Links
Links, links, links. Everybody wants people to link to their websites. Why? The truth is that high quality links to your website are important as regards search engine popularity. The question everbody asks though is "... yeah that's great but how do I get people to link to my site?"

Well firstly there are three different types of links:

Reciprocal
A reciprocal link is when you find a site that you want to get a link from. You place a link to this website on your resources page. You then email webmaster of other site and ask for a link in return. The webmaster can then either accept or decline your request.

This is a very hit-and-miss process. If you make 100 reciprocal link requests you may only get 5 links. It's also very time consuming but can be worthwhile if you get a few strong links from it. These links can "lead" search engines directly to your site and get you indexed faster.

One note is to never name your links page "links". Call it resources. Call it related sites but never call page "links". Some search engines frown on this. Also try to avoid automated reciprocal linking software packages - personally I delete any request received from users of these packages without even reading it. Most other website owners will too.

The problem here is that most people think search engine optimization is like magic and that only search engine "gurus" have all answers.

Forunately, for you, this is far from true. In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from ranking well in search engines is misinformation and promise of quick fixes. Every week there's a new tool or ebook that promises to solve all your search engine woes. There are no quick fixes folks. Accept that as a truth and move forward.

What follows in next three articles is a 10 step program for improving your online presence and search engine rankings. Enjoy!

Keywords

Keywords should be first step in your search engine optimization campaign. People put keywords or phrases into search engines looking for information. The search engines then check their index for pages that contain these keywords. Unless your pages contain keywords relevant to your business or service then do not expect search engines to rank you well. It's that simple.

For example if you have a website about dating then you'll find it very difficult to rank well for keyword "dating" because so many other sites are competing for it. However if you were to target a specific area like gay and lesbian dating then you're dealing with a smaller, more targetted market. You could even regionalize it by targetting gay and lesbian dating in Toronto. See where we're going with this?

So what keywords tools are available to you? Describing each of them goes beyond scope of this article so please refer to our site for more information on this topic.

Content

Make this your motto - Provide Useful Content. DO NOT provide keyword stuffed, spammy, automatically generated pages. Write something useful for your visitors based on keywords which are relevant to your business or service.