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If you are going to have a successful online business what is the one thing you need more than anything else? Consistent streams of targeted traffic is the key to your online success. Notice that says targeted traffic, not just traffic. You want people to come to your site who are actually interested in what you are offering.

This brings up the question of where your traffic should come from. Search engine traffic is the best for several reasons. First, if people find you on the search engines they were looking for something you have to offer, which makes them more inclined to purchase or browse around your site. The biggest reason search engine traffic is so much better than say pay per click is the fact that searchers trust the natural results, a great deal more which in turn means more conversions. More targeted than this you won’t find.

Some of the strategies used by our team of experts to dominate search results:

[+] On page SEO

[+] Keyword Research

[+] Social Media Promotion & Management

[+] Blogging

[+] Article & Content Writing

[+] Video Promotion

[+] Link Building

[+] Google Maps / Local Search Optimization

[+] Press Releases

In order to rank well in the search engines you need professional assistance. And this doesn’t come neither cheap or with the necessary qualifications. Many website owners hire SEO firms to handle their campaigns, the problem is a good number of these companies will bleed you for money and only return a few useless back links through RSS or inefficient site submissions. If you want to succeed online, it is important to be careful and know what you are paying for. Thought Mechanics is not that kind of SEO service provider.

What you will find with Thought Mechanics is a company that puts incremental growth of your site’s ranking power as a number one priority. Our company offers your business relevant links on Web 2.0 and niche related websites. You can effectively see the traffic to your site double in no time flat, since all links are given the necessary attention in terms of independent link building campaign for each such quality initial backlink. Do not trust your livelihood to just any SEO company on the block, backlinks that pass on sufficient link juice along side with sustainable referral traffic is the only way to make it in the online world. You need the services of a company that understands this fact.

Back links are important, but that is not all there is to SEO marketing. 97% of your website ranking will depend on quality back links; however, there are other considerations as well. You need a search engine friendly site structure and good content for visitors. Many site owners self sabotage in the content arena by winding up red flag triggers like duplicate content issues. This is a huge red flag to search engine web crawlers and can result in your site not showing in the search engine results at all, not to mention minimal indexing rates!

You need a partner SEO professional that monitors your online platform on an ongoing basis providing SEO service within and beyond the initial payed for link building or site development jobs. This won’t find with any other SEO firm on the market as far as our marketing department knows.

Search engine algorithms change constantly, thanks in part to people who have essentially “cheated” the system to get good rankings. Our SEO Experts work diligently to keep up with changes and cover all the pertinent optimization angles or methods. This is the type of professionals you want working for your online business, when Google or one of the other search engine changes gears which by the way has turned into a pretty predictable habit.

Like it or not, Google is the platform people use to find what they want on the internet, if you are going to be successful with an online business you have to work within their confines bottom line! Let our team do the ground work in research and render you strategies that produce rapid and long lasting results.

Creating and managing a website that is search engine friendly and relevant to searchers is no easy task. If it were simple, everyone would be doing it successfully by now. But the reality is that only a few search engine marketers dominate top 3 positions in markets that count in terms of making real money. Most site owners do not have the time nor the patience to monitor changes keep up with the trends or do the painstaking keyword research. And they frequently resign in wasting money and time with unqualified SEOs that lead them no ware on the SERP horizons. If you want to work with a company that will take you to the next level consider ThoughtMechanics.

We offer one on one consultation and analysis of your site to determine your keyword ranking chances as well as a complete and personalized SEO campaign and pertinent assessments as to how your website will rank on a give time period backed by our reputation and financial guarantee. Now Really, if our SEO campaign fails to bring your site where we promised it will be, you’ll be given a full refund of your expenses with our SEO services, no question asked.

By: Selena Narayanasamy / esvienne.com

When you update and optimize your website for search engine traffic, keywords should always be a primary focus. Keywords are the lifeblood that helps drive traffic to your website based on how your website ranks within those words and phrases.

However, what methods do you use to select your keywords? Do you carefully research keywords and phrases, and determine alternate lists of keywords? Do you use your site stats to find out what keywords most land on your site? Or do you use no research at all and employ keywords that you feel are best suited for your site?

