Before the advent of Google’s search algorithms, only web marketers and companies with deep pockets could hope to get top search engine rankings from floods of traffic to their sites. Nowadays, the playing field is leveled. To get your website at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages), you want to make sure you have a good chunk of one way inbound links from reputable and high ranked websites. There are four proven search engine optimization methods I highly recommend employing for your blog or website. Please note these methods require some minor research, a touch of patience, and some basic web knowledge.

1. Post on Free Blogs
You will receive one way linkbacks to your website every time you create a new post entry on popular free blogs. Make sure your free blog can ping the blog update services such as Technorati. Blogging is one of the easiest and most recommended methods to create valuable links back to your website. Web users can subscribe to your blog’s RSS feeds and get regular alerts from blog services whenever your blog has been updated. Also each RSS feed that is subscribed to counts as a free inbound link to your site. I discuss my top picks of free blogging services in another article I highly recommend you read. These blogs have rewarded me with fast and high valued inbound links time after time.

2. Post on Popular Forums
Registering on multiple free and popular forums is the second method I recommend for a great linkback campaign. It’s very important though to drop comments on forums whose topics are related or closely follow the same category, theme, and target audience as your website. It’s a good practice to include and link keywords in your comments that are found on your site. Remember to always choose forums that allow hyperlinks in your comments or more importantly in your profile signature. The next task is to make sure these hyperlinks do not employ the “rel=nofollow” rule. If this is the case, these forums are a complete waste of your search engine optimization efforts. Search engine robots such as Googlebot do not index these hyperlinks, resulting in no inbound links to your website. Check to see whether the forum is high trafficked and high ranked. The higher the traffic/rank of the forum, the more weight the inbound link holds by Google and Yahoo’s standards. Strong inbound links will push you further up in search engine results resulting in more traffic to your website.

3. Submit Original Articles to Article Banks
I can’t stress how important this method of Inbound Linking is. If you have the gift of writing then your website will benefit greatly by submitting your articles to article banks. As with any form of inbound linking, use only those article banks that are reputable, adhere to search engine optimization rules, and do not employ the “rel=nofollow” rule in their hyperlinks. The key is to write about topics that don’t expire or become stale. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep the articles around 300 to 700 words. Each article you submit will most likely have a signature line with an inbound link to your site, and each time someone uses that article they are required by article banks to keep your link in that signature section.

4. Submit content to Social Bookmarks
Social bookmarks are the new golden child of search engine marketing. They’re free and heavily used for content building on millions of websites. Most major portals utilize them to get their articles, videos, and images distributed to a broader reach of web users. A major advantage of social bookmarks is that once submitted, your articles get indexed by Search engines a lot faster than simply waiting for search spiders to crawl your site and index pages. Each submission creates a valuable inbound link. You can generally submit articles to about 14 high traffic social bookmarks, such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Mixx and so on.

Follow these methods and you will see an enormous turnaround in traffic and search engine rank in a short moment.

Sitelinks are the links shown below some sites in search results and  are meant to help users navigate to your site. Google analyzes the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for and when it does find something suitable then it creates a sitelink. This is what a sitelinks look like

Sitelink

There need to be atleast three sitelinks created by Google for a particular site for the sitelinks to be displayed. The unfortunate part is that we cannot tell Google to create  sitelinks according to our choice, it does so on its own. However once Google does create a sitelink and if you dont want that particular link to be displayed then you can block it. Simply go into webmaster tools, there go to the sitelinks option and block a particular sitelink. Once blocked within a few days Google stops showing the sitelink and the sitelink remains blocked for a 90 day period. If you want that sitelink to be blocked for more time then all you need to do is just go to the sitelink page on webmaster tools. Each time you do so the sitelinks will be blocked for an additional 90 days. You can unblock a sitelink whenever you wish too

So how do sitelinks help an SEO campaign? Many a times it might happen that Google might create sitelinks of pages that you think people might not visit frequently  or more importantly you feel that there are many more important pages that deserve a sitelink. Then if you block a sitelink, Google automatically will create some more  relevant sitelinks.  Having irrelevant sitelinks might deter users from visiting your site and that is definitely not something that you want to happen.

Many webmasters don’t get high rankings on Google and other search engines just because the indexing robot has difficulty to index their web pages.Search engine robots are very simple software programs. If an indexing robot cannot find the content of your website immediately, it will skip your site and go to the next link in the list. For that reason, it is very important to make sure that search engine robots can index your web pages without problems.

Here are the top 5 elements that drive search engine robots away:

Element 1: Your robots.txt file is damaged or it contains a typo

If search engine robots misinterpret your robots.txt file, they might completely ignore your web pages.

Double check your robots.txt file and make sure that you use the disallow parameter only for web pages that you really don’t want to have indexed.

Element 2: Your URLs contain too many variables

URLs with many variables can cause problems with search engine robots. If your URLs contain too many variables, search engine robots might ignore your pages.

