It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don’t post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

Creating Valid HTML Documents Means Cleaner Code and Easier Maintenance

I’ll be the first one to let you in on a secret: building Web pages isn’t hard. With the software that is available now, you can write your Web page and have it up and viewable in half an hour. And with these tools, why would you need to run an HTML validator on your HTML to find errors? Well, you don’t have to, but if you want your pages to stay viewable through future versions of HTML, or you want newer browsers to be able to display it correctly, then writing valid HTML is the place to start.

There are several specific reasons for writing valid HTML, and using an HTML validator to insure that what you write is valid:

Future compatibility
As browsers evolve, they come closer and closer to supporting the standard HTML as written by the W3C. Even if they don’t fully support the most recent version of HTML, the browser builders go in and make sure that they are compliant with older versions of the standard.

If you are writing non-standard HTML, there is a chance that as browsers evolve, they will no longer support your Web pages.

• A good example of this is a trick that some Web developers used with an older version of Netscape. If you included multiple body tags with different colors, Netscape would load them all in in succession creating a fade-in or flicker effect as the page loaded. This trick no longer works, as it relied on an incompatibility of the browser.
• Current browser viewing
  Unless you know for a fact that your entire audience is using a specific browser, you are setting your site up to annoy some of your readers if you make it inaccessible to them through invalid or non-standard HTML. Many HTML validators will check your HTML for browser specific entities and alert you to their use.

  Browser specific HTML can be part of the standard (IE supports the <iframe> tag, but Netscape does not) or not a part of the standard (the <marquee> tag is supported by IE and the <layer> tag is supported by Netscape, but neither are a part of the HTML 4 standard).

• Fewer strange problems
  I am often asked to look at Web pages for people to tell them why the code is doing something strange. I can usually come back in just a few minutes and tell them what is wrong. Why? It’s not because I know HTML inside and out, it’s because I run their page through an HTML validator. This usually points out a problem with the HTML, that, when fixed, solves their problem as well.

  For example, often people will design a beautiful page with tables and view it in IE. Then, a couple days later their friend calls them up to ask them why they have a blank page up on their site (as viewed in Netscape). The problem is that Netscape interprets the tables standard (the ending </table> tag is required) strictly and IE does not. You could argue that IE is being more flexible, but what if they decide in IE 6 to interpret the HTML standard more strictly? With the merging of XML and HTML into XHTML, this may easily become a reality. And suddenly, your pages no longer work for IE. But if you had written valid HTML, you wouldn’t have had that problem.

HTML Validators

There are a lot of validators available. You can get ones that are run on your computer, embedded into your HTML editor, or online on your live Web pages. Here are two of my favorite HTML Validators:

CSE HTML Validator
This is a powerful HTML validator that comes embedded in HomeSite, or you can get a standalone version. It checks your tag spelling, attributes, character entities, quotation marks, missing end tags, invalid nesting of tags, and more. If you are looking for a Windows based validator, this is a great one to use.

Doctor Watson
This is the online validator I use the most. Doctor Watson provides great analysis of Web pages that is easy to use and understand. It is also fast. One of the things I like best about it is the style checking. This isn’t of CSS, but rather of how you wrote your Web page and includes warnings about things like using “click here” as a link, and other elements of bad Web style.

When you create a Web design, one of the more overlooked aspects of the design is the layout. Now, many people think about how to do a layout (CSS, tables, frames, etc.), but the basics of Web layout are often completely ignored.

Space and Whitespace

Use the whole space, but don’t be specific in your use. In other words, use relatively sized layout sections on your Web pages, so that they expand and contract to fit the browser window

Keep screen resolution in mind. While the majority of computer users have moved away from 640×480 resolution, keep that in mind when you’re designing. Having customers leave because all they can see is a logo on their monitor is not good customer service.

Use color to define spaces. If you want to have a page that’s a specific width, why not center it on the browser screen and make the background color of the page a different color? This will help the page appear to resize for different browsers; larger browsers will just have more background color showing, while smaller browsers will have less or none showing.

Images and Graphics

Align your images. One of the most common newbie layout mistakes is to slap images into a page willy-nilly without thought to layout. If you just use an img tag and then write text to follow it, you’ll have the image and then one line of text to the right of it. Using the align attribute will help make your images part of the layout.

