Anyway, the best way to learn search engine optimization is by actually putting what you learn into practice and seeing the results as you work. The idea is to set aside about 30 minutes of work per day to put into practice each SEO technique you learn and see how much it impacts, if any, your results. If you do everything at the same time, you will never know which one worked and which ones did not. This is why monitoring your SEO progress is a crucial part of your campaign.

Best SEO Practices
SEO is traditionally a task that has been viewed as something complicated and mythical. The underlying truth about SEO is that anyone can do it, provided you put in the time and effort to make it work for you. While there are many reasons why you would prefer to not DIY, you should know that adhering to white hat techniques and conducting a best-practice SEO campaign actually involves nothing more but the application of relatively simple set of ethical principles.

There are essentially four key elements that you should be worried about when conducting your SEO campaign. These key elements should form an integral part of your thinking when marketing and optimizing your website.

1. Proper Keyword Research and Implementation:
Conducting a proper and thorough keyword research is the only first step that makes sense. You are, after all, optimizing a website for search engines and the only way that “real humans” use to find whatever it is they are looking for is by means of using keywords or phrases. Perhaps this could change in the future, but for now, this is the key ingredient to a good SEO campaign. Learn as much as you can about conducting keyword research and remember to target for “less competitive” keywords, specially when you are just in the beginning.

2. Content Development:
You may often seen a lot of times the phrase – “content is king”. In is indeed a fair assessment and is probably more relevant than the SEO campaign in itself. Your sites content is paramount to success and the way you structure and present your content can make or break
your online marketing efforts in a lot of ways. It is without a doubt that search engines prefer quality over quantity and needless to say that delivering only great and high quality content will ultimately be responsible for your website having more traffic that is relevant for your small online business’s success. learn how to write optimized content, without hampering the usability and users experience. Remember that you are first writing for your audience. You can then compliment your content by applying the best SEO practices for content optimization.

3. Web Development:
Content may be “king” but a poorly structured and technically flawed theme or coding, can equally be damaging for your website. Plan ahead as to what theme and navigational structure will suit your needs bests and try to stick to it for the long run. Changing themes often can and will hurt your rankings.

In addition, ensure that your navigational flow and menu structure are using the keywords that you identified earlier during your initial keyword research. Avoid “bells and whistles” in your website as in most cases they only serve to distract your audience. Keep it clean and as logical as possible. When developing your website, keep in mind the following, at least as far as SEO is concerned:

* Navigation flow and menu structure
* Sites copy, post or articles
* Headings and sections (sub-heading)

4. Link Building:
Having covered the core aspect of on-page SEO, it’s time to away fro your site and apply off-site or off-page SEO. Building inbound links links is also very important and while there are several link building techniques, remember that again, that it is quality that counts and not quantity. The key factor to remember is that the quality and relevance of your inbound links are what matter most. Focus on receiving fewer, higher-value links, rather than lots of low-quality or irrelevant links. The later, may even hurt your sites credibility and reputation, so I suggest to stay away form it.

5. Deep Linking or Internal Linking Matters Too
While link building focuses primarily on external sites, you should also be aware that links within your own site helps to strengthen your overall relevance and authority. When appropriate, try to link from one matching keyword to another post or article within your site. You can see the example I have just done, by linking from this article to another (inbound links above).

6. Social Engagement:
While this could be considered as part of a link building campaign, I preferred to keep this separate as it is important for you to know that social engagement is now a very important part of your SEO campaign. Many search engines are now using “signals” to determine trust and credibility of users and websites via this medium. Take the authorship markup verification, that has been recently introduced by Google. It might not be the most important ranking factor just yet, but I am convinced that in the very near future, it will play an important role on search results. Learn the ropes on how to build and establish your brand, and you will see that the effort will pay off. On a side note, don’t neglect the power of social media in your SEO campaign.

