You also need to avoid using frames when you are creating pages for your website if you want them to perform well within the search engines. Frames end up slowing things down and can even end up confusing the search engines as well. Javascript also should be avoided in large parts, since this can cause your pages to load slowly. While graphics can be a nice part of your pages, you’ll also find that they can slow down page load if you end up using too many or if your graphics are too large.

Research and Use Good Keywords
If you want to have a website that is search engine friendly, researching and using good keywords is going to be very important as well. When you first start coming up with the website design, use a good keyword tool that can help you come up with keywords that will work well for your website. You should have a nice range of keywords, although you don’t need to concentrate on all the keywords on one single page. Once you have those keywords researched, you need to work on incorporating them into your website. This can be done in meta tags, title tags, links, and more.

Remember That Content is Always the Most Important
The content on your website is always the most important part of your page when it comes to catering to the search engines. However, content should not just be written with search engines in mind. You also need to write with your visitors in mind too. Most search engines look through text and they identify the keywords that are in the text, which helps provide good rankings in the search engines. Ensure that you use keywords in prominent parts of your text for the best results. However, avoid using keywords too much or this will end up causing problems with the search engine. Too many keywords will also hurt the quality of your text as well, making visitors less likely to come back to read your content again.

When your visitors get to your site, they want to be able to get to the information they want quick. The average web surfer stays on a page for approximately 7 or 8 seconds. During that time they are looking at how easily they can get around, or navigate your pages and information. Your navigation elements need to be readily available, easily seen and the right ones even increase your results in the search engines.

Remember that search engines can only read text. For this reason, simple text based navigation buttons or links are the best option. Just write the phrase "about us" and link it to the "about us" page. It is important that that link goes directly to your "about us" page. The same applies to the other navigation links on all your pages, no matter how many or few you have.

Now, on to the search engines and what works best. As we said, the search engines can only read and assess text. That is why your page content has to be relevant and current all the time. This helps your site remain in the top listings for your niche or market. The web is a competitive place, so the top 5 to 7 results listed will grab 95% of the visits. That is a hard statistic.

If your navigational links are text based, the search engines can read them. The result is simple. The search engine will return a link to your site’s pages. Have you ever noticed that when you search for an established web site, you get links to all the pages associated with that site? You can go to the contacts page, about page, links page or any page that the SE sees a link for.

On the other hand, if you get fancy and layer the text over a graphic like a folder style tab or a pre-made button, the search engine does not see that. This reduces your results and gets you less visitors. Since the aim of your web site is to either inform the visitor about a product or directly sell them the product, your navigation needs to be simple and straightforward.

Other types of navigation elements are even less effective, such as dropdown menus. Not everyone is a web expert. If they cannot see the link clearly, they may just go away. So keep the navigable links visible and easy to see. Specify them with colors, bold text, underline them or make them appear different on mouse over. All these things call attention to the link and urges them to click.

Location is important, too. I like to keep mine at the top of the page. This is where most folks look for them to be. Placing them down the left side is acceptable as well, but not as effective and it makes them have to look for them. Too much work makes a surfer turn away.

Lastly, remember the 3 click rule. Keep all your pages no more than 3 mouse clicks away. It has been shown in studies that most web surfers are only willing to click a maximum of 3 times to reach their desired information. Make your navigation easy and within a click or two and your site will succeed and be effective.

Of course, web design has made incredible leaps forward since the days of 14.4 K modems and text-only web browsers. While text only browsers are still available (and actually, you may want to install one yourself for reasons we’ll explain later on), they are hardly the norm. Web content is now decidedly visually oriented and people think about the World Wide Web and the pages on it in a different way than they once did. The view of internet content was once that it was a sort of technologically advanced extension of print media, but the web has now taken on a life of its own and has become very much its own medium.

Photos and other images are now an important part of nearly every website, especially now that dynamic Web 2.0 platforms have become popular ways for users to share their own content. It’s almost unimaginable in this day and age that someone would create a website without including any graphical elements for readers. Everyone uses images as part of their web design now, but what not everyone is doing with their website images is using them to their full advantage.

If you’ve spent any time reading about web design or basically any other internet related topic, chances are that you’re at least somewhat familiar with the concept of search engine optimization or SEO. This is a fascinating topic in itself, though we’ll refrain from going into too much detail of the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization here. What is important to know about SEO for our purposes today is that it refers to a number of techniques which increase the amount of traffic to websites by fine tuning the content as well as some of the behind the scenes elements of web pages to make it easier for major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to index their content properly and increase site rankings in search engine results.

Even if you already know about using keywords to optimize your text content for the search engines, you may not know that the images on your website can also be optimized in order to make your site more attractive to search engines and thus easier for your target audience to find.