The best keyword strategy for search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) is to use web tools. There are plenty of free tools available on the internet for your use. Here are a few of the best recommendations:

1. Keyword Suggestion Tool

The keyword suggestion tool developed by Aaron Wall at SEOBook.com is not only a handy suggestion tool, but it is a powerful analytical tool as well.  Previously free to the public, SEOBook does now require a free membership in order to use the tool.

Once you are signed in, simply enter a keyword or phrase and watch as the tool delivers suggested keywords based on search volumes for all the major search engines like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It will also provide links to other tools like keyword price estimates from Google Adwords, as well as links to other databases to let you know how your keyword is being tracked in social media, blogs, and directories. This is truly the all-in-one keyword research tool, and it only costs your email address.

3. Wordtracker

The Wordtracker tool is also a great help when researching keywords. This is a paid-member access only, but anyone may use the Wordtracker for free with a 7-day free trial. Membership is $59 per month, but any website owner who makes money through his or her website will find that this tool is worth the cost.

Wordtracker will help generate thousands of relevant keyword ideas to help anyone using PPC campaigns. You can use it to help optimize your own website with the best choice of keywords and phrases. In addition, explore and research online markets to discover niche opportunities using your keywords.

4. Search Engine Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tool

If you want to know how your keywords position within major search engines, try the Keyword Tracker & Ranking Tool at DigitalPoint. The tool requires a membership registration, which is completely free. With this software, you can track historical rankings of your chosen keywords. Get real time system stats from all major search engines, along with keyword rank, changes, and even the last time it was queried.

 
 
Remember- no tool is 100% efficient, so don’t rely solely on these. They do make life a lot easier though. What are some of your favorite tools?
 
 
 

If you’re into SEO writing and tagging, you know that you are trying to drive traffic to your website or online business. You want the best tools to help you with this, but you don’t want your profits all eaten away by high fees. So let’s take a look at 10 of the very best, “must have” free SEO tools.

Let’s start by looking at Ranking Checker by SEOmoz.com. With this SEO tool, you are enabled to check your rankings for as many as five keywords every day at no charge, and the program also maintains an archive for you, which you are even able to download as CSV. All you’ve got to do is install the “browser button”, and it will then copy the URL of the page that you’re looking at into the tool and perform a quick check on its ranking. At five free keywords per day, you can check up to about 150 of them per month all for no charge.

MultiRank Checker by iWebtool.com is another great, and free, SEO tool. Want to check both the Alexa Ranking and the Google SERPS for your websites and multiple competitors of yours? Well, all you have to do with the MultiRank Checker is simply pour all of the domain names into the MultiRank Checker and then copy-and-paste the results table. Save time, multitask!

Next, let’s have a look at the SEO Analyzer by Sitening.com. This is a tool to use to commence with your optimization activities. It gives you a report featuring a detailed list of SEO components which you might want to assess more carefully on your websites. For your convenience, the tool furthermore maintains a copy of your previous reports, which with just a simple mouse-click you can download them all as a PDF. But, remember, this is not a total SEO analysis tool, so you would not want to rely on it alone.

Now we turn to the Strongest Subpages Tool by WeBuildPages.com. With this, you’ll find an organized listing of any website’s most SEO-potent pages. This makes it very easy for you to determine which pages carry the highest concentrations of inbound links. A magnificent way to use this tool is to analyze other successful websites’ pages and then take ideas from them to apply to your own.

Backlink Checker by WeBuildPages.com is essential for anyone working to design SEO-potent webpages and websites. With this, what you get is an outstanding backlink checking tool. Looking for a starting off point for your backlink marketing? Use this tool. You can analyze competitors’ links, too, in addition to your own.

SEO for Firefox by SEOBook.com can provide you with more data than any other from either the search engine or the visited page, making it the perfect tool to get yourself competitive overview quickly. You’ll be given cache date, number of cached pages, PageRank, Yahoo backlinks, domain age, number of dot-edu links, and on and on. With a simple right click. Then all of the data can be exported directly from the SERPs to CSV.

This tool is based on Urchin–Google makes it free to anyone. You’ll get thorough data about funnel information, traffic behavior, content visitation, and on and on. The Webmaster Console tool now gives you a good view of what Google “sees” for your site including: crawling rate, crawling speed, backlinks, highest PageRank of your site and more.

