In today’s race to the top of the Google SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages), there are a number of factors that can help you achieve those coveted spots. While certain techniques may weigh better than others based on your industry and level of competition, there is no questioning the power of links.

There are several methods, some common and some yet to be discovered, you can try out to help boost your link density and search rankings. While it would be near impossible to go into great detail on all methods (that would require a book) below I have outlined some of the more common techniques a web site owner can use to increase their site’s popularity.

1. Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links used to be a huge asset and played a significant role. Today, fewer sites are employing this technique as it is thought by many to have no role in the eyes of Google. This is simply not true. While the overall value of reciprocal links has declined over the years, they can and will still help your rankings if done correctly.

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I’m trying to figure out all this blogging stuff, but I’m a bit confused about two aspects of blogging: pings and trackbacks. What’s the difference?

Dave’s Answer:

You’re not alone, I’ll tell you that. I was recently attending a blogger meetup here in Colorado and was rather surprised to find out that many bloggers don’t understand the difference either. When one attendee endeavored to explain it, I realized that he too didn’t fully understand.

Here’s the difference: a ping is a message sent by a blogging application to blog search engines like Technorati that inform the systems that you have posted a new entry. If you think about how a regular search engine like Google works, you’ll realize that when you add a new page, nothing happens until the search engine stumbles upon it, so the “on demand” pings are quite efficient and are one reason that blog entries are so quickly indexed. If your blogging tool doesn’t send out pings — which most do — then you can also generate these system pings through a service like pingomatic.

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In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.

In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.

The focus of Part 1 will be on page website optimization.

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS

This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly. If you are interested in reading more please see Keyword Research for Organic SEO.

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Did you know that there are three simple alphabet letters that can make or break your social media campaigns? So many times we overlook these three letters and never realize that they can help improve your social media profiles’ success. In fact, many top social media users use this and often we don’t realize that they’re using these three letters to make them successful.

What are these three letters? RSS. Yes, it is probably not surprising and we’ve all heard it before. Most of the time we associate RSS as being from our own site and our own blog; many blogs automatically create an RSS feed of the content, allowing you to syndicate it on other sites. But did you know that many social media sites (social bookmarking sites) automatically create an RSS feed of everything that you’ve bookmarked?

Most likely you’ve spent time promoting the RSS feed of your blog and you’ve tried to get more people to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. But, how often have you looked at the RSS feed of your social media profiles that are available? Did you know that many social media sites give you an RSS feed of everything that you’ve submitted, voted on, or otherwise participated in? By promoting the RSS feed of your social media profiles, you’ll drive more traffic and build links; which will help you in the long run.

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Some tools exist because they are valuable and remove market friction. Others exist because they are perceived as being valuable, even if they are actually value destroying, or only valuable in rare circumstances.

Valuable Tools of the Trade

Outside of paying for a domain name, hosting, site design, and buying a few links you could create (an ad supported) business online virtually free.

Blogs are easy to post to, easy to subscribe to, and easy to comment and interact with. Keyword tools and analytics services are easy to view and infer ideas and trends from. Searchable email saves time. Google Alerts and feed readers save time and keep you connected with your industry. Many of these tools are free, in spite of offering great value.

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We have heard from Matt Cutts on many issues either through his blog or through the videos. The NOINDEX tag has been deliberated upon before by him, see: Handling Noindex Meta Tags and Google even made changes to how the tag was implemented, see: Google Accepts The “noindex” Directive In The robots.txt, Temporary or Permanent?.

Some time back Google came up with a video about removing your websites from its index, and later when it was discussed at one of the forums, many came to know for the first time, that the remove url feature came with an expiry of 90 days.

The latest post from Matt comes as a policy discussion about NOINDEX and how Google should treat the NOINDEX meta tag.

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These days, as more and more companies come to the conclusion that their 1990’s built websites with the animated gifs, static backgrounds, and auto-playing midi files have seen their prime, they begin to enter into a world of redesign.

While creating these new websites with the sleeker look, and cleaner file structure is a smart move for the future, the risk and complications caused by changing URL’s and the impact this has on search engine rankings is very real.

This is where redirects come in. Using the correct redirect, in most cases a permanent 301, is key to helping maintain your existing rankings, whether your site is undergoing a complete face lift, or if you simply want to move a few pages around.

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As more and more users gain access to the web, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few.

Just as businesses must comply with the American Disabilities Act to ensure proper access to customers with disabilities, businesses should do all they can to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of the means in which they access the site.

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There is a lot of talk amongst designers about why web standards are important, sometimes it is a bragging point to say that you know a lot about CSS and HTML and can make a good site within standards.

Some of it is just a line to make whatever you are doing sound better. I hear a lot of local Oklahoma web design companies talk about web standards but for the most part I see some of them still designing in tables or not even getting the bare minimums in when it comes to web standards.

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From years of troubleshooting websites for companies, I have consistently run up against the same problems.

The size of the company, or the website for that matter, has very little to do with these problems, however I usually find that larger companies have these problems at unusually higher rates than smaller companies.

Each of these problems can kill your internet marketing campaign in the search engines. They have critical importance in allowing the search engines to properly download your website to their servers and then analyze all of the information in your webpage’s code. Having your website downloaded correctly to the search engines is the first step in organic search marketing, and these issues are at the foundation of the organic strategy.

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