Website owners who keep up to date with SEO competition are finding out that if you are not learning and evolving you’re falling behind. It’s becoming more and more difficult for websites to maintain high rankings on search engines and that’s even if your site is already a few years old. If you are starting a new website it’s even more difficult to make your mark on a SEO. Expectations for new sites should be set up with the goal for long term results.

The most important factor in determining your website’s success is to know what you are looking for from your site. Most owners believe that rankings dictate a website’s success and while rankings are important they do not determine the overall success of the site. Owners should pay attention to the traffic they receive because that is going to factor into your business success and put money in your pocket. That’s why you have the site, correct? To make more money! Most website owners want to be in the top five of Google and Yahoo searches, when at the end of the day those rankings to not affect their bottom line.

This will not change the fact that rankings will continue to be a highly sought after commodity. Website owners need to think outside the box if they want to move up on SEO rankings. Owners have been expanding their keywords in hopes of attracting more surfers to their site. What they should be doing is figuring out what keywords people are using and incorporate those words and phrases onto their site.

At the end of the day websites are all about content, but what constitutes good content? In one word: Creativity. Your website is an extension of you, just like your business is. Use your voice and be unique with the content you decide to put on your website. This includes videos and pictures as well. Look at the resources you have and incorporate all the good things around you into your website. Do not steal or copy from other websites, it is superficial and that comes across to the visitors on your site. Make your content genuine. Do what you do best and speak from the heart. Make sure you write content for your site and not based on search engines. It’s a disservice and will not help your business or rankings.

The best advice one can give a website owner is: Do not compete with other websites! Continue to expand and evolve your own website and don’t saturate your brain with other people’s ideas. There is no right or wrong, what works for one does not work for another. Start with what you need to have on your site and work up from there.

You can pay all the money in the world to a SEO company and be number one on all the search engines, but did you really start a website to spend money or to make money?

begin by saying that if paid advertising is your primary form of Internet promotion this article is probably not for you. However if you are looking at ways of creating long-term Internet success developing backlinks to your website will be important to you.

I find it interesting that the World Wide Web has not changed that much even though Internet marketing has. The Web itself is composed of links all pointing to each other.

If you grasp this concept you can quickly understand why the more backlinks you have pointing to your website from a multitude of different sources the more potential traffic it you can bring to you.

Not only that but the traffic will continue to be there over a long period of time as long as the backlink remain. This means you must spend the majority of your time creating quality back links and all of your marketing efforts.

In the early days of Internet marketing reciprocal linking was very popular. Trading links with other sites was a way to create backlinks to your site.

This strategy is not as popular today because link directories are pretty much discarded by the major search engines. Not only that but you want to spend as much of your time creating one way backlinks to your site and not away from your site.

So how do you go about creating one way backlinks? Here are 3 easy ways that are working very well today and should be incorporated into your linking strategy.

1. Write and submit articles to the top article directories. In each article you can include a link pointing back to your website and your resource box.

For additional keyword relevance try hyperlinking your primary keyword phrase to your site as well. As you begin to develop backlinks to your homepage begin deep linking to sub pages within your site from your article resource boxes too.

2. Write blog articles and submit them to the top social directories. Search engines love fresh content and your blog articles will be spidered quickly if you submit them to the top social directories. We are talking about sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Technorati, and more.

Each article submission creates a backlink to your blog or specific blog article. If you do not have a blog you are missing out on easy traffic and long term quality backlinks.

3. Utilize social networking to create links pointing back to any web page you have. For example when you create a new web page announce it as an update on your Twitter account.

When you Tweet your followers this way you are creating back links to any webpage or blog post you make. Again the search engines will find these, as well as your readers, giving you more potential traffic.

Other popular social networks to join and create a profile with your website address in include Facebook, My Space, eEntrepreneur, and many others.

I feel that the most important thing you can do to create a long-term Internet presence is concentrate on backlinks regardless of how the Internet changes in the future. These three ways right now are excellent to create backlinks to your website and blog!

When it comes to doing SEO for your website, one of the major concerns you may have is how much time and money you’ll need to spend on it. If you’re hiring an SEO firm, then time IS money, and you’ll want to know a rough estimate of how much time the SEO firm will put in and, therefore, charge you for.

You can break down the steps necessary for SEO work, making it easier to judge how much time you or your SEO company will need to spend on each. The estimates given here do not take into account any major issues or technical problems that may arise. You may want to add in a few extra hours to each step to account for any problems that you may have to deal with. If your website is exceptionally large (a thousand pages or more), you may also want to add more time into your estimate.

Step 1: Domain/URL Issues – Two hours to a day

The first thing to do is to go through your website manually and make certain that everything is consistent. You also want to look for things that will cause a search engine robot to have difficulty navigating through your site. If you have a large, dynamic site or a site that brings in a lot of content from other sites that may change often, it may take you more than a couple of hours for this step. Once you’ve completed this step, expect it to take two to four more hours to create and test all of your 301-redirect links. It may also take between two and fifteen hours to rename or re-code any filenames depending on how your site is assessed.

Step 2: – Design issues – two to four hours plus 30 minutes per page

It’s easy to see many design issues, but it can be difficult to make certain that your design is consistent from page to page across your entire website. It may take a few hours to note down every design issue, but it shouldn’t take more than four or five hours. You can often note down these issues while you’re doing your domain/URL assessment, saving a bit of time. How long it takes to implement all of the changes you need to make at this step depends on how many pages you have. At most, you may end up spending half an hour on each page. If you’ve got a huge site, this can add days to your SEO.

