Unless you’ve been living under a rock (which would be an awkward and uncomfortable place from which to do search engine optimization work),  you’re probably aware that the two most important things to know about link building in the post-Panda world are that 1) backlinks are still very important for ranking, and 2) traditional link-building methods (or at least many of them) are no longer effective. In its efforts to combat webspam, Google now ignores or even penalizes “unnatural” link profiles. So what types of links should you avoid? MORE >>

Optimizing a website by incorporating keywords into page titles, headlines, text, page URLs, image alt tags and internal links will help improve the position of a site in the search engines—but it’s only half the battle. As one of the posts linked below notes, “In Search Engine Optimization, things that are happening OFF of your site can be just as important (if not more so) than things happening ON your website.&# Search engines look at on-site factors to determine relevance, but at external links to gauge authority. Is great content really all you need? MORE >>

One important way that this trust is earned is through inbound links pointing to the website. The search engines view an inbound link as a kind of “vote.” If a website is linking back to content somewhere on your website, it must be valuable. Of course, not all inbound links are weighed the same. Inbound links from high authority websites, especially.gov or.edu, websites carry the most weight. Next, comes links from respectable websites such as news outlets or powerful blogs that receive a lot of traffic. Internet Marketing link building nofollow link MORE >>

The latest Google slap dealt with individuals who used unnatural linking practices to achieve higher rankings. Once an individual is a member, he can write short articles and include a link back to his own site within the article. This made it look like a page on the webmaster’s site was being linked to by one of the blog sites in the network, which usually helped improve its ranking. Recently, Google decided to de-index many of these networks, which also affected all of the sites that the blogs were linking to. MORE >>

When you think about linking for SEO purposes, you tend to think about link building from other web properties to your website in order to build trust. That is an extremely important aspect of linking for SEO, but what about the links that exist on your site? Internal linking from one page of your site to another is important for usability purposes. In addition to linking to internal pages, it sometimes makes sense to link out to external sources as well. This is why it’s so important to run a broken link report on a semi-annual basis. MORE >>