Want a “dietary supplement” SEO tool? Try using Google’s Keyword Tool. Since the Overture.com went down this is perhaps the most reliable keyword filter tool on the market. All SEO programs that have keyword research capabilities pull in their data from Google’s own stats. So why pay when you could use it for free!

Now here’s a unique one: XENU’s Link Sleuth by Tilman Hausherr. This is something that you download at no charge, and once you do you are allowed to keep your copy in the event that the owner decides to making people pay for it. With this one, you get a spider…so, with it you are able to figure out whether or not a website has, say, broken links, endless loops, redirect detections, and so on. Kill your competitors!

And at last, we come to Visual PageRank by iWebTool.com. For your intuitive side, you get to actually “see” your webpage with page rank overlays for every one of your links.

Count ‘em–one through ten. Put ‘em all in your SEO toolbox–for free!

Honorable Mentions:

• Digital Points Keyword Tracker
• Rank Tracker, it costs money but it’s worth every damn dime. Get this.
• Market Samurai, this also costs money but it can come in very handy.
• SEO Quake FireFox Plugin – This should have been in the top 10 list but Cristian, my blogger has failed not only me but all of the readers out there

The “no follow” link ( <a href=”http://www.targetdomain.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a> ) was created in order to prevent search engines from following links within blog comments. The rationale was simple: spammers constantly use blogs to spam because this gets them better SEO results and higher quality link-backs, and this would stop the spammers. Unfortunately, that logic has proven false.

Spammers have not stopped spamming. NoFollow doesn’t work to stop them. Spammers have other ways of getting rankings. And of course the NoFollow link has gone beyond blogs, and found its way into other types of websites.

NoFollow links should not even be in use if bloggers moderate comments made. If you can pass the “human inspection test”, you should be able to have search engines follow your links. It’s really that simple. But, on WordPress blogs, NoFollow is the default format.

Therefore, they (as in the bloggers) might be trying to build their search engine presence in a legitimate way with linkbacks but getting nowhere fast–without even being aware of the problem.

Why would anyone in their right mind use NoFollow if they are trying to build up online presence value? And just think about the way someone builds up the value of a blog by adding comments–if they present a link, why should they not be given the credit for a link-back?

Why should they be victimized by this “NoFollow” tag when they are not a spammer?

As a matter of fact, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has said “In theory [the NoFollow link] should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.”

If you link to someone with a NoFollow value, you certainly aren’t really showing any trust to them. It’s like shaking someone’s hand but secretly spraying down your hand with Lysol first.

And then there are all those naive newbie webmasters who in the name of site-protection do the NoFollow tag for every and any outgoing links at their website to “protect the site from page rank leakage”–whatever that’s supposed to mean.

It really gets outrageous after a while. Search engines, even Google, ignore the NoFollow links, but where does it end? Shouldn’t the serach engines be the ones responsible for filtering out untrustworthy links?

Why should they be looking for some “NoFollow” nonsense? And this just kills off text link ads, by the way–kind of like trying to get your wife pregnant while you both use birth control at the same time.

Having said all this, Google is constantly evolving and it has programmed itself to allow at least some following of “NoFollow” tagged links. Yahoo has always been doing this, but then again Yahoo, as important as it is, is not nearly as important as Google when it comes to search engines.

There are key ways in which you can use a NoFollow tag. If you’re doing SEO, only place the NoFollow tags on content pages. Just keep in mind that a website that has tons of unverified links won’t make it big with the webcrawlers anyway, so why waste time and possibly screw up other parts of your website’s SEO effectiveness with NoFollow? Never forget that there are, in fact, some significant SEO benefits from freely linking out.

And what if you sell ads on a blog or on some landing page? well, that’s when you can use a NoFollow tag, since the almighty Google webcrawlers don’t favor followed ad links for SEO purposes.

All in all, you have to know when to use a NoFollow tag. There’s no reason at all to just shotgun the approach. The tag really does not prevent spammers from doing what they know how to do and there are far more effective means of stopping such critters. You don’t want to stop legitimate online business practices in the name of an inferior method of spam prevention.

Have you ever been surfing on the Internet and landed on a website where there was a lot of activity going on, such as heavy use of Flash, animation and video that made you stop and say, ‘way cool?”