By understanding and educating yourself through the application of these principles, your SEO campaign will most likely thrive. Stay away form “those “quick” ranking schemes and less ethical techniques. They might get you good rankings quickly, but rest assured that they will eventually fade away. As I said before, SEO is an ongoing process and only with regular monitoring and adjustments can sustain your rankings for the long haul.

One of the advantages of opting for free web directories is the marginal gain of one way links used by numerous search engines to your network site. When you opt for a free directory to advertise yourself, ensure you have as many inbound links as possible, so as to get much better ranking on any used search engine across the network.

If the site X links to the site Y, the latter gets credited with a percentage of Site X’s Page Rank which kind of gets passed cover to it. The Site X loses nothing so far as Page Rank is concerned – unless and until the link is to a bad neighborhood or a banned area.

An example to understand the situation better. Site X had a Page Rank of 5, there were only 2 outbound links to Site X. One of the outbound Links was intended to brand new Site Y. Brand new Site Y had 4 outgoing links, with NO other Incoming Links, apart from the one from Site X. Google awarded Site Y a Page Rank of 5.

From this example in real life, it is evident that fewer outbound links on a per page basis means a higher Page Rank.

If Site X in the above example had a huge amount of outgoing links on the page, in that case the percentage of Page Rank passed would have been smaller and the New Site Y would have received a lower rank than the equal rank that was passed.

Things to avoid

While engaging in reciprocal linking, make sure you check the amount of outbound links that not only the page has but the overall site as well. Search engines such as Google doesn’t like pornography sites, gambling sites and Link Farms that have thousands of links on them. Unless that is your business, don’t link to any of those types of sites.

You can lose Page Rank and Search Engine Results if you link to sites that are considered Bad Neighborhoods or are Banned. Be alert and make sure you check before linking. Though sometimes you may not be “punished”, you won’t be gaining any benefits and the loss in PR of your site is not at all worth it.

Be aware of which sites the outbound links are linking your site to. Check your outbound links from time to time, ensuring that they are:

1) Still an active website
2) Still a resource for the reason you linked to them in the first place
3) They have not changed formats or the theme and continue to be a quality site.

Page Rank improves over time. Though not very often, Google does update the Page Rank, once in say every four to eight months. So link exchange with like-themed sites or quality sites is the best possible SEO strategy.

Tip #1 Don’t Spam

No major search engine indexes websites for too long, if they are found to engage in spamming. What’s more, from time to time, search engines revise the way they define “search engine spam”, so it would be worthwhile, both as a visitor and a website owner, to educate yourself and stay updated with the definition of spamming by the major search engines. Search engines often blacklist websites that practice spamming, which means you don’t get off by simply not getting indexed but you might also get your website blacklisted for life.

Tip #2 Don’t Use Frames

Search engine spiders crawling the web do not respond well to websites using frames and frequently miss many of the pages that are listed within the website.

Tip #3 Don’t Have Pages Under Construction

Make sure when you submit your URL to the search engines to get indexed, that you do not have pages still under construction. Search engines as a rule don’t like to list pages that are yet under construction. So, always complete them before you submit your websites for indexing. Also, never use the phrase “Under Construction” on your pages that are unfinished! It does not create a good impression.

Tip #4 Never use Sneaky Tricks like Invisible Text

Do not use invisible text stuffed with keywords to try and boost your SE rankings. It may not be apparent to your viewers that you are using invisible text, but the search engine spiders will detect it and may even blacklist your website. Play fair and safe and always go by the rules.

These are just a few of the most oft-used suggestions to keep your web pages indexed by the search engines. However, these rules are not exhaustive. There are others that also matter a lot. The idea is to be informed and educated. And it is always a good idea to believe and accept that the search engines are, and will always be, smarter than you.

In a layman’s parlance, keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.

Step 1: Keyword Identification

The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: “cat food” and “dog food”.

Step 2: Locate Your Keywords

The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularities, you can make use of the Aleksika keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.

Step 3: Choose Keywords

The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.