Balance the graphics and text on a page. It’s easy to get carried away with lots of images and animations, but they can make a page very hard to read. When you’re considering your layout, remember that images are a major part of the design, not just afterthoughts.

Text Width

Think about text width. This is often called the “scan length”, and refers to how many words are displayed on one line. Most people can comfortably read about 7 to 11 words on a line. Longer than that, and the text is hard to read, shorter than that and it’s disjointed and distracting. When designing your layouts make sure that the major text area displays the text in a readable width.

Centering text is inadvisable. One of the first layout techniques that a new designer learns is the center tag, and they center everything on their pages. However, centering is very difficult to do well and it’s often hard to read.

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1. Link Baiting:

Make sure that site has great content and content which other webmasters will genuinely want to link to. If you are doing a website about saunas for example, give genuinely helpful information such as the health benefits and even a list of local saunas. Good content is always a winner.

2. Article writing

Writing original and quality articles about whatever subject your website relates to and then including your signature at the bottom of the article, can be an excellent way to build one-way inbound links to your website. Again, try and write good content to make it interesting for the reader. This will increase the chance of the article being syndicated.

3. Blogging

Starting a blog and submitting regular blog posts can be a great way to target links to your website. Do not just focus on the homepage but always create deep links to various parts of your website to build the value of all pages in your website

4. Ask friends

You may have friends who their own websites and they may be willing to add a link to your website. If their website is in some way related content wise to your website, even better.

5. Social Networks

Why not create a page for example on Facebook and add some links to your website and also brand your website a little more. You can also add in some quality information and have some fun with building a few links this way.

6. Directories

Add your website to some of the directories. Sites such as searchsight.coma and add your URL to Google and Yahoo. Just do a search for the expression ’submit url Google’s for example.

7. Rented or banner advertising

Most big companies spend money on paid advertising and companies such as Google understand this and even advertise themselves. Buying a few banners or natural links on content related sites can help you.

8. Forum comments

You can post some comments on forums and you may be able to include your url in the forum post signature. Sometimes these links have No Follow code attached and sometimes not.

9. Blog comments

Similarly, you can add comments to other people’s blogs and include your link. Many blog masters though, edit the comments left on their blog and they may block posts which have your link in the comment.

10. Ask clients or customers

You can potential get a large number of links if you are able to get a link on your clients and customers websites. This can really work well if you have a number of clients or customers!

Organic on site optimization refers to fine tuning the web site, optimizing keyword density and prominence. On page search engine optimization makes your web page more search engine spider friendly when done properly. The main steps taken while doing the on site optimization is:Content Editing The content optimization is a crucial factor for on page optimization. The content of your website can always use some technical enhancements. Keep keywords in mind while re-writing the website content.

Keywords Analysis Conducting a good keyword analysis is the first step in an effective search engine marketing campaign. Keywords should be changed to reflect prospective client search characteristics. Through any Database like Word tracker or keyword discovery you can determine the most effective keywords for generating relevant traffic to your site

Changes to Met tags The pages of your website can have identical Title & Meta Tags, which in turn harm your organic rankings. Search Engines put much emphasis on the uniqueness of titles and descriptions. They want every page of the site to be defined properly and uniquely. Having identical Title and Meta Tags puts negative impact on optimization process as such pages can be considered as duplicate pages or pages having duplicate content.

Meta Tags Optimization - Title Tag is not a Meta Tag, but nevertheless it is the most important of all Tags. Almost all crawler based search engines use the Title Tag to gather information about your web site. The Meta Description Tag is a part of HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your web page content. The words placed in this Meta Tag, are often used in the search engines result pages (SERP), just below the Title Tag as a brief description of your page.

Navigational Structure XML and HTML Site maps should be added to the site. This will help the site in getting indexed properly. Always try submitting xml sitemap to Google webmaster tools.

Code Optimization Code optimization is always recommended to enhance the speed of website and helps with search results.

Site Architecture Analysis - Depending on how your site is built and the value it provides to an audience, the search engines might index one of your pages, or they might index thousands of them. Search engines crawl the World Wide Web to include web pages they find relevant within their search engine index.

Building New Pages and making changes to existing pages is recommended. Ideally you will want to set up a process within in you firm for creating and updating content. Google’s ranking algorithms give presence to sites that both have more relevant content and are changed more frequently.