Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that links back to your site have a great impact on your ranking in major search engines. Think of it like an election; your site is a candidate and every link to your site is a vote. Of course, it was never quite that simple (high ranking, relevant sites have more voting power) but now it may have gotten even more complicated.

The Dampening Link Filter

It seems that Google may have introduced something called a “Dampening Link Filter” into its indexing algorithm. I’ll give you a layperson’s overview of this filter, but for more intimate details, check out WebProNews.

More and more people are realising importance of links back to your site (or “backlinks”). For some time, companies have been engaging in all sorts of link campaigns designed to generate thousands of backlinks. Many of these campaigns haven’t really paid too much attention to context or lifespan of these links. And Google knows it. Because these campaigns are designed to artificially generate perception of a site’s importance – to trick search engines into thinking they’re important – it’s been suggested that Google has decided to put an end to it. Apparently, there’s evidence to suggest that Google has introduced a new link filter to dampen effect of new backlinks. So if your link generation campaign has just created 500 links in a day from seemingly irrelevant sites, Google will suspect it of being artificial, and refuse to pass on full effect of those links – at least for a while. Well, that’s how theory goes, anyway.

It has been argued that you can avoid being penalized by this filter by generating links:

• more slowly;
• from relevant sites; and
• which have a long lifespan.

The wisdom of relevance and lifespan is already well established; dampening filter is simply one more reason why people should start to heed it. Writing and submitting SEO articles for online publication is one way to do so.

This article explains how SEO articles satisfy each of these three conditions. (For basics of SEO article writing, take a look at How to Top Google by Writing Articles.)

Build Backlinks Slowly

Writing quality articles takes time. It’s as simple as that. Even an SEO copywriter can’t just bang an article together in a morning – it has to be well considered. It must be accurate, informative, interesting, well written, and topical. And once you’ve written article, real work begins. You then have to submit it to your favourite article submit sites. And as they all have different requirements and idiosyncrasies, submitting your article to 50 submit sites can take you all day!

Here are 10 to keep in mind:

1. Don't use frames. Why would you want to use frames if SEO is important? Don't risk confusing search engine spiders, which happens often with frameset sites. Sure, you can write scripts or adjust content to work within frames, but you probably have better things to do with that time and energy.

2. Don't use Flash. Everyone agrees--Flash looks awesome. But it also slows down user experience and Flash makes it tough to get ranked. The Flash future looks bright for ability of search engines to read some keywords, but what good will this serve if site pages lack visible, readable text?

3. Don't skimp on title tags. Why would you simply call a page About Us in title tag when this meta data occupies prime SEO real estate? Always include effective search phrases that reflect content within title tags.

4. Don't overstuff title tags. Limit titles to 70 characters, with commas between phrases in EVERY title tag; use fewer characters on pages with limited content.

5. Don't bury text. Design often gets in way of Text. Make sure your visible text is located high on page.