be designed in such a way that links lead to the landing pages of other silos if your content contains keywords or anchor texts that reinforce those silos’ themes.

The silo architecture has been proven to boost your search engine rankings because the way how your pages are linked to your home page and vice versa gives your pages more link juice, telling search engines that they are important. It signals search engines the overall theme and significance of your site while providing a convenient navigation for your visitors.

When you carefully plan your site’s navigation from the very beginning, your site will be able to rank better with less effort and address a specific topic of interest, therefore attracting more visitors.

Do you remember the time when you unknowingly clicked a link to a website you want to check out and patiently waited for the page to load when you realized it was taking a bit long to appear? And adding to your annoyance, an ad banner of a dating site comes out of nowhere? Maybe you told yourself, “Hey, this is NOT what I am looking for!” and searched for another related website that had no annoying pop-ups.

Does anyone miss the dismal age of pop-ups? Nobody does. Nobody wanted their browsing experience be spoiled by a flood of advertisements that they weren’t even interested in. More often than not, users close the pop-ups the moment they appear.

Clearly, pop-ups used to be the mainstream of online marketing, but users didn’t like it. When most Internet users think of pop-ups, they think of the irritating ad that comes out of nowhere, making the web experience more inconvenient and annoying. Moreover, pop-ups can create trouble not only to users, but also to the websites, their owners, and their search engine optimization efforts.

Bad for the User

Pop-ups are used to display information or advertise products and/or services. At times, they may look like browsers of normal web pages and can cause confusion to the users. A pop-up may not be even related to the site itself, thus annoying the user with its irrelevance to the site and its obstruction to the browsing experience. People tend to close the pop-up down, or worse, close the websites by mistake because the pop-up looks like a regular browser. More often than not, people would click away from your site and never come back because the website confused them or the site did not give the necessary content that users expected from the site and needed immediately.

Some pop-ups appear as a result in the site being reloaded, causing loss of information for the users. Some appear to install software and clicking on some may also cause additional windows to open. On some occasions, pop-ups have victimized users to the extent that a pop-up keeps on appearing or regenerating even after it was closed, or it just stays in front of the browser unless the pop-up is closed manually.

Pop-ups have become a source of Internet hostility and are a major turnoff for users. People may develop resentment and mistrust towards websites that abuse pop-ups as they utterly spoil the browsing and learning experiences.

Bad for the Website

Pop-ups have become a mainstay of the Internet’s dark side. Statistically, pop-ups have been 50% more noticeable than regular ad banners, according to a Statistical Research Report. However, it has also been proven that pop-ups have been 100% more likely to be seen as disruptive and unhelpful. Simply, pop-ups make you more effective in advertising a product or service, but it also makes you TWICE more annoying than ad banners, thus hurting the reputation of your website and driving away MORE visitors in the long run.

Pop-ups do more harm than good as they create more obstacles between your viewers and your pages, leading to less traffic conversions. A clear indication of this is the emergence of more pop-up blockers, such as the Google Toolbar pop-up blocker, that prevent pop-ups from being displayed on your screen. They are now widely available for anyone to download for free. With the widespread use of pop-ups, pop-up repulsion has clearly developed overtime amongst users. This in turn has paved the way for a growing number of pop-up countermeasures users can freely utilize.

Moreover, a growing number of assisted technologies, such as screen reading software that allow blind computer users to access information despite their disabilities by reading aloud what is on the computer screen, do not support pop-ups. Thus, it leaves these potential users incapable to enter your site. Lastly, having pop-ups on your site can decrease the loading speed of your pages, irritating your users and driving them away to look for other websites to get the information they need faster.

Bad for SEO

From an SEO perspective, using pop-ups on your pages can create SEO problems and can be a clear disadvantage for your site. As pointed out earlier, there are pop-up blockers that have been developed to prevent pop-ups from appearing on the screen. This is more evident especially with Google’s own toolbar with a built-in pop-up blocker. This in itself can already harm your rankings for selected keywords in search engines, especially in Google’s. Google has been clear with its message that its search engine only indexes and serves high quality pages to its users at the fastest possible time. Even if a page has remarkable content but is bombarded with many pop-up ads, Google wouldn’t bother dealing with the content. Google is strict with quality and they don’t want Adword landing pages that contain pop-ups. They always prefer clean and pop-up-free websites to index.

