How do you get people to buy your product if you don’t tell them about it? How do you get a search engine to rank your site if other sites don’t link it? This is exactly the reason why backlinking is important. Backlinks are a way to tell search engines that a) your site is worthy of visiting, and b) other sites care enough about your site that they even link to you. The methods to backlinking are relatively straight forward, so here they are:

• Directory Submissions - Submitting to directories is a great way to build up backlinks as well as PageRank. Look for directories that have pagerank and preferably get visited often. It is doubtful you’ll receive much traffic from these, but search engines will love you for submitting. Also, be sure to submit to dmoz.org as this directory is human edited and works with many popular search engines as I described in this post.



• Blog Commenting - Comment on the blogs you visit and read and include a backlink url in your comment. High pagerank blogs may also be good to post comments on, but don’t just visit random blogs and post comments just for the sake of it. Also include thoughtful comments because other readers will see your comments and if they’re good, they’ll want to know more about you.
• Social Networking - Don’t underestimate the power of Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, Odnoklassniki, etc. Add your link to your (or your blog’s) profile page and connect with others. Sure, it might not be very full, but SEO doesn’t happen overnight. This is a long and grueling process that you must make the best of.
• Forums - Forums are also a great way to add some variation to your backlinks. They may not be very “SEO-savvy” but they’ll help you nonetheless whether they’ll bring in traffic or plain backlinks. What’s even better if your link is found on forum pages that are related to your topic.
• Link exchanges - Link exchanges are great too as long as you trade with sites that display your real URL instead of http://domain.com/out.php?id=2345. Always be sure you watch out for that otherwise your link exchanges are pointless for SEO.
• Paid/Unpaid Reviews - By now we’re out of freebie ways of backlinking, so if you’re willing to forge out a couple bucks to pay someone to review your blog, do that. Not only will you get more traffic, but your reviewer will boost your rankings heavily with the keywords you want them to include. Unpaid reviews work if you have a buddy and wish to trade reviews or something along those lines.
• Advertising - Plain ol’ advertising works as well to have your link placed on various sites. When it comes to money though, be sure to choose sites that will guarantee good backlinks because when it comes to money, everyone has a shortage of it.

Wherever you research anything about Search Engine Optimization, you will always run across something that has to do with keywords. Keywords are essentially the groundwork of optimizing your blog which also, you may not know, sets some of the goals in your blogging experience.

How does it do that?

Let’s go back a few posts, to where I define SEO terms. As I mentioned in that post (indirectly), keywords are specific and significant words that represent your blog. These are the words/phrases that “represent” your blog in search engines. For example, if your blog is about making money online, your keywords would be the “key” “words” that represent your blog, in this case “making money online”. If you Google “making money online“, there will be around 48,100,000 results and your goal would be to optimize your blog to a point where it is one of the top of these listing pages. Of course, this is somewhat nearly impossible considering there is so much competition, but what if we found words that had less competition?

This basically means, find some primary keywords you wish to target them and work with these keywords.

I Found My Primary Keywords, What Now?

The goal here is to choose keywords similar to your primary keywords that you will use to boost your rankings that don’t have much competition, and also those that people actually search for. You may think you know what people search for in order to find you, but in reality many people are far off in this. So, in order to be correct in our keywords, we have some handy tools that we may use:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool - Great tool which gives you keyword ideas based on either the keywords you enter or based off of a URL you enter (your site URL).
• Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool - Another keyword suggestion tool that gives suggestions revolving the keywords you wish to target.
• Thesaurus.com - This one is my personal favorite. The above tools will generate lists of keywords that users search for, and Thesaurus.com will help you fill up your list even more with synonyms that more often than not, are not showing up in those tools, but are still searched widely.

After researching the keywords you’re trying to rank on top in, you should have a compiled list of many different variations, synonyms, and related words that will still point to the primary keywords you’re trying to rank in. Now, keep this list close to you and use these keywords when blogging.

Tips on Using your Keywords

1. Use your keywords in post titles - Using your keywords will give those keywords more importance making those posts rank higher.
2. Use Keywords in Anchor Links - When you advertise your site or blog, the “anchor words” are those words that are in the title of your link. So if you’re blogging about making money online, your anchor words would be “Making Money Online” and not “mycooldomainname.com”. When search engines find the links to your site, they’ll see those keywords in your links titles and will already direct themselves to associating your site with those words.
3. Use your Primary Keywords in Your Domain Name/Site Name - This generally gives a great boost to your rankings if your keyword is included in your domain name. You can see my domain name has nothing to do with my keywords or “designers” and “web development”, which is why those keywords are on the very top of my blog. Include your main keywords in your blog title, and meta tags to tell search engines that this is what you’re ultimately targeting.
4. Use Keywords in your Post - Tip #1 was about post titles, this one is about post content. Use your keywords from your keyword list in your post content because, although your post content may not be relevant enough that it gets many searches, but when it does, users are much more guaranteed to click on your link because your post content is usually much more relevant than general keywords.
   

   IMPORTANT! Do not overuse the same keywords in your posts. Keep a keyword ratio of 4-5 (4-5 keywords per 100 words) otherwise Google and other search engines may throw you out for keyword spamming.

