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Keeping up to speed with all the SEO strategies that the industry professionals are using can be a time consuming task. The work required to write your blog posts, and contribute to industry forums leaves little time to make sure your SEO strategy is up-to-date. Like any one who is trying to keep up to speed with the SEO market, you know that backlinks are the key to success, but getting quality backlinks without paying a fortune can be difficult.

One of the newest and most popular ways to get backlinks into your SEO repertoire is by submitting articles containing links to your pages to popular and top ranking article websites. Websites like ezinearticles.com and e-how.com are sites where users can submit articles on virtually any topic, and even get paid for hit results. The following are a few tips on submitting articles for free, and getting the quality backlinks you want.

Keep your articles topic relevant

Let’s face it, writing what you know is much easier than not, and writing articles that appeal to your potential customers or blog readers will get them interested in checking out your website. Contributing to topic relevant forums and blogs can also establish you as an industry expert, and will create even more backlinks through other’s linking your work.

Keep the quality of your articles

Avoiding the temptation and even the advice to “keyword stuff” will make your articles more readable and interesting. If you lack the skills to make your articles great, then there are plenty of freelance writers who can help, and they are often worth the investment.

Do a bit of research

Keeping up to date with topics being discussed on industry forums, and identifying your competitors can keep your articles fresh and relevant. This is also another great way to establish yourself as an expert and will keep people clicking your links.

The SEO business is definitely competitive. Knowing how to use Search Engine Optimization to get your website or blog top hit results on search engines is getting more complicated every day. With the growing number of professional SEO consultants flooding the internet with great SEO, and the number of tactics used to maximize your SEO strategy changing constantly, maintaining your SEO skills can be a full time job all on its own. That is why more and more professional web masters and bloggers are turning to professional consultants and companies to get their website noticed.

In the SEO world, backlinks are the most sought after way to maximize results. Backlinks are links back to your website or blog from other pages online. While the number of backlinks you can get is important, the ranking of the sites that contain your backlinks is the key to success. So how can you get top ranking sites to give you backlinks? One answer is to seek out professional SEO services, but finding a quality consultant or company to get you the backlinks you want can be tricky. Like any trend-setting marketplace, there are literally thousands of individuals and companies online that claim to be SEO backlink experts. Determining which ones really are, and how to get the most value for your dollar can be next to impossible without considering the following tips.

Know your SEO basics

Get to know at little about SEO before you start your search. Understanding the lingo can make knowing what you are looking for much easier. It can also give you the skills you’ll need to spot an amateur posing as a professional. Checking out some professional SEO blogs and forums is a great way to learn the basics from those who are in the industry.

Know how to Spot a Link Farm

While there are a number of legitimate online companies that can create and maintain backlinks for you, there are a growing number of individuals taking advantage of the popularity. There are countless overnight SEO businesses online that likely won’t last, and may even get your website or blog blacklisted by search engines like Google who are taking active measures against link farms. Doing a search for the companies you may be considering, and reading reputable reviews can help you avoid this problem.

Shop around!

While choosing a company or consultant that has top hit results on Google may prove that they are great at the SEO game, they may not always have your best interests in mind. Make sure you can personally contact someone. Always ask them for references, or examples of their work, and asking questions about what types of strategies they use can help you find someone who is in the business of making your website or blog get top results. Ultimately you want to find someone in the business of customer service, and not someone out to be your competitor.

With the ever increasing number of websites appearing online that create revenue from ad space, and the spike in software programs available that offer to track and analyze your web traffic, Google Analytics is the easy to use, and free option that is definitely worth a look. In fact, it is currently the most popular web analytics tool used according to Wikipedia, and is used by some of the most successful websites around to keep track of their online presence.

While Google Analytics has been around for a few years, its success essentially lies in its use of fairly simple technology to accomplish the task. Primarily it uses java script, time-stamped cookies, and an implementation code called ga.js. This allows the data to be collected and tracked, as well as analysed.

One of the benefits of Google Analytics is that there are multiple ways to analyze your data. It offers reports that are customizable depending on the type of data you want to know, and how you want it displayed. It is also very functional with other types of software that you may already be using, or that are part of your web host’s control panel; a feature not often found with free analytics tools. Another feature that makes this an excellent free web traffic tracking option is its ability to not only track direct web traffic, but related traffic, such as hits from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as through multimedia searches for your site’s images and videos, and even more importantly, search engine hit results.

Another great feature of Google Analytics is both the free and paid support options they offer to help maximize your web traffic. Their site has an extensive Help Centre that contains numerous articles and blogs from industry and Google experts that help you use the product. They also have an active User’s Forum where many question you may have can easily, and quickly be answered. They also offer email and telephone support if needed; a rare service in the world of free online business. If you require more professional, or intensive help in analyzing your web traffic data, or with your search engine optimization and web marketing strategies, Google Analytics also offers paid services from authorized consultants.

