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The focus on ‘keyword research’, ‘link building’ and ‘marketing’ for website optimization in Google is a highlight of the latest SEO checklist from Matt Cutts. Here is an illustration on these sections of the SEO checklist -

Keyword Research

• Make a list of the search keywords or key phrases that most of the users are likely to use while searching for your content or product or service or website. Choose the most and the least competitive of the keywords to optimize your web content. Google itself recommends potential keywords for a particular content. Adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal is a free tool from Google’s kit for webmasters to conduct keyword research at ease.
• Do not stuff a blog with too much information. For better search results, choose a blog topic related to a well-defined niche. Pick up keywords from that specific niche to optimize the blog content. Log in to the Google Webmaster tools account of yours and then, go to the dashboard of your site. Click “Keywords” under “Your site on the web”. The keywords reflecting the content of your website will be shown in a list, prepared by Google.
• Website owners are involved in neck and neck competition to get high search volume in Google for their websites. The only source of web traffic is not Google. There are other such traffic sources as Facebook, Twitter, Google map listings, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. than Google. It is easy and fun to promote your website on social networking platforms on the basis of a difficult keyword that is hard to get ranked number one in Google.
• Analyze Google Webmaster Tools report on your website and checkout the keywords or phrases that the site appears in Google search result pages. Instead of focusing on the promotion of a single keyword, categorize the web content into multiple sections and choose keywords belonging to those sections in order to get better long tail results on search for your website. A website promoted on the basis of more than one or two keywords draws more and more organic traffic.

Link Building

• According to Matt Cutts, the sites with huge traffic base and from a specific niche are the sites to get links from. Websites belonging to a specific niche are symbols of authority. Single niche websites are better than multi-niche sites like article directories to extract link juice. Links from the former will add search engine value to your site.
• Make sure to be careful of linking yours to other sites. Checkout the search engine relevance of those sites providing external links to yours. Checkout if the content of those websites relates to yours. The increasing number of links from the websites that are not in keeping with yours from any perspective does not benefit.
• To make your website flow with link juice, build links to only those sites that will benefit the users of your site. Do not let the navigation menu of your site feature them frequently. Build a good internal linking architecture instead of developing an excess of external links.

Marketing

• Instead of having several blogs or sites to fetch traffic, concentrate your efforts into developing a single website. It is difficult to manage several sites or blogs and improve them simultaneously from SEO viewpoint. Marketing a single website as a single entity across the World Wide Web is an incomparable strategy to get the best of the site in search engines.
• Think about how to brand your site to make it stand out from the milling crowd. Think of buying a brandable domain to differentiate your site from the rest. Branding is of immense importance to help you build your online identity. Being owner of a recognized brand in a specific arena, you will find it easy to implement the marketing of your website.
• Think of the things that make the visitors keep coming back to your website. Devise a marketing plan and enrich it with innovative products or services to make people return to the site. Updating the site with fresh content on a regular basis is a good strategy to promote the site among the visitors.
• For business or e-commerce websites, it is important to place the physical address on the contact page of the sites. The address including the city, state, country names and zip codes is a complete physical address. It is beneficial for geo-targeting and useful for the visitors. A website with a well-defined address is easily marketable.

The global SEO industry is thriving on the rising number of websites and the increasing demand of their owners for the reputable ranking of their sites in search engines. Wishing to carve a niche in this industry, many individuals are getting trained in the art of search engine optimization as well as the use of SEO tools and technologies. Link building is a most important SEO activity for website promotion. So, I have attempted to turn up with a tutorial on link-building practices for the benefit of SEO novices.

A reciprocal link refers to a mutual link shared between two websites of almost similar essence. Having mutual traffic for the websites is the purpose of building reciprocal links. A website owner needs to submit is website to the reciprocal link exchange directories. It ensures him good SERP ranking in search engines.

Three way linking is a special sort of non-reciprocal linking. The go at building three way links is a SEO method to create natural links that are highly relevant in the eyes of the search engine spiders. Therefore, the value of three way links is higher than that of general reciprocal links.

Two way linking is better known as link exchange, an alternative to the above-mentioned link building processes. This SEO is practiced on the community-based forums where the registered members exchange links to their webpage content. Usually, the sites listed under the same category participate in this SEO activity.

One way linking is another link-building method used by webmasters to boost the link popularity of websites. It is in fact a hyperlink pointing to a website having no link back from the website. Also known as inbound or incoming link, it is a one-dimensional way of website linking. the search engines consider one way links more natural.