Optimizing your site’s images and other graphical content is a good thing to do for a couple of reasons. It helps your site to climb higher in the search results so that you’ll bring in more visitors. It’s also a good web design move in terms of enhancing your site’s accessibility to visually impaired web users and users who use older hardware and software with limited webpage rendering capabilities – and increasingly, the major search engines are starting to reward accessibility standards compliant websites with a boost in their rankings. It’s a win-win situation; your site benefits in terms of more traffic and you do the right thing by making the web just a little more accessible to users who sometimes find that not every website’s content is available to them.

Best of all, optimizing the images on your site is fairly easy to do. You don’t have to be a programmer in order to do this, though you will need to learn a few simple HTML tags. If your website is powered by WordPress or many other modern content management systems, you may not even have to do that, since these platforms usually offer a user-friendly method of tagging your images as you upload them to the site and post them on your web pages.

Assuming yours is a static HTML/XHTML based website, you’ll have to use Alt tags for your images; these provide alternate text which is placed on your site instead of the images themselves when your site is viewed in text only browsers or using screen reader software.  Without these tags, search engines don’t know what your images are or what they’re about  – they only see the text content of your site and its HTML code.

This is where trying out a text-only browser (like Lynx for Windows or w3m or Links for Linux systems) is educational. View your site in a text only browser before and after adding Alt tags; before, there’s nothing – but after, there’s a description of the image which actually tells your visitors something. Since these Alt tags can also incorporate your site’s important keywords where appropriate, it can also give your site’s SEO efforts just a little more of a boost. Every little bit helps when you’re trying to attract an audience, so optimizing your images isn’t just good web design, it’s also good business.

If you’re logged-in your webmaster account and don’t know what to do to improve your site, go write some content! Now really, one thing you can do and enjoy doing it is handle the site’s speed.

There are 4 main advantages for having a site with high response:

• improved rankings,
• improved quality score for Adwords,
• improved conversion rates,
• decreased bounce rate.

Not so long ago even Matt Cutts stated the site’s loading time will definitely be included as a factor (among the other 200) in determining a site’s the ranking power in the SERPs. While this is a projection for the uncertain future, the truth is site speed affects conversion rates today.

To give you a sense of what we’re saying take as an example the case of Amazon and Google. When Amazon made changes that resulted in a 100 milliseconds increase in response rate (1/20 of a second to be more exact), they reported a decrease in sales of 1%. When Google raised their response rate with a half a second, they reported a decrease in searches of 20%. Given these facts, you really should ask yourself how the site speed influences your current profit margins. Here are some ways to do it:

Reduce the number of HTTP Requests

Every time you access a webpage the web browser makes a request for all page elements that combined give you the full picture. Each individual element, whether it’s an image or script it’s responsible for an HTTP request. Consequently the number of items displayed on the page dictates the number of page requests. And the more such requests pending to be processed the slower the page will load.

• Here are a few rapid tweaks to reduce the loading time:
• Instead of using background images add them to the CSS file.
• Keep your images fit – reduce number of colors and eliminate useless white areas.
• Work with lower quality images. Having non-premium images will not alter user experience if used in the right site areas.
• Combine images and scripts where possible.

Use Content Delivery Networks

This section targets webmasters with big website networks. The distance between visitors and the server a site is located on influences the rate at which readers receive information. A content delivery network is a spiderweb of servers located within a geographical area. The trick is to have your content spread throughout multiple servers within the same network, that way the loading times are diminished.

Use an Expires Header

Every time new visitors access your site some of the information delivered in response to http requests are cached by their browser meaning that future returns to the site will be processed faster. Servers use Expires Header via their http response to instruct the browser how long should the page be kept in cache. An example of a far future Expires Header reads like this:

Expires: Thu, 21 Dec 2020 12:30:00 GMT

If you site is on an Apache server, use the ExpiresDefault directive to set in place expiration dates relative to the first access date. It should look something similar to this:

ExpiresDefault “access plus 5 years

Using far future Expires Headers the browser will cache more data from that initial access.

Verify Stylesheet in Header

The stylesheet must be linked as an external file between the header tags of the page. This is common practice for the majority of webmasters but make certain that you have it also. Here’s how should look like:

<head>

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css” />

</head>

This makes the web page load faster as the webpage renders progressively. Your web developer should be very concerned with browsers displaying the page as soon as possible. Having the stylesheet in the footer isn’t a good idea because it will hinder the browser’s ability to render progressively. In the case of Firefox, it will force a screen to redraw when loading is completed which isn’t the best user experience, if you were to ask us.

Scripts Go to the Footer

For progressive rendering to work, you have to have scrips like Javascript near the bottom. A second strong argument for moving scripts down is because it is blocking parallel downloads. The browser won’t start another download if one of the two parallel downloads is a script. Thus, a good idea would be to have them load last.

Avoid CSS Expressions

These are not so widely used in the web design community so should be a priority for you. Of course it would add a drop of personality to your site but also some hazardous events that would keep your site imobilized.