Did you realize that using a lot of these incredibly appealing, eye candy design techniques may actually be hurting that particular site’s buoyancy in the organic listings?

Whenever you or someone you hire designs a website, many decisions about optimizing the various components that are placed on your pages need to be considered if you’re ever going to obtain higher search engine rankings.

As either a designer or a purchaser of designs, you need to know what website components are going to have a negative impact upon how that site ranks in the search engines. It also helps to have an understanding of which types of designs will improve a site’s search engine rankings.

The 4 design elements that will hurt your site’s SEO results

[+] Flash is one of those elements that the SE spiders don’t particularly care about. Spiders like to nibble at text, and there are no text elements inside a flash file. Not only can the spiders not scan or read them, they present no way for search engines to understand what these elements are like the way they can understand what HTML pages do.

Granted, Google and many of the other popular search engines have a continuous research effort trying to figure out ways to read and scan Flash technology, but we may be years away from it.

Lots of new designers, who are typically young and enthusiastic, like the look of flash elements thinking that they hold a great deal of attraction. However, the true strength of any web page attracting visitors relies totally on its content, the text, and the keywords used on pages that are the same ones entered into search engine queries.

[+] Another seemingly hip technique used by a lot of look-oriented web designers is the implementation of images as navigation links. Again, the search engine has no idea what this link is or where it may be going since it cannot be read. If you’re interested in better performance from an SEO perspective, don’t do this.

[+] The use of frames is also counterproductive talking about SEO efforts since the spiders usually ignore this type of element. You are better off using a control device such as a cascading style sheet to produce the same effect as frames, but as an external document that is written in text.

[+] Also, don’t get clever by putting descriptive text that is intended to be content on a page inside an image. Again, the spiders will not see it and it will be ignored. However, by all means use text in “alt” tags that serve as a description telling the spiders what that particular image represents. Again, use of CSS to display image descriptions is the proper method.

Now that there is a discussion of things to avoid, consider some of the design elements that you must include in order to have your website optimized properly

> One of the most critical SEO techniques is to include unique and relevant keywords that are placed directly in the content on the web page. Spend some time doing research to select those unique and relevant keywords. There are free tools available online that can help you choose the keywords that will benefit you the most.

Always make sure these keywords are included in such design elements like your domain name, headings and titles tags that the spiders love to crawl upon. Furthermore, never stuff keywords into your web content because this will get you penalized by the engines. Use a keyword density tool that will instruct you on how to spread them this out so they read correctly.

> Use the site map not because it just helps users to navigate but because it also helps search engines to index your website. The engines use this information to get an idea how fresh your content is and how often you update your pages and what areas of your site are particularly relevant.

It is highly recommended that anyone building a website check with Google Webmaster guidelines. This will supply you with all the information you need to make sure that your website design is SEO friendly and is free to use.

There are five specific SEO factors that affect how all domains are viewed by the search engines. This is true whether the name is old or new. However, there is a distinct advantage when starting with a new selection when you understand these factors and what their particular impact is upon SEO. You can build up your “ownership” in these areas and easily outrank any competition.

Before we get into the meat and bone of this article, know that if you intend on making a quality acquisition you need to start looking for an aged domain name instead of one with no background; all the more so since .com domains are becoming rarer in the majority of niches. If you have an “aged” name – or plan to purchase an “experienced” one, it is important to know how these five measurable factors will affect your chosen name.

When you get a handle on what these five factors impact upon your domain, you can get a starting leg up on your competition for the top rankings in the SERPs.

The 5 SEO factors Related to Domain Name Efficiency

[+] Backlinks – are there other websites that point to yours and act as sort of a “vote” in your favor? However they are given greater consideration when they come from quite authoritative sites, for example CNN, opposed to a brand new site that is not as popular, or does not have a high authority ranking.

Additionally, backlink relevancy plays a part when related to your website niche where if you are an online flower shop with a link from a nursery, this link would rank higher than one from a site about puppies. When you have a large number of authoritative but relevant backlinks, the greater an SEO value you will possess.

However, new domains start at with no backlinks and a campaign that consumes a great deal of time, effort and more than likely money is needed. If you purchase an aged name, it may already be associated with effective backlinks.