Instead of making your search more vague and inaccurate, (which generally happens when you try to choose one-word keywords), it is suggested that you focus your concentration on only those keywords that can be easily managed. And that would typically mean phrasal keywords.

More people link to a page when it has valuable content. However, such links that arrive without your effort is never enough for promoting your website. So, there is no other way than using other methods of getting relevant backlinks.

Use Web Directories to Get Backlinks

It is very important that you get listed in popular directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ, if at all you are bothered about web presence. The good thing here is that you not only get free and relevant backlinks; you also become more visible to prospective customers and search engines. Although this is free, the only disadvantage is that you should wait for a long time to get listed.

Make use of Article Directories and Forums

Article submissions and forum posts are other trusted ways of building backlinks for your site. Adding a plain link on your signature is usually an efficient method of getting extra traffic to your site. However, it is important to ensure that the backlinks you get are relevant. Irrelevant links to your website are not going to make any difference.

Affiliate Programs

Just like the other methods, affiliate programs are also effective ways of earning valuable backlinks. However, even though you increase your chance of bringing prospective buyers to your site, this one is a pricier method compared to the rest. The reason is that you have to spend a lot on paying affiliate commissions.

Press Releases

Although this is not something that you can employ everyday; it does give fine results if used properly. Many press release sites are available, where you publish free press releases on your latest products. This is a good way of bringing relevant traffic to your site.

To finish, always remember that backlinks building brings rewards only to those who are persistent. Just doing it for one day will not help your SEO efforts in any way. So never give up. Although it may take some time to get results, it is surely worth your time.

1. Determine your target audience

The first step is an important one. Think hard…what type(s) of people do you want to visit your site? If you sell something on your site, who would be your top consumers? If you provide a service, who would be looking for it? This may seem obvious at first, but knowing who is searching will affect how they’re searching.

2. Guess what they’re searching

Now the hard part…you’re going to have to step into the shoes of your average consumer and think:

“If I wanted to find one of the products/services offered on my website, what would I be typing into a Google search right now?”

Maybe you think people interested in getting a truck driving job are only using phrases like “truck driving jobs,” “trucking jobs” and “trucker jobs.” But have you considered the sizeable group of seasoned truckers that would use different phrases with the same meaning, like “cdl jobs”?

Is your product/service geo-specific? Consider geo-targeted keywords like “LA oral surgeon” instead of “oral surgeon.”

There are many angles to consider, so rack your brain and do your best!

3. Make a keyword list

In general terms there are two major types of keywords: “head terms” and “tail terms.” An example of a head term is the keyword “basketball.” An example of a related tail term keyword is “college basketball tshirts.”

Someone that owns a basketball t-shirt store would probably like to rank well on both of those terms, but each has its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of head terms is that they will net a greater search volume, so ranking #1 for that head term (“basketball”) would inevitably get many people to your site. The disadvantages are that 1) people search head terms (like “basketball”) for all kinds of reasons, so the chances that they’re looking for your exact product/service are lessened and 2) since it’s such a broad term, it will be very competitive and difficult to rank on.

The disadvantage of tail terms is that they get fewer searches per month. But on the flip side, those individuals that do search for your tail terms pre-qualify themselves (for example, anyone searching for “college basketball tshirts” would certainly be interested in your site). Another advantage to tail terms is that they are less competitive and relatively easier to rank on.

In summary:
A keyword that consists of only one or two words is generally considered a “head term.” The characteristics of a head term are as follows:

1. Head terms typically boast high search volumes (i.e. they get searched a lot)
2. Head terms generally drive less-qualified traffic
3. Head terms are typically more competitive and more difficult to rank well on

A keyword that consists of three or more words is generally considered a “tail term.” The characteristics of a tail term are as follows:

1. Tail terms are typically boast lower search volumes
2. Tail terms generally drive more-qualified traffic
3. Tail terms are typically less competitive, and easier to rank well on.

So when you generate the list of keywords, its recommended that you choose 2/3′s tail terms to 1/3 head terms. This will ensure that you have a strategy that will help you achieve both short term and long terms success from a diverse set of keywords.