Have Scripts and CSS External and Cached

As you already know, having information – scripts and stylesheets included – cached in the browser reduces significantly the loading times. On the other hand having the scripts and CSS embedded inline means they are loaded upon each webpage request. For visitors that persevere in surfing your site, this will turn into a very tiring experience of having to wait long seconds for pages to load.

Remove duplicate scripts

There are two main factors for the occurrence of duplicate scripts on the same hostname: first one has to do with multiple developers working on the same project and second the number of scripts used. This scenario will surely hurt the site’s performance as it will multiply the number of http requests and script evaluations. To avoid these nagging duplicates implement a script management module in your template. A script is easily included with the script tag:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”menu_1.0.17.js”></script>

An alternative in PHP would be to create a function called insertScript.

<?php insertScript(”menu.js”) ?>

Gzip Compression

This section was included just the sake of clarifying some myths about this compression/decompression software as a big loading time saver. The program was advertised by Yahoo developers that claim it improves loading time to up to 70%. From our experience there’s no much to be gained by using it.

So should you take seriously Google’s warnings to include site speed as another ranking factor? Based on big G’s policy of rendering the most relevant results while keeping user experience at high standards, YES, this will definitely count in a site’s overall performance in the search results. We suggest using Yslow developer tool released by Yahoo!. This tool only works with Firebug – a Firefox plugin and delivers a complete report about a page performance while making recommendations for improvement.

I say without a doubt, there is indeed a sandbox. I saw this post and decided to re-post it here.

——————

It is just about a year since we posted our poll on the Google Sandbox existing or not. The results back then had a lot of people saying it still existed on some level. Some said it no longer existed and some said it never existed.

I spotted a new WebmasterWorld thread with renewed discussion on the topic. The SEOs there are debating about if it exists now, did it ever, etc. I wanted to run a very short poll, the 2010 Google Sandbox poll. This poll has two answers, yes or no. If you think it never existed, answer no. If you think it doesn’t exist now but did exist in the past, answer no. If you think it still exists on some level today, answer yes.

Please take the poll below:

Is There Still a Google Sandbox?customer surveys

As I said before, but just so some of you have some history. The Google Sandbox goes back to April 2004. We first spotted it when I wrote New Sites = Poor Results in Google, then it became known as the Sandbox effect and had controversial definitions. Matt Cutts confirmed the sandbox existed, somewhat, in his Coffee Talk with Brett Tabke. But since then, we really did not discuss it much.

Is There Still a Google Sandbox?

Need help getting fictitious reports cleaned from the first page of Google?

Contact us today and have those reports pushed to page 2 of Google where they belong.

If you’re looking for someone to do business with in the information age, where is the first place you look? The answer for the vast majority of us is the internet. Search engines help us find plumbers to Zoologists, and everything in-between. So, it stands to reason that if you run a business, you want the search engines to say only nice things about you. Ripoffreport.com, complaintsboard.com, and a few others seem to want to get in the way of that by allowing anyone to signup and post a bad story about you or your company and they can do it all 100% anonymously.  That old worker you fired for being a bum? Your arch business rival? Doesn’t matter who it is, that can make the post and immediately tarnish your good name.

The most significant factor in deciding whether someone will do business with you is trust. Trust that you’ll deliver what you promise and are worthy of their time and money. Anything that erodes that trust is damaging to both you and your business. Ripoff reports are a relatively recent idea that seems to be gaining ground fast. The reports that disgruntled consumers can post to highlight companies they feel have ripped them off or fallen short of their promises.

The term was coined by the founder of Ripoffreport.com, Ed Magedson when he launched his consumer website in 1998. The site provides a forum where consumers who feel they have been duped, cheated, scammed or just treated badly. The idea is excellent, providing consumers a legitimate forum to air their grievances and perhaps prevent other people falling foul of the same treatment.

The problem is in the execution. A quick read of some of the posts shows you that anyone, from anywhere can post about almost anything. The site takes no responsibility for the content and will never, ever remove a ripoff report. That means anyone with an axe to grind can post negative comments about a business. Not only does the website feature highly in the search engines, but so do the reports. That means anyone searching for a business online is bound to see ripoff reports, if any exist.

If you run a business that’s mentioned on a ripoff report you can offer a rebuttal, but this just adds to the problem, as this will also be indexed by the search engines. From a business perspective, the best course of action is reputation management. If you run a company that has had a ripoff report filed against it, get in touch with a reputation specialist like ThoughtMechanics.com and let them help you regain your good name. They can’t remove the ripoff reports, but they can bury it under the weight of positive material about your business.

The process is a combination of SEO, PR, advertising and marketing. The reputation specialist will produce a significant amount of positive material about your company, target it and release it into the world. This will “bury” the ripoff report further down the search engine results and will lessen the impact of it. It will also further publicize your business and give it much greater exposure on the internet.

So if you run a business with a ripoff report against it, all is not lost. Contact Thoughtmechanics.com. Not only will they bury the report, protecting your business and your reputation, but they will also boost your position in the search engines.

Every moment you wait could be another lost client.

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

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.

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.