Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at quality of product, graphics, and ease of use. Then check out other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with crowd.

When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures reader will read on.

Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them address of your links page, and ask them to check out link for themselves. It's a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don't sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it's time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.

Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By way - make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!

Brought to by Larry Strawson author of many articles and ebooks on search engine placement.

Issues such as Google Sandbox theory tend to distract webmasters from core ‘good' SEO practices and inadvertently push them towards black-hat or quick-fix techniques to exploit search engine's weaknesses. The problem with this approach is its short-sightedness. To explain what I'm talking about, let's take a small detour and discuss search engine theory.

Understanding Search Engines

If you're looking to do some SEO, it would help if you tried to understand what search engines are trying to do. Search engines want to present most relevant information to their users. There are two problems in this – inaccurate search terms that people use and information glut that is Internet. To counteract, search engines have developed increasingly complex algorithms to deduce relevancy of content for different search terms.

How does this help us?

Well, as long as you keep producing highly-targeted, quality content that is relevant to subject of your website (and acquire natural inbound links from related websites), you will stand a good chance for ranking high in SERPS. It sounds ridiculously simple, and in this case, it is. As search engine algorithms evolve, they will continue to do their jobs better, thus becoming better at filtering out trash and presenting most relevant content to their users.

While each search engine will have different methods of determining search engine placement (Google values inbound links quite a lot, while Yahoo has recently placed additional value on Title tags and domain names), in end all search engines aim to achieve same goal, and by aiming to fulfill that goal you will always be able to ensure that your website can achieve a good ranking.

Escaping from Google Sandbox

Now, from our discussion about Sandbox theory above, you know that at best, Google Sandbox is a filter on search engine's algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. While most SEO experts will tell you that this effect decreases after a certain period of time, they mistakenly accord it to website aging, or basically, when website is first spidered by Googlebot. Actually, Sandbox does ‘holds back' new websites but more importantly, effects reduce over time not on basis of website aging, but on link aging.

This means that time that you spend in Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from Google Sandbox.

However, if you keep your head down and keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, filter will stop having such a massive effect on your website.

As ‘Allegra' update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during time that they were in Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords after Sandbox effect ended.

This and other observations of Sandbox phenomenon – combined with an understanding of search engine philosophy – have lead me to pinpoint following strategies for minimizing your website's ‘Sandboxed' time.

SEO strategies to minimize your website's ‘Sandboxed' time

Despite what some SEO experts might tell you, you don't need do anything different to escape from Google Sandbox. In fact, if you follow ‘white hat' rules of search engine optimization and work on principles I've mentioned many times in this course, you'll not only minimize your website's Sandboxed time but you will also ensure that your website ranks in top 10 for your target keywords. Here's a list of SEO strategies you should make sure you use when starting out a new website:

Start promoting your website moment you create your website, not when your website is ‘ready'. Don't make mistake of waiting for your website to be ‘perfect'. The motto is to get your product out on market, as quickly as possible, and then worry about improving it. Otherwise, how will you ever start to make money?

Establish a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and follow it religiously. For example, you can set yourself a target of acquiring 20 links per week, or maybe even a target of contacting 10 link partners a day (of course, with SEO Elite, link building is a snap). This will ensure that as you build your website, you also start acquiring inbound links and those links will age properly – so that by time your website exits Sandbox you would have both a high quantity of inbound links and a thriving website.

Avoid black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing or ‘cloaking'. Google's search algorithm evolves almost daily, and penalties for breaking rules may keep you stuck in Sandbox longer than usual.

Save your time by remembering 20/80 rule: 80 percent of your optimization can be accomplished by just 20 percent of effort. After that, any tweaking left to be done is specific to current search engine tendencies and liable to become ineffective once a search engine updates its algorithm. Therefore don't waste your time in optimizing for each and every search engine – just get basics right and move on to next page.

Remember, you should always optimize with end-user in mind, not search engines.

Like I mentioned earlier, search engines are continuously optimizing their algorithms in order to improve on key criteria: relevancy. By ensuring that your website content is targeted on a particular keyword, and is judged as ‘good' content based on both on-page optimization (keyword density) and off-page factors (lots of quality inbound links), you will also guarantee that your website will keep ranking highly for your search terms no matter what changes are brought into a search engine's algorithm, whether it's a dampening factor a la Sandbox or any other quirk search engine industry throws up in future.

by Brad Callen Search Engine Optimization Expert Learn How To Get A Top Google Ranking In Under 28 Days With This Breakthrough New SEO Software! http://www.seoelite.com