Google Analytics does offer a great product and service; however, there are a few limitations that should be kept in mind, especially if it will be used as your only web analytics tool. Google Analytics can often be easily blocked by privacy software that block or deletes tracking cookies. This however, is the major issue with most tracking software available, and it certainly does not affect the overall rating of this web analytics tool in general. Overall, Google Analytics is a highly useful tool that all webmasters and web marketing professionals should seriously consider.

Why Search Engine Optimization is the way to make money online

Given the growing number of money making opportunities that can be found online, from ad-based blogging to specialized web stores, making your website a top hit on search engines is absolutely crucial to its success. So how do you convince Google to make you a top three hit on searches for your product or service? The answer is Search Engine Optimization, or as it is more popularly referred to, SEO. SEO is essentially a web-based marketing strategy used to increase web traffic to a website through the inclusion of specific keywords in the html code, and the creation and maintenance of links from other sites that lead to yours.

The recent explosion of freelance consultants and professional SEO companies means getting your website or blog noticed is as simple as hiring an expert. But knowing how people search for information online, and how search engines produce search results is essentially the only things you need to know to get top results.

Finding the right Keywords

Usually the best place to put your keywords in the html code of your webpage is in the Meta tags. Keeping your keywords simple and relevant, but unique enough that they won’t get lost with the thousands of other sites that used those keywords is important to remember. In general short phrases work better than single words, and making sure that you have multiple keywords, but aren’t “keyword stuffing” is the best approach.

How will people search for what you have to offer?

While most know that SEO involves selecting the right keywords to include in your html code meta tags, often getting top results for tags on image or business searches can be just as critical, and sometimes more effective. This is especially true if you are creating a website for a business such as a hair salon, or bakery; or an image rich blog.

Back Linking: The New SEO

Back Linking is the other way that search engines organically find and rate your website, and its relevance is determined simple by the number of pages that link back to your site. While the number of ways that you can get your website Back Linked is ever increasing, it is important to ensure that the sites linking yours are topic relevant, and the more popular the better. Search engines like Yahoo and Google are taking active measures to reduce the number of top search result hits that are simple there due to aggressive “black hat” SEO tactics being used by an ever growing number of websites. While it is possible to create revenue based blog or website, keeping your content quality up and topic relevant will prevent your site from being removed, and ultimately produce more revenue in the long-term.

Looking to buy those nifty little 125 x 125 graphic ads on sites related to your niche? Maybe you’re just looking to buy a text ad. Whatever your need may be, there is a market for these effective ad spots. I have found the following 3 sites incredibly useful for buying and selling ads on websites. If you know of some better ones, please post them!

Digital Point Forums

This monster of a forum can be a very valuable resource to webmasters, if (that’s a big if) used properly. Check out the Buy/Sell/Trade section and click on Advertisements. There are hundreds of new posts every day in the ad sales section. As you can probably guess, this free-for-all attracts a large amount of junk, but don’t be discouraged by the scams and junk posts because there are very often hidden gems to be found here. On multiple occasions I have managed to locate high traffic/authority sites with cheap ads for sale, so be patient when using Digital Point Forums. Also, make sure to check the iTrader feedback of every solicited ad, (think eBay feedback), and always read the replies to each thread. Just use common sense and you’re much less likely to get ripped off (which is a very common occurrence on DP). Start off with small purchases until you are well acquainted with the DP marketplace.

SitePoint Marketplace

Sitepoint is one of my favorite sites to frequent, there is a wealth of information to be found on their forums, and the marketplace is “pay per post” so this weeds out most of the scam artists. Over time I have purchased hundreds of banner ads through Sitepoint, and, if you’re smart about it you can make money doing ad sales arbitrage or brokering with Sitepoint. Out of the ads that I’ve purchased, 9 out of 10 of these were sold well below their market value. How do you know the market value of an ad? I will save that for a future post. As with DP forums, always check the feedback of the user you are buying from. Sitepoint takes this a step further with their phone verification system, but since the dawn of pay as you go phones, this still doesn’t completely guarantee a legitimate seller.

BuySellAds.com

This site has taken the webmaster world by storm, and they did it fast. Go to a popular design or webmaster related site and you can almost always bet they are using this service to sell their ads. Why? Well the question is more like, Why Not!? BuySellAds.com offers a simple way for webmasters to sell ad space on their websites, no more writing long, convincing posts on Digital Point. Gone are the days of successful webmasters paying $10 to post a single ad for sale on Sitepoint. What does this mean for the buyer? Affordable, highly targeted ad space that is readily available. You are only limited by the size of your bank account. The downside? Currently BuySellAds only serves websites that are related to webmastering, design, development, or SEO. So if your niche is outside of this realm you are better off finding ads on Digitalpoint or Sitepoint. If you’re looking to sell ads, don’t get too excited; they have a 100k impressions/month minimum to become a seller.