[+] Page Ranking is determined by a number of factors including the quality and quantity of your backlinks. The (visible) PR ranking of a page is calculated from 1-10, with 10 being the highest.

So, an experienced, authoritative site like CNN would rank 10 where a new site would rank 0, or effectively have no ranking yet. As with creating backlinks, obtaining a high page ranking can also take energy, time and money.

[+] Age of a domain name is an important factor since new names inherit no SEO aspects, but need to develop these over time.

If you can acquire an aged domain name, you may benefit handsomely since search engines equate age with trustworthiness – the longer the domain has existed in their index the more trust is placed in it. Obviously new names have none.

[+] History plays a factor when purchasing an aged name since search engines will judge for ranking based on the site’s relevant history. Therefore, if you have an auto parts site that can buy an aged domain that was used as an auto parts site, this will work toward your advantage.

The reverse is true to a disadvantage if you bought an aged name for use in a completely different niche than it originally represented. You would be better off buying an SEO-oriented new domain name.

[+] Listing in DMOZ and Yahoo is valued by Google but it is almost impossible to get in DMOZ nowadays and it takes about $300 to be listed in Yahoo.

Obviously, newly registered domain names will have no listing in either of these. But, you may find an aged name available for purchase that is listed, thus shortcutting any efforts you might look to make to gain entry to these directories.

“Branding” Considerations

Add to these five factors the various reasons for choosing a domain name when Branding comes into consideration. Although there is fast becoming a plethora of suffixes from which to choose, i.e., .com, .net, .org, .me, choice is still a distinct factor affecting branding.

For example, the .com is still considered the strongest and best representative for doing business on the net. However, substituting the suffix .org is becoming a popular choice for people seeking keyword rich domain names not available through .com. In the past, .org typically signified usage by non-profit organizations and associations almost exclusively. But unlike .gov, which is strictly limited for use by recognized government entities that must be verifiable, .org is not limited simply to non-commercial entities.

It remains important in SEO efforts to associate a business name in a URL that can also be pointed to a URL that is keyword dominated so search engine users find you more readily.

Getting Ranked Well in Google Local Results

Search for “Fort Myers plumber” or “Naples painter” in Google and the first thing you usually see is “Google local business results”. Because this is almost always the first thing that shows up when searching for a local business or service, it’s becoming critically important that a company be listed highly in the local results if they plan to capture leads.

Nobody except the Google Engineers know exactly how Google ranks local results or the organic results, making educated guesses is the best us common folk can do. Local search is still fairly new so there is no clear consensus amongst online marketing experts on how sites are ranked. However, there are some basic fundamentals that one should keep in mind when it comes to ranking well in local search:

1. Reviews - You’ll notice one thing about the results, all or most of them have reviews. Thing is, Google pulls reviews from many sites, not just the reviews on Google. For example, take a look at this. What you’ll notice is Google pulling results from a wide-range of review sources.

Moral of the story? Get reviews. Even if you have to offer your customers coupons or discounts, get those reviews!

2. Organic SEO – Many SEOs and online marketing experts believe that your organic search power also plays a role in the local search. The idea is that Google doesn’t want a site to be able to game the local results by using fake reviews. So by including natural rankings into the local search algorithm, Google is making it harder to game the local rankings.

3. Location – Location is very important and it’s something that can’t be controlled. When someone searches for something, Google knows where they’re at. It’s in Google’s best interest to show the searcher the listings which are the closest to his or her home.

Although thousands of new people gain access to the Internet every day, you should know that many are still on dial up. Therefore, you should show a little empathy for these poor souls by doing a few simple things to make your pages load faster. Making your pages load faster will also keep your bandwidth charges to a minimum and your users happy.

1.) Styling your website using CSS allows the use of an external file that will help your pages load much quicker. This streamlines your coding compelling a web browser to cache all the formatting information instead if reading tags on every page. Generally speaking, CSS will handily speed up page loading even when switching older designs from HTML-only to a combination of external cascading style sheets and inline tagging.

2.) Use of external scripting will do the same chore as it will with CSS. This is especially true when using the very same script on several pages within your site. Referencing Java scripts from an external source instead of incorporating the code on every page will allow the browser to cache the script and save a lot of time specifically when using very large scripts.