Also, as mentioned earlier, pop-ups slow down the loading time of your web pages. Remember that your loading speed is a major factor that determines the overall site experience and rankings of your pages in search engines. The slower the loading time of your page due to pop-ups or poor server speed, the greater the damage done to your search rankings.

If your page loads too slowly, users would leave your site. Additionally, if your site takes much longer to respond to search engine crawlers, you might face the risk of your site not getting indexed. Search engines such as Google’s would always make sure that high quality pages deserve high rankings. And a page that has poor page quality carrying a high bounce back rate due to heavy pop-up activity gets much poorer search rankings.

Not Worth It

Let’s face it: using pop-ups is just not worth it. Indeed, it would make your site more noticeable, but for the WRONG reasons. It would not only annoy your users and drive them away from your site in the long run; you are damaging the overall browsing experience of your users and the reputation of your site. And ultimately, things will backfire; you thought that throwing so many ads on the face of your viewers will make you more popular or will reap you greater profits. But the truth is, users would not only condemn you for the annoyance and inconvenience you brought to them, the big fish of the online world like Google would ensure you get mark downs in rankings and visibility.

What is Link Building? Links are essential in getting noticed on the Web. In terms of search engine ranking and indexability, they are an important factor, along with the way a search engine ranks how a user experiences and views your site. Link building is defined as an “integration of useful elements into a whole Web site to allow for the accretion of links through natural means.” From this definition, we understand that link building is a two-step process. We split this definition into two parts and analyze each to dissect the link building process better.

The Two Elements in Link Building

1. The first process in link building is integration. Integration involves the combination of two or more parts or elements together into a complete whole, set, or unit. The idea in link building is to make a site desirable to the widest possible audience and admirers. In order to do so, a site must possess components that would attract viewers and potential site owners who might want to link to it. Hence, a link building campaign is not a stand-alone process that relies on a singular point of view to achieve link popularity. Without incorporating or blending other topics or materials to address its diverse audience, aiming for higher page rankings becomes a difficult goal to achieve. Full integration occurs when a site addresses the interests of all of its potential audience. This could include customers, employees, business owners, industry executives, and competitors. Any Web site that you create must take the needs and requirements of each of these groups into consideration or else you stand to isolate a valuable segment of your audience. Because you are dealing with and competing among millions of sites for traffic, every segment is indispensable. Adopting a populist attitude toward Web site creation generates relevance and meaning to the widest number of users. The more complete the integration, the greater the likelihood of attracting more links to your site.
2. The second process is accretion. Accretion is the increase or growth in size through gradual addition, inclusion or fusion. Accretion cannot occur without integration. Web sites that lack the integration requirement undertake several methods in order to attract links and achieve higher page rankings. Generally, there are two manifestations of accretion: viral awareness and standard public relations. When audiences find your Web site meaningful and relevant, they unavoidably pass the word along to their friends and people they know. The campaign then becomes viral as it is viewed, linked to and shared among a large and diverse audience, which in turn results to higher link popularity. The most common mechanisms are “send a friend” emails and icons to recommend the site such as Digg, Twitter, Reddit, or StumbleUpon. The importance of viral awareness in link building makes these mechanisms a necessity. Doing without these elements would spell disaster for the accretion component in your campaign. The other form of accretion is an active one. Standard public relations needed for accretion require that you create awareness of your site by asking other site owners that they link to it. This is why integration becomes important: the more relevant your site is to a diverse audience, the greater the number of relevant sites you can request to link to yours.

The Importance of “Natural Means” In understanding the link building process, it is important to distinguish the natural from the artificial means of acquiring links. The ideal link building strategy is thus: create content that is genuinely relevant, and the links will come naturally. Natural links are considered the best links for search engine rankings, and are defined as links from other sites that are given by a website’s authors and not by bots or a computer program. Simply put, natural links are those given by the site’s owner to your website or blog because it is truly linkable, and not merely because of compensation.

There are three popular SEO techniques that are used by a link building service or a link building company to acquire more links:

1. link buying
2. link exchange
3. link farming

Natural links become an important issue in link building because search engines like Google now give penalties to links that manipulate search engine result rankings. Search engines’ algorithms are now capable of detecting whether a site is abusing SEO techniques in order to obtain higher page rankings. However, SEO has developed ways in order to use these three techniques without getting penalties by creating natural-profiled links. Still, SEO experts are unanimous in saying that the best link building campaign involves the creation of relevant and authority content. Link building may be a long and time-consuming process, but its rewards could mean a big boost for your business. Before engaging in a link building campaign, keep these fundamentals in mind and learn more about SEO for proper guidance in making SEO-related decisions.