Here’s Google’s official statement about web pages with many variables:

“Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored.”

Element 3: You use session IDs in your URLs

Many search engines don’t index URLs that contain session IDs because they can lead to duplicate content problems. If possible, avoid session IDs in your URLs. Better use cookies to store session IDs.

Element 4: Your web pages contain too much code

Of course, your web pages can contain JavaScript code, CSS code and other script code that is not directly related to your content. Visit your website with a web browser and select “View source” or “View HTML source”.                                                                                                                                                               If it is difficult for you to spot the actual content of your website then search engines might also have difficulty to parse your pages.

Element 5: Your website navigation causes problems

Fancy JavaScript or DHTML menus cannot be parsed by most search engine robots. Flash or AJAX menus are even worse when it comes to website navigation.
As mentioned above, search engine robots are very simple programs. They can follow HTML links; all other links can cause problems.

Optimized web page content and good inbound links are crucial for high search engine rankings. However, the best content and the best links won’t help you much if search engines cannot index your pages.

The terms crawling and indexing (and indexing’s cousin, caching) are frequently used together, but they are vastly different in terms of SEO.

Exact definitions probably differ from person to person, but following is how I explain the processes:

Crawling is the process of an engine requesting - and successfully downloading - a unique URL. Obstacles to crawling include no links to a URL, server downtime, robots exclusion, or using links (such as some JavaScript links) from which bots cannot find a valid URL.

Indexing is the result of successful crawling. I consider a URL to be indexed (by Google) when info: or cache: query produces a result, signifying the URL’s presence in the Google index. Obstacles to indexing can include duplication (the engine might decide to index only one version of content for which it finds many nearly identical URLs), unreliable server delivery (the engine may decide to not index a page that it can access during only one-third of its attempts), and so on.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin while studying at Stanford  developed Google,  which would provide better and quicker search results. After months of hard work and analyzing the content  present on the web they developed the Pagerank system wherein it was decided that they would rank a page depending on the content of the website, no. of incoming links and hyper text matching. The most important factor was the no. of links pointing to one’s website. In a real world scenario links represent votes and the more no. of votes a candidate has he wins. It was as simple as that however somewhere down the line the concept of “relevant links ” was introduced. According to this concept, if your website talks about watches and if you receive a link from  a website that talk about animals, this link adds no value to your website. It was argued that only relevant links mattered. It was argued that relevant links meant that someone who has a website providing the same services/information  as you is willing to link to you, thus meaning that he holds your website in high esteem and therefore more the no. of relevant links that you get the more important your website is and it should be placed higher on the Search engine results page(SERPs ). However, I don’t agree with this concept in totality and have listed a few of my reservations.

Relevant links means linking to your direct/indirect competitors and why would you want to do that. One might argue that one gets a reciprocal link in return but it does not make too much sense. Why should I push my competitors ranking up in a bid to push mine? In the real world would the Chairman of company A which manufactures mobile phones  use company B’s  mobile phones and ask “B’s” chairman to reciprocate? It just does not make sense.

Most of the search engines consider data within the anchor- text as content present on your page. This leads to a situation where in the k/w density of your links page increases and the search engines start ranking your links pages. Yes, I know you are beginning to argue that if this is the case then you resources page might be banned because of heavy k/w stuffing. However, this is not the case if you look at the links not all of them target the same k/ws. Coming back to my point high k/w density results in the links page getting ranked and getting a link page to rank higher than all the other webpages is the perfect way to lose traffic !!

Within the domain of relevant links also, Webmasters have different sets of rules. Will a webmaster of  a footwear website refuse a link from BBC.com  just because the two are not related. Take it one step ahead, would that webmaster contact BBC.com and ask them to remove his link. Another point is that if your website has been tagged(Digg, Delicious etc..) by 100 irrelevant websites/  bloggers are you going to contact Google and tell them not to consider these tags. There can’t be different sets of rules for different websites.

I am doing reputation management for one of my clients. We used a lot of socio – media forums and focused on building a certain brand image for the client.  We observed that all though these forums  did rank on all the search engines they did not make it to the first page. We decided to build links to these forums. One way to do this was to create more forums and link them to the ones already ranking. This idea was discarded because generating original content was too time consuming and we really needed to show quick reesults. We decided to use our existing sites and create links from there to our forums and to the main client site. Two months later, we have the results that we wanted. We were very happy that our project was successful however I had some doubts.

The sites that linked back to these forums and the main client site were in no way related. I would classify them as “irrelevant links”, however they worked. These irrelevant links helped push up my web pages and I achieved what I set out to. What I infer from this is that if the websites linking to you are content rich  are useful and generate lot of traffic and leads then the search engines give a lot of importance and these links count very  heavily.

What anyone who is working in the SEO field needs to realize is that search engine algorithms are constantly evolving and one needs to keep abreast with the developments,  else he  runs the risk of losing the race completely.