Step 3: – Architectural Issues – 125 hours

The most important aspect of your webpage to a search engine is its architecture. While building a list of your architectural concerns can be done while making your other lists, the actual implementation of these changes may take days or weeks. Much of this depends on how dynamic your site is and just how much re-coding is necessary.

Step 4: – Content – half an hour / 250 words

Creating content that is search engine optimized can take a good amount of time, especially if you have a lot of content on your site. One way to save time and money on this step is to do the writing yourself; however, before you jump on that idea, make certain you understand how SEO works. Otherwise, you may do more harm that good. You can also purchase licensed content or rewrite your own content to include keywords.

Without a doubt getting high quality backlinks to your site is the backbone to search engine optimization. If you want to rank well in Google or any search engine you need quality websites linking to your website.

It tells the search engines that your site must be good if so many other websites are pointing to your site. Many internet marketers are beginning to understand that there is one type of link that is far better than any other type of backlink.

What type of backlinks you ask? Education backlinks better known as .edu backlinks.

Why do the search engines regard edu backlinks as the best on the internet? Great question. .edu backlinks are the most trusted links on the internet because they are from colleges and universities. In the mind of the search engine spiders an education website does not link to just any website, they only link to websites that really have something to offer.

There is a big problem with most education backlinks though. Most education websites now use the nofollow tag with any external link that goes away from their site. They know that there are people out there that will try and exploit their websites because they know that the links they provide to websites are the most powerful for the obvious reasons discussed above.

The nofollow tag basically tells the search engines not to count the backlink on the education website because they might be trying to exploit the education website. Now because of the nofollow tag that is used for most .edu backlinks most marketers don’t even bother with trying to get them anymore.

Believe it or not there are many edu websites that can give .edu backlinks to a website that do not use the nofollow tag, these are the websites that internet marketers can still use to gain some very big love the Google and the other search engines.

There are actually people on the internet that work with education websites that will help you get dofollow edu backlinks but it typically costs money for these backlinks. However it should be realized that the cost is normally worth it if used with a solid backliking strategy.

If you ever get the chance to get a dofollow edu backlink from an education website jump on it if you can afford it. It could make all the difference to your search engine optimization efforts.

Link-building is one of the most important aspects of SEO but many business owners go about it the wrong way. Not all links are going to make a difference in your search engine rankings so blindly accumulating links will not be to your advantage. Of course the top search engines like Google tell us that the best links to have are natural links that you receive without taking any action on your own. While these natural backlinks are ideal, it’s not as easy as it sounds to get them.

Other Types of Quality Backlinks

There are many other ways to get killer backlinks besides naturally. Three factors you can use to measure the quality of backlinks are the source of the link, the motivation behind the link, and the link itself. When judging the source of a link, you have to look at the site’s page rank, how much quality content the site has, and if the site has a high number of quality backlinks itself. Killer backlinks come from popular websites that have high page rank and plenty of quality backlinks.

The motivation behind a backlink is judged by whether you had to manipulate someone or something in order to get the link or if the link was created based on pure intent. An example of a link made with pure intent is when someone makes a natural link to your site because they like your content and simply think you have a great site. A manipulative link on the other hand is a link you had to pay for or otherwise take some sort of action to get.

When judging the actual backlink itself, you have to look at how it is built. A link to your site that says click here is better than no link at all but it can’t be considered a high quality backlink. Ideally, backlinks should have anchor text containing your target keywords.

Tips for Accumulating Killer Backlinks

In a perfect world, hundreds of nice people with reputable websites would find your website and link to it simply because they think it rocks. Such natural links are harder to get than it sounds. The first step you can take towards attracting more of these natural links is by creating top-notch content that is interesting, informative, and useful to your site visitors.

Beyond natural links, there are a number of other types of backlinks that could be labeled killer backlinks. For example, you can share your content with a Creative Common License, allowing people to reproduce your articles, videos, and pictures, just so long as they link back to your site. On those terms, you can receive links anytime someone uses your content.

Creating what is known as linkbait is another way to receive tons of backlinks. Linkbait is interesting content that appeals to a large group of people. It could be a funny photoshopped picture, a catchy blog post about an evergreen topic in current events, and much more. Linkbait, also known as viral content, can attract tons of backlinks to your site in a short amount of time through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Reddit.

Other types of content that are viral in nature include content that can be embedded into people’s blogs and sites such as widgets and videos. An incredibly useful widget that includes a link back to your site can not only bring you a ton of backlinks, it can also drive a substantial amount of traffic to your site.

Another way to gather quality backlinks is through submitting your site to reputable directories such as the Better Business Bureau, the Yahoo Directory, and the Librarian’s Internet Index. You can also drive traffic to your site and build killer backlinks when you contribute articles and blog posts to popular blogs and article directories on the web. And don’t forget about the power of online press releases to build killer links to your site.

Link-building is not an exact science but focusing on accumulating quality backlinks will certainly pay off with time. Make the creation of quality, informative content your top priority and you’re sure to gradually attract those awesome natural links. Utilize these other link-building methods as well to help you achieve your long-term SEO goals.