The link building process involves two steps: integration and accretion. Integration requires the consolidation of relevant elements into a whole Web site, while accretion is the use of several methods in order to increase links to your site and boost page rankings. The end result of any link building campaign is increased link popularity and better search engine rankings.

• Link Popularity

To understand the relevance of link building, it is crucial that we understand exactly what search engines are looking for in a site and what factors influence a site’s page ranking and link popularity. The theory of link popularity assumes that if search engines view other sites linking to yours, your site must be a winner and consequently, deserves an upperhand in rankings. After all, people are more likely to link to sites they find interesting or relevant. It is a common misconception that the Google Page Rank is equivalent to link popularity. In reality, Google PR is merely a subset of link popularity.

PR focuses on the quantitative side while link popularity emphasizes on the qualitative factors. Building link popularity is considered one of the most tedious tasks in SEO. Unlike before, search engines now have quality control mechanisms in place that boot out “artificially created” or useless links so that today, strategies that result to artificial links can earn penalties or point negations in a web site’s rankings. Search engines today require links that come from authoritative sites or sites that focus on the same areas as your web site. Major search engines consider link popularity in their ranking algorithms to measure a site’s importance.

There are two types of links that give a boost to link popularity:

1. Links from other sites using like keyword phrases as your site
2. Links from relevant categories from industry-specific portals and major directories

Experts warn about paying for submission on free-for-all, or FFA, sites that are not viewed as quality links by major search engines. Moreover, getting links from sites that are completely outside the range or field of interest of your Web site will not earn you high points on the rankings.

• Link Acquisition Strategies When launching a link building campaign independently or when you are using a link building service or hiring a link building company, you have to take note that while many strategies exist that could help you acquire links, abusing these strategies will downgrade your search engine rankings.

Among the top SEO techniques that have been prone to abuse or manipulation include:

1. Link Buying. Many bloggers and webmasters buy links in order to boost their page rankings. It is also the easiest way to build link popularity. Link buys are frowned upon by major search engines like Google and SEO experts advise against link buys. However, some have found ways to buy links without getting into the search engine’s radar and others find link buying useful in launching viral, social media campaigns that have a specific end date.
2. Link exchange. A link exchange is a network of websites operating as a web ring by registering under a central organization running the exchange and in turn, receiving an HTML code to be inserted into their web pages. This HTML code runs a display of banner advertisements on member web sites. Link exchanges, or reciprocal linking, are the most common link acquisition approach for bloggers and webmasters.
3. Link Farming. Link farms are made up of a bogus network of blogs, and from that fake network, they create links to their web site. Though an effective link popularity builder in the past, stricter quality control mechanisms of search engines have prompted an avoidance of this strategy.

Effective methods in getting links include link baiting, directory submissions, comments, article submissions, and writing testimonials or reviews. There are several specialized SEOs and link building service that are capable of helping you perform some of the above-mentioned strategies.

• Ideal Link Profile There are ideal ways to ensure that your web site is rated positively by the search engines. Among the important things to consider are:

1. One link per linking domain. Try getting one or two links from a website that wants to link to yours.
2. Fewer Reciprocal Links. Reciprocal links are easily detectable and subject to point negations. It is best to keep reciprocal links below 5% of your site’s total linkage.
3. Varied Anchor Text. Vary keywords in the anchor text to avoid red flags from search engines.
4. Related Links. Acquire links from web sites that share relevant content to get better page rankings.

• What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or URL. They are often used interchangeably with inbound links, incoming links, inward links, and inlinks. In the world of SEO, backlinks, like PageRank, are an indicator of link popularity or importance of a particular web page. The weight that search engines like Google ascribe to quality backlinks when calculating SERP have made backlinks a building block for excellent SEO. Search engines consider pages with a substantial number of quality backlinks more relevant or more important than others when coming up with SERP. Link building is a vital tool that gives Internet businesses direct traffic, better position in the search engine rankings, and more profits. For any link building campaign to prevail and reap these benefits, webmasters or site owners need not rely on merely the quantity of backlinks pointing to their site, but the quality of backlinks as well. The usage of proper search engine optimization techniques and link building methods should take these facts into consideration.

• Quality Matters.