5. Use Keywords in Image Alt Tags - This may not apply to those who blog about things that do not relate much to visuals, but if you’re blogging about clothes, toys, photography, etc put in keywords in your image alt tags. You just can’t imagine the effect these may have.

That’s it for keywords and should basically set up the foundation of your blog key SEO elements. If you need to make some changes to your blog in order to match up with what I’m suggesting, DO IT NOW! Otherwise, all of your SEO efforts will result in lost time and worthless rankings.

This is an example of a way NOT to attract any visitors. But unfortunately its a must for me at this time. Don’t expect any posts in a couple of days, but everything should be wrapped up by the end of this week. (Hopefully tomorrow).

Bloggers…Use these kinds of posts sparingly.

The good thing about search engine optimization is that it has become so mainstream the past several years that you don’t have to do all the backend dirty work yourself. Simply said, all the prerequisites to Wordpress search engine optimization are ready made in nice simple plugin packages.

General Wordpress SEO Plugins:

• All-In-One SEO Pack - This is one plugin that is the closest thing close to an “all-in-one” package. It optimizes titles, creates meta tags, deals with duplicate content, and more! The great thing about it is
• No WWW - Search engines hate when half of your links go to http://www.yourdomain.com and the other half go to http://yourdomain.com. It makes it seem like there’s two sites for them. This plugin allows you to stick to one domain name. Why don’t I use it? Because I’ve set my server to send my domain to http://www.askllora.com which eliminates the need for a plugin.
• Permalink Redirect - Your posts and pages can be accessed through your URL + a backslash (/) and they can be accessed without a backslash. This plugin manages this so that you don’t have problems with search engines thinking you have duplicate content on two different pages when in reality its one same page.
• Google XML Sitemap - Automatically generates sitemaps for your blog and submits them to major search engines. (I already covered this in the plugins I use post.)
• BreadcrumbNavXT - This plugin adds a text navigation bar that shows the pyramid to whatever page the user is on. These are not only great for users, but for search engines as well because SE spiders are crazy about structure.

This week we will be covering about how to SEO your blog. I know for many, the phrase “search engine optimization” means something unrealistically hard, but in reality, its not what it is at all. I remember a while back when I was first confronted with this idea of optimizing your web site, I was confused every single time I read about it. This week I’ll put SEO into a language you can understand. For today, I’ll highlight some basics of SEO that we will be going over:

What is SEO?

SEO, as I mentioned above, is search engine optimization. This basically means that you will be making your blog or website “Google-Efficient” and by that I mean, making it easier and better for sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and others to browse your site and then return your results on the front page. That’s the key here; we want to see our be one of the first ones to pop up when a person searches Google or a related site.

More Confusing Terms Defined:

Directory Submissions: Nothing hard about this. All you’re doing is going to various sites, filling out a form that will add your site to theirs.

Keyword Research: All this means is that when a person searches certain words, such as “cheap designers” your site will come up on top. For this, you need to check out a few tools that will help you pick out other “keywords” that will help you achieve this.

Keyword Density: Another phrase dealing with those words you want to represent your site. Density is simply a ratio of how many keywords you have per say 100 words. So if you have 5 keywords in every 100 words, your density would be 5 (percent).

Meta Tags, Meta Analysis: Meta is simply text that is placed in the top of your web page that tells the search engines what your page is about. There’s all kinds of fancy tools for meta analysis, how to put in correct words, etc. but all we need is one lesson that will be sufficient in achieving this.

Backlinks: Backlinks are links that link back to your site. The more sites you have that link about your sites the better right?

Link Popularity: This is almost the same as backlinks except these are actually calculations on which sites link to your site. Not all backlinks are created equal therefore you want good sites to link to you. More about that later on in our course.

No-Follow, Do-Follow: Search engines use programs called “robots” or “spiders” that visit websites and gather the information you have. You can tell a robot whether or not it can proceed to another link or not. If the link has a “do-follow” tag attached to it, the robot will go on that link and check it out. If it has a “no-follow” tag, then it won’t.

Pagerank: Should be something everyone knows about. Its how Google ranks webpages. You can have a minimum rank of 0, or a maximum of 10 (in reality its more of a 9 since there’s not many sites that have gotten a 10). If you want to see your pagerank in action, visit RealPRCheck.com

Alexa Rank: Your Alexa rank is determined by how much traffic you have. The more traffic you have, the lower the rank number i.e. if your Alexa is 1, you’re the most visited site in the world. If its 1,000,000, you’re nowhere close to being the most visited site.

DMOZ: dmoz is a website directory like we talked about earlier except all of its websites are handpicked into their directory. Search engines such as Ask.com, Yahoo, and others use that information to fill up their databases, so if you’ve been dmoz approved, you have a better change at getting ranked into a lot of search engines.

That’s it for now, if there’s more that I’ll need to add later on, I’ll cerainly will and be sure to subscribe or bookmark for more detailed lessons.

We’ve now finally decided on which designs to feature as there were a lot of great designs. So here they are:

In no particular order,

By Vito Vigliotti,

By designeracts,

By Alexandre,

By Samuel from 404Found!,

By Vasil Krustev,

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All designs are displayed with permission from the respective owners.