Multi way linking is a hardcore SEO technique implemented for website promotion in search engines. Multi-way links are one-way non-reciprocal links from three or more than three sites. the latest algorithm of the leading search giants pays less value to the sites having a large number of reciprocated links but more value to the sites having a high percentage of incoming one-way or non-reciprocated links.

Incestuous linking is a search engine optimization trick adopted by webmasters to promote websites. Owing to the domination of Google and its PageRank technology, the websites having high strength of inbound links from the high-ranked sites with quality content deemed more important. Social media sites are a good source of inbound links.

Overlinking refers to too many of hyperlinks in the content of a webpage. A word of a phrase consisting of a few words in a sentence is rendered as a link. A single term is linked repeatedly in the same page. To make the meaning of certain words clear, they are linked with the underlying little information.

Link doping is the practice of creating a large number of hyperlinks on a website to get reciprocal links in exchange from the website. A person practicing link doping, hyperlinks to a site that he has not visited, in order to get a place on the blogroll of the site so as to inflate the popularity of his own site. The algorithm of search engines depends on the strength of hyperlinks to a site in order to determine the site’s influence.

A FFA or free for all link page refers to a webpage that webmasters set up to push up the search engine position of websites. Using a software application, they place a link to a particular site on many FFA sites in expectation that the inbound links from the FFA sites will add to the ranking of the site in the search engine result pages. However, this way of website linking is not in good favor of the SEO experts.

In the category of link-building practices, link baiting is aimed at enhancing the quantity and quality of links to a particular website. Described as “interesting enough to catch people’s attention” by Matt Cutts, link bait is a content based feature to persuade visitors to place links to a site from their websites. It is an extremely powerful means of link marketing. Only quality content deserves to be the medium of link baiting to trap social media traffic.

Link building is one of the efforts that SEO experts make to enhance the search engine visibility and popularity of a website. The search giant Google takes a hard look at external links to a website or a webpage to determine its SERP ranking. All links are not equally treated by Google. Relevance of the links to the target website or webpage is a prime consideration for the search engine. This blog of mine will tell you tell you how to evaluate the relevance of a particular link and ensure if it hits the jackpot. Keep reading…

No need to say that links from the high quality websites do wonder. Links meeting the criteria set by the search engines deliver the best goods. You need to weigh several factors to assess relevance and quality of the website or webpage which links to yours.

Prominence of Inbound Links

Checking if the webpage linking to the target page of your website is the first must do. Check if keywords of the webpage are relevant to the keywords of the target page. Besides prominence, the placement of keywords in the webpage that you want to link to yours is the other factor that is worth consideration to evaluate the relevance of links from that particular page. Title tag, heading tags, webpage content, anchor texts, domain and URL are the parts of a webpage to look for keywords.

Significance of Nofollow Links

Link equity is a most important factor to consider. Check how much link juice the links from a website or webpage will pass to yours. Link equity and link juice are considered to be associated with Page Rank that in turn, has little direct influence on the SERPs. The links that do not pass link juice to the target page are nofollow links. If a link is marked “rel=nofollow”, it is not countable as a vote for the webpage that it links to. There is no gain in Page Rank without link juice. However, nofollow links from a high PR site add some SEO value though no link juice to yours.

Evaluate the link equity of a linking page on consideration of three factors – the page’s PR, the number of the page’s outbound and internal links, and the number of the page’s nofollow links.

Permanence of Inbound Links

Not only prominence but also permanence also matters in the game of SEO. A link from a budding site that features updated content and builds trust with the search engine bots grows gradually in SEO value with the rising maturity of the site. Such links are likely to exist for a long time and benefit the page that they link to. It is not much true about the links from a high PR site. If a link is gone, its benefits too, disappear. Buying links is not recommended because those links exist for a specific period of time. Once the period is over, you will have to pay more to maintain them.

Positioning of Inbound Links

Next to prominence and permanence, the positioning of links is too a must consideration. Links from external sites can appear in different places of a web page – the top, the middle, the sidebar and the footer. Google does not value every part of a webpage equally. The top of a page is supposed to be more valuable than the bottom. So, adding a link to the beginning of your target page will benefit.

Context of Inbound Links

The context of a link refers to the placement of the link in webpage content. Readers pay more value to the link placed in the middle of an article than to the link in the author’s bio at the end. Likewise does Google. Try to get a link placed in the beginning or middle paragraph of webpage content. Make sure, the paragraph is optimized with relevant keywords.

Acquisition Cost of Inbound Links

The cost of acquisition is among the remaining factors to be evaluated when you acquire inbound links. It refers to not only money but also time that you spend. It is difficult to get links from .edu sites. If they pay off, difficulty does not matter. Think of the factors that are likely to affect the possibility of acquiring links from particular websites.