In getting inbound links for link popularity, quality matters. Search engines like Google compute the relevancy of a site based on the importance or relevancy of the backlinks pointing to that site. It is not enough to get as many inbound links as possible; we need to look at the quality of these backlinks. Quality is usually determined by the content of a specific site. When backlinks to your site come from other sites that have related content to your site, these backlinks are judged as relevant by the search engines. However, if these backlinks are from sites with unrelated content, search engines consider them less relevant. The more relevant the backlinks are to your site, the greater their quality. Moreover, there are several factors that influence a backlink’s value. When backlinks come from “high authority” sites, they are highly valuable.

• Importance of Anchor Text

One thing you need to consider in back link building is the anchor text of your backlinks. An anchor text is a description of the inbound link and must contain useful information relevant to the content on the linked page. There are tools like search engine bots that evaluates the relevancy of an anchor text to the content of a given web site. The bottom line is for the anchor text and content to be highly congruent. This will ensure that your web page becomes highly weighted in the SERP rankings based on a given keyword query.

• PageRank and Backlinks

Backlinks are important when we deal with how to increase our performance in Google PageRank. SEOWatch conducted a study to determine exactly how important backlinks are when computing PageRank. They conclude that 67% of PageRank depends on backlinks. This tells us that serious link building efforts require a lot of investment in order to enhance the quantity as well as quality of backlinks to a website. There are several techniques in building backlinks – some are considered ethical, and some unethical.

• Get Them Naturally.

When we say ethical methods in link building, we mean that the link acquisitions are made naturally. Increasing awareness on how search engines operate has resulted to the increasing use of sneaky and manipulative designs by webmasters in order to influence their placements in the search engine rankings. Since search engine algorithms are designed to assign rankings in a democratic manner, tougher measures and quality requirements have been imposed to prevent other webmasters from using unethical methods to gain undue advantage over others. Using sneaky devices like link farms do not only get you penalized, they might get you banned entirely. Search engines look for natural inbound links, which are links that are built slowly over time. There are several techniques to build natural links. Link baiting and using high quality content in order to attract natural links your way are among the most effective ways to improve a site’s link popularity. Site owners can develop natural links by themselves or can hire a link building company to do it for them.

• Backlink Building Don’ts

There are several link building practices to avoid.

1. Link exchange. One of the don’ts in link building is link exchange. This operates as a barter exchange of links. If you put a link to their site, they put a backlink to your site. When involved in link exchanges, you must be wary of the ratio of your outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links outnumber your inbound links, this is a negative sign. Moreover, you must ensure that your link exchange partners are not link farms; if so, you may put your site at risk of being banned from search engines.
2. Suspicious links. Never link to suspicious sites. While search engines do not penalize you for having backlinks from such sites, engaging in a link exchange program with so-called “bad neighborhood” sites would destroy your link building efforts.
3. Acquiring quality backlinks are an important factor to consider in any link building campaign geared at improving search engine rankings and enhancing link popularity. However, it takes more than just backlinks to drive traffic to your site and influence your rankings. The most important thing is to develop a website with high quality content that is useful and relevant to the end user experience.

Competition is there whether one acknowledges them or not. With the importance of link popularity today, tools in checking links have also grown in popularity. In the market, companies like INP & Arelis Google Keyword Tool, WordTracker, SEO Tools Rank Checker and Free-Webmaster-tools provide checking and link building service for websites that may need their link’s popularity checked. Most of these companies charge a fee for their services, while there are still many others that offer services for free catered to those start-ups and cash-strapped companies. Search Engine marketing is a very tricky endeavor, but once mastered, the benefits are tremendous and very advantageous. Many shortcuts exist; there are also techniques that businesses can do to take advantage of SEO opportunities.

What worked for one company may not work as well for another. Individual strategies are important for companies to be able to reach out to the millions of users who log into the World Wide Web everyday. Beyond the technicalities and skills that are required in establishing a website, every business has their own goals with which individual strategies are applied. Checking the quality of links, inbound and outbound, is important to rank high in search engine tools like Google and Yahoo. Google, for example, values quality inbound links found in the website for higher rankings. The more quality inbound links a web site has, the more probable it is for that company to be ranked high in Google searches or any other SEOs for that matter.