4. Check search volume

Now that you have a good list of potential keywords, run them through a keyword tool (like Google’s free keyword tool) to see how many monthly searches these keywords get per month. You’ll likely see what we learned in Step 3–that your head terms will get high monthly search volume and you tail terms will get low monthly search volume. Remember though, a few qualified searchers might be better for business than hundreds of poorly qualified searchers. The goal is to make sure that your keywords get at least some search volume per month.

5. Check competition

Now that you’ve analyzed search volume, check out the competition for your search terms first hand. Type each of your search phrases into Google and look at the first ten results. The following characteristics make your competitors more difficult to unseat:

1. The age of their domain
In other words, how long ago the domain was registered. Find out by typing their domain into a WhoIs search. Older domains are generally more authoritative
2. The number of backlinks they have
Sign up for a Yahoo account and use their Site Explorer tool to check the number of inlinks to the site (inlinks=backlinks). As a general rule, the more inlinks a competitor has, the more difficult they’ll be to unseat.
3. The quality of backlinks they have
When you examine their inlinks in Yahoo’s site explorer tool, look at some of the top ones–are they from other authoritative, relevant .com sites? Do they have links from authoritative .gov or .edu sites? Authoritative backlinks make your competitors more authoritative as well.
4. Their Google PageRank
Download the Google toolbar to see each website’s PageRank. PageRank is a score of 1-10 assigned to each website that has been indexed by Google (1 being the least authoritative, 10 being the most). Higher PageRank = a more competitive site.

6. Make your final cut

Taking Steps 1-5 into consideration, pick your final list of keywords. It’s not always an easy decision, but it’s important to focus your efforts. It’s time…

After careful examination, I have consolidated ten most popular link building techniques into a list and here they are, for your reading pleasure!

1. Link Exchange

The most widely used and predominant link building technique is the exchange of links with other like-minded websites. This can be done through one-way link exchange, reciprocal link exchange or a clever three-way link exchange. One way link exchanges are hard to do as it only requires the target website to link back to you. People will only link to your website if they are paid or in lieu of any other incentive.

Reciprocal link exchanges are easy because you are also putting the target website’s link on your website, therefore, the give and take rule applies here.

Finally, there is the little known three-way link exchange technique. Let me give you an example of how its done. Say, you own websites “A” & “B” and want good inbound links for website “A”. You go out and do a three-way link exchange with a webmaster who owns the website “C”. When doing the exchange, you put C’s link on your website “B” (instead of putting it on website “A”), and C puts “A” link on their website. So, you are basically gaining one way link for your website “A” without losing any Page value.

In order to initiate a link exchange, you will have to contact a website’s administrator by sending an email stating what you want to do. Make sure your e-mail is courteous and you explain what benefit the other website will get out of the link exchange. You can also try visiting different webmaster forums where you can find many people wanting to do link exchanges.
I also recommend you using this great free link exchange tool to check links’ value before you exchange links.

2. Social Bookmarking Websites

With the introduction of social bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg etc., getting targetted traffic to your website is easier than before. People will bookmark your website if it is useful to them and has good content. Every person who bookmarks your website helps you in getting an incoming link.

You can link to the bookmarking sites so that its easy for your visitors to bookmark your website. WordPress users can even download plugins which automatically put bookmarking links under your individual posts. Once someone bookmarks your website, there are chances that he will return back to your website sometime later. He might even share that bookmark with his friends/family which can get you more visitors.

3. Link Baiting

This is the most organic way of getting unlimited backlinks. Link baiting basically means offering some kind of unique content (bait) to your visitors and in turn they link back to your website. For example, ebooks, templates, custom scripts, custom graphics etc. I guess you get the idea. You can insert your website’s link in that content and as long as that content holds value and is available on your website, it is certain that people will use it and link back to you automatically. It will have a lasting effect for your website’s pagerank.