3.) You may be quite the knowledgeable designer but you should avoid trying to show off using every single tool in your webmaster kit. Although embedded sound, video and flash elements may look cool and impressive, why are you placing all of these elements on a single page?

4.) The “survey” says that most embedded sound files are found to be annoying to most people. Think about all those people peeking at the Internet while at work. The unknown sound that suddenly rings out through the workroom will alert everyone that someone is surfing the net.

5.) Also, many people actually ear plug up listening to music when your annoying sounds come over the computer’s speakers. Forget Java Applets; use Java Script because it loads faster. Unless all the fancy effects are actually part of the solution you are offering visitors to your site, take a far better critical look at them determining if they are really necessary.

6.) Another design method that tends to slow things down is nesting tables – putting one inside the other. If at all possible, try using CSS to create columns for your well-designed site instead of using tables. Your browser is going to take a little bit of time to work out the tables facing when you put one inside the other using strictly HTML coding.

7.) Another great tip is to avoid using full-page tables. The little page loading will keep spinning and spinning and spinning since it will take the browser quite a deal of time to read the entire code for the stable. Instead, you can try to use multiple tables that are not asked, or place regular content above the first table appearance that will get the page loading quicker. This may just be a little bit of an illusionary trick since the page is probably not loading faster, but you visitor thinks it is doing so.

8.) Design your pages to a minimum length. This not only will help to make your pages load quicker, but you will stop annoying your visitors to have to teach growing on and on and on to read the information you’re presenting. It is a given that people have limited attention spans, so try not to abuse them.

9.) Whenever you do hand coding, always edit for all the whitespace. The whitespace is that empty area between your code where you can remove any unneeded tabs or spaces. This will help immensely. Not only will this take out a lot of those unnecessary bytes that make up your page size, it will also go a long way to speed up how well the page will load.

Also, if you're using a WYSIWYG editor, when you finished coding a page,  you need to go back and remove all those excess and empty tags that  this type of editor produces.

10.) Make use of image optimizers that can help reduce file size as well as employing one of several page load testers like Pingdom, WebPageTest.org or the Google tool, Page Speed. These online tools and plug-ins can help you identify objects and areas of your pages that are slowing down and thus help you correct the problem. Page Speed will also test your server checking out how its configuration affects the loading of your pages making suggestions on how to improve it.

When you perform your SEO flawlessly and with commitment, you can receive some absolutely fantastic results from Google, the world’s largest search engine. There’s no better platform for getting your business, products or services out to as large a group of the public as you can with Google.

However, you have to play by the right rules or you can be penalized. If you’re unsure about whether or not you have been penalized by Google, then ask yourself the following questions to help find some answers.

1. Is your website new? If you have a new website, don’t be surprised and don’t panic if your site isn’t being found within Google.

This common phenomenon is known as “The Google Sandbox“, and whether or not it’s a real thing, it’s certainly very widespread for new websites to take some time before they get found, indexed and then highly ranked.

Additionally, rapidly jumping up and down between vastly different ranking spots is also common for newer, less established websites that have not really found their place yet.

2. How long have you noticed changes? If you have been looking at your positioning to gauge how you’re doing in Google, it’s important not to overreact to changes that aren’t longstanding.

Even older and more prominent websites can fluctuate greatly within the results of Google for certain terms, or all of their targeted search terms.

If you check up on your site one day and you aren’t where you thought you would be, give it a few more days or a week to see if it jumps back.

3. Are you noticing real changes in your numbers? Besides just checking in on your rankings, it’s hugely important that you actually check your stats, whether you use Google Analytics or any other services.

You might think you’ve dropped down by a huge margin, but then check your traffic from Google searches and see that it has been pretty consistent.

Maybe only one or two pages or keywords have changed greatly, or maybe the results on your own Google have been skewed to your other recent searches. The stats don’t lie though, so dive in and take a peek at your numbers to see if there have been real and prominent changes.

4. Do you see any warnings from Google Webmaster’s Tools? The webmasters tools area of Google is an invaluable resource, because they will tell you upfront and blatantly some of the issues that they are having with your website.

