SEO

Building links to your site is one of those things that is far from glamorous. It can be downright mind numbing at times. But it is one of the primary reasons the sites ranked above you are there.

A strong backlink profile is crucial for any business trying to get customers through the search engines. Unless you have the budget to spend a ton of money on Pay Per Click.

Some great methods you may want to think about are:

Guest posting.
Building Lenses or Hubs.
Posting to a few Article Directories.

Guest Posting
If you’re a writer (ie you enjoy writing), the best method for building quality links to your site is through guest posting.

To do this, you approach a website owner and offer them an article written by you that they can publish on their site. At some point in the article there will be a link back to your site, possibly in the blurb.

The key to this is to follow that site for a while and see what they talk about. Make sure what you offer the owner is your highest quality work tailored specifically to their site and audience.

This works so well because you’re getting usually a pretty solid link from a site with a fair bit of authority and at the same time exposing your work to a wider audience. Done right, you’ll get far more benefit than merely the link.
Lenses or Hubs
Squidoo pages are called Lenses, Hubpages pages are called Hubs (bit of a tongue twister there).

The general idea is the same for both. You build an authority base on those sites by publishing great, useful content. The more you create and engage, the better return you’ll get. Think of them as social media for article marketing.
Article Directories
Like with the previous, only work with a few of the major article directories, like Ezine Articles, Buzzle, iSnare

Read more about this at Search Engine Optimization Unite Building

One of the most important factors in getting your pages ranked higher in the search engines is the number and quality of incoming links.

The value of links to your page is related to the PageRank of the page that links to your page. The higher the PageRank, the higher the value. However, the increase in value isn’t in a straight line… It seems that each level is about 10 times more valuable than the level below it.

So focus on getting quality links, rather than quantity. Or better still, if you can, focus on quality AND quantity.

Even if you know nothing about on-page search engine optimization, your site can still rank quite well just by having enough quality incoming links.

Lots of quality incoming links can even compensate for not having the keyword on the page. What do I mean? Usually, if you want a page to rank for red widgets you need to have red widgets mentioned somewhere on the page. But with enough links, you can rank #1 for something that doesn’t appear on the page… even if there are millions of sites in the search engine index for that term.

Full article at Online Marketing 101: The Need For Connections

How difficult is it to get into the first page of Google?

This is a question I hear all the time. Ok, usually, it is “how difficult is it to get ranked #1 on Google”. How long is a piece of string?

There is an easy answer. Go to Google, search for your keyword you are trying to rank for and analyse the competition. Could it be easier? Fine, that’s not quiet so simple…

The most important thing you are looking for is how many of those top sites ARE actually in competition with you for that keyword? If you were to search for “news”, you would pretty much stand the same chance of ranking in the organic listings as a snowflake would have in hell. CNN, NBC, ABC, etc are so incredibly strong in that market.

On the other hand, one of the keywords I am going for (as a kind cool way to showcase my emerging talents to my friends) is World Cheese Toast Champions. If you do a search for that, you will find that there is no one in direct competition. There are some quality sites there, but none of them are trying to rank for that

Find out more at First Page Of Google

I personally think that one of the fastest roads to success on the internet is to use public domain works to easily develop content and work on your Search Engine Optimisation skills.

The most critical aspect of internet marketing would have to be your site’s visibility. You are the one who has control over that. There are many different ways to optimise your site. The main thing is to get started immediately.

If no one can see your site, it might as well not exist, or you have to pay a fortune in advertising. I have been in this game for a sufficient length of time to know that however you want to go, you can make money on the internet.

I have tried Google Adwords, article marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, posting to forums with a link back to my site, etc, etc. In fact, they all work. However, when you put them all together and combine it with a well designed webpage, the success is phenomenal.

If you have extensive web programming ability and a budget of absolute zero, along with a healthy scepticism for whether you can make a go of this, I highly suggest you find some public domain works and build a site based on them. Resources that I have used and found VERY useful for this are: Public Domain Empires and the

Find out more at Public Domain Web Sites