4. Web Directory Submissions

There are hundreds and thousands of online web based directories which list websites classifying them into categories. You can perhaps find lists of directories if you search on Google.com. You can submit your website’s URL to them and depending on your website quality, it will be accepted. Paid directories also exist where you have to pay an annual fee to enlist your website.

Make sure that you do slow and continous submissions to these directories to avoid penalization from search engines. Submitting your site to these directories can gain you quick backlinks and give some boost to your pagerank also.

5. Article Submissions

Depending on the niche of your website, you can write quality aritcles and submit them to various free article directories on the Internet. Article directories allow you to put link back to your website in the author resource box so that will give you backlinks and traffic too. If people like your article, they might even directly link to it.

6. Press Releases

Another effective way to spread the buzz about your website is by doing press releases. You can write press releases about your website or a particular section and submit them to press release distribution services such as clickpress, webwire, businesswire, openpress etc.

7. Blog Commenting

When you are visiting other people’s blogs, you can leave comments on their posts. Some bloggers allow you to put your website’s link along with the comments which can help you build links. Sometimes, the link that you put will have a nofollow tag attached to it which will not give any pagerank value to your website, but it can still send some extra visitors.

8. Forum Posts

Try and become a member of all the popular forums that are related to your website’s topic. Most of the forums will allow a certain number of links which can be added to your signature below every post you make. You can add your website(s) link(s) there and build backlinks.
Or, if you don’t have the time to build links manually, I recommend you to order this forum link building service. It’s very effective.

9. Link Programs

There are various link programs which you can join for link development purpose. These programs have a lot of listed subscribers and your links are rotated on their websites which help you get visitors. Most of the time, these programs will tell you to put a piece of code on your website to allow other people’s links.

10. Creating Contests

Last but not the least, a viral way to make good backlinks is to hold a number of contests on your website. You can even offer a small amount of money for the winner of the contest. If money is short, then you could offer something else that is readily available with you as the prize. You can then ask people to link back to your contest and this will get you some quality one-way links.

There are many free tools which we use in our daily web life. Will update this post to extend it to more user friendly free software downloads.

Concludingly, I will say that these are some good ways to build links but if you are creative and exercise those extra cells of yours, you might come up with something that can really boost your incoming links.

These distinguished attributes can be spotlighted as:

* Tags
* Text
* Keyword concentration

TAGS
Heading tags denote to the viewer and the search engines the title of your page and other subheadings. There are 6 such tags. The font of these tags can be adjusted using the font tags or through CSS. The content in between these tags is given special weighting. The rules must be strictly followed while using H1 tags else you could be fined /banned for spam even when you didn’t intend so. The same tag mustn’t be used more than once on a single page. The H1 tag specifies the primary heading on your page. The subheadings must be marked with other tags like H2, H3 and so on.

TEXT
The wordings need to be precise. The ratio of your keywords to the total number of words in your title should be about 50%. That gives your keywords increased priority.For supplementary importance the subheadings can be formatted in bold. Too many heading tags will on its own reduce the weight of them. You can stylize your content with bold, italics, underlined, colored text. Textured text serves two ends. To draw the attention of viewer and for indicating to the search engines that those words are of more importance (are your keywords).That doesn’t imply you bold every occurrence of your keywords. You can even highlight non keywords if need be so.

KEYWORD CONCENTRATION
As far as the keyword density is concerned there really is no magical number associated with it. So you never can say for certain what is optimal density because it keeps on changing. Plus, that figure may not the same for any two given search engine. It is best advisable to keep it around 3 to 5 percent of your total text. This works well in 9 out of 10 cases. Another simple trick- create the article for the readers and not for the search engines. Unprincipled webmasters use very small text size, hidden text or other such unethical devices to rank well. Unfortunately, for them, these tricks work only in the short term.

Some good advice (like given above), common sense and a rational understanding of marketing can very well guide you towards good content optimization. It wont harm to remember that it is a bad idea to fool the search engines and worse to fool your visitors.