Maybe there is a lot of duplicated META information, missing or broken links, incorrect sitemap forms or data or anything else.

If you see warnings there, they could be factoring in on your rankings, and ignored warnings could lead to your rankings being penalized or devalued (that is if the warnings are substantial and not smaller or subjective issues).

Therefore you don’t want to jump to any conclusions before you see what those tools are telling you. Plus, when you correct any significant warnings or issues, you will be restored.

5. Have you done anything you thought you shouldn’t have? Many people try to get around the system and make use of some black hat, illicit or highly questionable promotional or optimization strategies.

If you’ve done this and were hoping it wouldn’t catch up to you, maybe it has.

If you think you’ve been participating in something that has negatively affected your rankings, try to break off your connections to that and start fresh, and you should be able to rebuild up your credentials.

6. How are you doing in the other search engines? You’re never going to be ranked exactly the same across all of the major search engines.

However, it’s usually a safe bet that if you’re doing pretty well in Google, you’ll be doing pretty well in Bing or Yahoo, and vice versa.

So if you’re Google traffic and rankings have nosedived, then you have to evaluate your traffic and rankings on the other major services.

If they all have nosedived, you have to re-up your efforts in terms of keyword research, optimization, link building, fresh content and more. If Google is the only one that has significantly dropped off, it’s a strong sign that yes, you have been penalized within their rankings.

Everybody should know that building links towards your website is an extremely important piece of search engine optimization, as well as growing your presence around the web as well.

But what exactly are the types of links that you should seeking, and what’s the difference between all of the available options?

You can break down types of links into several different categories based upon what you’re trying to achieve with them, how much control you have over them and how much value they really provide.

+Links that Boost your Search Engine Rankings

Most people build links to help them rise through the search engines. Of course, an incoming link acts somewhat like a vote for your website in the eyes of the search engines, and the more of them you have, and from better sources, the more value you can see with them.

To see the most value from links that boost your search engine rankings there are a few different items to check off.

First of all, the links should be dofollow to make sure that you are getting full Page Rank value from them.

Secondly, the higher the Page Rank of the site with the link, the more that incoming link is worth to you. A few PageRank 4 or 5 links are worth more than dozens and dozens of links from PR 0 or 1 sites.

Other factors that provide you with more value for your SEO results from links include the relevancy of the website in relation to yours, and the anchor text that is used within the link.

A relevant backlink will be one that is highly related to your own industry or niche. If you repair bikes, a bicycle manufacturer is surely a more valuable and relevant link than a grocery store your Mom works at across the country.

The anchor text used within the link is hugely important, because it will align your website with the specific terms and phrases that you’re trying to rank for. The anchor text tells the search engines what you’re page is all about, and it makes you credible and relevant for those terms.

Sometimes you can control the anchor text, such as when you participate in article marketing, or perhaps with amiable webmasters participating in link exchanges. In other occasions though you will have to hope that the links used are as relevant as possible, and it will be out of your control.

+Links that Directly Lead to Traffic

Some kinds of links may not boost your SEO value that much, but they can help to provide you with a huge stream of traffic. This might be a link from a website that NoFollows it’s outgoing links as a rule. Or it could come from a social bookmarking or networking site that gets a ton of traffic but whose links won’t really boost your rankings.

Either way, the direct traffic is valuable and with the right content and links in the right places, you can help find a whole bunch of clients and prospects that you would not have found otherwise, with or without the search engines.

+Links that Grow Your Presence

Finally, sometimes you will be building links that are really in place to grow your presence and build your reputation. They might not send a ton of traffic to your site, or provide a whole lot of SEO value. However, you will be growing awareness for your brand, your website and your business, and helping to spread the word.

A popular example of this might be a Facebook profile page. Surely you will produce some direct traffic from your link, but it probably won’t be that much unless you really have a huge presence on the site.

But what you are doing is getting your website’s name and out there, and when you make a positive impact and offer help, assistance or simply friendship to others it can and will be remembered.

Of course, never forget that many links can help to do all of these things. A link from a relevant, high ranking and highly trafficked blog to yours will boost your SEO, provide you with a direct stream of traffic and grow your presence as well.

The more backlinks the better, and a varied strategy that gives you all of the above kinds of links will produce the best results.