To check and make sure of the legitimacy of a website’s popularity, companies can utilize these tips:

1. Not faking and/or using artificial methods in creating inbound links to one’s website. In other words, link farms, top sites, automatic link generators, link services, spamming with keyword text, and doorway pages will most probably be an unwise use of funds to raise search engine rankings. If worse comes to worst, a website may be banned by search engine marketers as a result of implementing these methods.
2. The main objective of link building is to rank high in the list of search engine marketers. Link swaps and linking with similar websites are still the best way to go.
3. Check your links and spend time logging on to search engine websites like Google and Yahoo. Typing in keywords related to your website and poring through how your site is presented every time you make a search is another good way of checking your website’s popularity.

Sheer quantity of links is not the name of the game. To be popular in the vast domain of the Internet, quality is all that matters. A couple dozen links to a website from related, high quality, authority sites are much more valuable to a search engine than hundreds of low quality links one can obtain by exchanging with any site that would agree to post their pages. Positioning one’s website to reach out to millions of customers can only be done through patient strategizing and building link influence. Link Building has played a vital role in search engine positioning for many companies. It helps improve a company’s rankings on different search engines and most importantly, boost over-all company productivity and popularity.

SMO has another primary agenda; As the person who coined the term, Rohit Bhargava, explains, is to make the target article/website/blog “…easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines, and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.” It is, simply put, to make your material the talk of the town by enabling people to share it conveniently according to their preferences. Indeed, as a recent survey conducted, participants from 50 countries—a conclusive 90%—say that online endorsements of their friends/colleagues are something they consult with/trust (Nielsen Global Online Consumer). That figure singlehandedly points out the already obvious advantages of making linkability a marketing priority. Here are a few pointers to note:

1. Add clearly visible buttons; The easiest step would be to add clearly visible buttons to make sharing any material almost reflexive, whether on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon or any industry-specific site (i.e. Technorati). Enabling tagging and comments also make for a productive interaction with netizens.
2. Creating quality content; For those who are already applying optimal SEO practices to their own online presence, chances are they already understand the value of creating content that is not only a shout-out to search engines but is also compelling. In other words, content that is easy to read, relevant, accurately verifiable, and interesting. That makes for material people will actually want to share.
3. Community; The importance of grasping “community” can never be understated. This translates to being actively involved not just on a blatantly commercial, “I’m here to sell” approach. Participating means providing positive contributions to the group — case studies, constructive comments, guides to help make certain informed decisions, updates on matters that the community is passionate about (hobby, campaign, and if all goes well, your BRAND). Keep this in mind as community members protect their own; any spamming or obvious exploitation of their networks can lead to considerably backlash.

The success of an SMO strategy is very much like its nature — both quantitative and qualitative. Setting defined indicators of success, an individual/organization will find not only increased traffic or comments or links to their site. More importantly for some, it enables them to keep an ear quite close to the ground. A product/service’s pre-, current, and post-development can constantly be given another direct source of insight — the consumers themselves. This is but the start of something that will doubtless be a force to reckon with, no matter the industry.

1. Increase Your Linkability. The key performance indicator of any social media campaign revolves around link building. The simple commitment to maintaining a blog for one, can do wonders for increasing linkability.
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking Easy. Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon are names to be recited by online marketers as sacred. The easier it is to share your content, the likelier it is to be spread.
3. Reward Inbound Links. Positive reinforcement works in most cases, but in building your credibility, also bear in mind that not all inbound links ought to be automatically reciprocated.
4. Help Your Content Travel. Through RSS feeds, newsletters, social media updates, and downloadable files, content that can conveniently be communicated expands your reach.
5. Encourage The Mashup. The fact is, your content will be available for most of the world to see. Encouraging your followers to add their own take on the matter will make for an entirely productive interaction.

Enumerating two important points, Jeremiah Owyang, emphasizes the need to:

1. Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn’t Help You. Well, doesn’t help “directly” — it will return in the form of recognition as the go-to authority for information on your field of expertise.
2. Reward Helpful and Valuable Users. Following the Pareto Principle of 80-20, forming relationships with your influential VIPs are a valuable investment.

Four things that Cameron Olthuis shares never to underestimate are the value of:

1. Participation. Being involved, belonging to a community to which you significantly contribute to — that is what social media is all about.
2. Knowing How to Target Your Audience. To ignore this piece of advice would be folly.
3. Create Content. Real content is different from space-fillers in being relevant, informative, and reliable.
4. Being Real. Sooner or later the truth will prevail. Fakers, scammers, hypocritical identities will backfire no matter the short-term advantages.

Creating a difference is simplified by keeping in mind the two things contributed by Loren Baker:

1. Don’t Forget Your Roots, Be Humble. Do not forget the people who have one way or another brought you where you are today.
2. Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Things, Stay Fresh. Be critical, yet open-minded about opportunities to constantly improve.

Lee Odden completes the list by focusing on Social Media Optimization with the easy to understand advice to:

1. Develop an SMO Strategy
2. Choose your SMO Tactics Wisely
3. Make SMO part of your process and best practices

What is PageRank? PageRank is a numerical value that is assigned to a site for the purpose of measuring its importance or relevancy. PageRank was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The concept was inspired by citation analysis conducted on scholarly journals or articles to measure its credibility. The more times a paper gets cited, the more important or credible it is to its peers.

PageRank computes the probability of finding a web page if a person randomly surfs the Internet. Google uses the mathematical formula, PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)), where: A = Linked Page tn = Linking Page C/(tn) = Number of outbound link on v d = damping factor, normally set to 0.85 Despite its intimidating appearance, the mathematical formula has several implications for obtaining the link popularity of a web site:

1. If a web page links to another page, it is essentially casting a vote in favor of that page.
2. If several pages link to a web page, it means it has more votes and deserve a higher rank.

How does Google assign PageRank? Google PageRank is highly dependent on the quantity of backlinks. An experiment conducted by SEOWatch concludes that the more backlinks a website has, the higher the PR will be. This is logical since the PageRank was designed as a type of balloting system among Web users where site owners “vote” by linking to a particular page to show support. This explains why PR is often referred to as a measure of link popularity. However, because mere reliance on quality of links have made spamming and search engine manipulations a link building tool in order to influence a site’s positioning, Google’s algorithm includes the quality of backlinks associated to a website in its calculation.

If the pages linking to your site have high PR and are considered “high authority” sites, then your page shares a piece of their reputation and improves its link popularity. Google PageRank considers other factors in assigning values to web sites. These include site age, back link duration and back link relevancy. The fact that Google considers back links’ relevancy helps warn site owners: bad sites can harm your overall total PageRank and your link popularity.

Is there only one type of PageRank? There are variations of PageRank used by Google in order to measure importance or relevancy. Google Toolbar PageRank. This feature projects a page’s PageRank as a whole number ranging between 0 and 10, 10 being the highest. In order to restrict and disallow search engine manipulations, the accurate procedure on how Google calculates PageRank is not disclosed. However, there is always stress on the quantity and quality of backlinks to produce higher PR and higher link popularity. Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank. Link building campaigns are built around this type of ranking. It returns the actual result produced when a search engine responds to a keyword query.

A web page’s SERP rank is indicated by a link’s placement on the SERP. If the page can be found on the top positions in a SERP, the higher its SERP rank. It must be noted that while PageRank plays a vital part in SERP, a myriad of factors are included in its computation. Any link building campaign should be geared towards achieving the highest SERP ranking for a website or websites. In order to deter search engine manipulation, Spamdexing, and spoofing, as a means of building link popularity, Google is mum on how factors influence PageRank specifically.

What are some tips to improve PageRank? The encouraging thing about being able to understand PageRank is that webmasters, site owners, or a link building company can determine how to adjust some factors in order to optimize PageRank and improve link popularity. A high PR to add to other link building methods will drive you ahead of competitors. There are three basic areas to consider when optimizing PageRank:

1. The quality of links you choose to have link to your site. The link you choose and the effort you put in to acquire them are essential in PR optimization. As explained before, quantity and quality of links are important considerations in PR and link building. Choosing link farms and banned sites to link to you would prove disastrous to PR and link popularity.
2. The site you choose to link out to from your site. In using outbound links, there is one golden rule: ‘Keep PageRank within your site.’ Linking out will decrease your total PageRank compared when you decide not to link out. However, if you choose to link out as part of your link building campaign, experts advise to choose pages that has both a low PR and a lot of links to your site.
3. The internal quality of your site. Your site’s navigational components and linkages must be able to distribute PageRank within the whole site. To accomplish this, Google’s algorithms must consider as much content in your site as worthy of being indexed. Developing quality content creates more PageRank and boosts link popularity.

While PageRank is a valuable tool, achieving link popularity through PR optimization must be combined with quality visitor experience. Gaining higher PageRank will not amount to any significance if users could not find content to enhance their experience when navigating your site.