You should probably know by now that the best way for ranking higher in search engines is to start link building. Backlinks of a website are the most important votes when it comes to Google deciding whether your site deserves a top ranking for certain keywords or not.

Many folks are following white hat, legit link building strategies, others decide to go “on the dark side” and build links through black hat methods, however these features below are a total must for any successful link building campaign.

1.      Website relevancy

Although many SEOs consider that “a link is a link is a link”, when trying to get only the crème de la crème of backlinks you should definitely consider searching for highly relevant websites to get links from. If you are selling for example sports shoes, a relevant backlink can come from shoes, sports, athletes websites, and not only.

2.      Number of outbound links

You should definitely search for pages/websites that keep their outbound links levels low and most important, if they are linking out to websites promoting pharma, casinos you should skip that very website, of course, unless you are promoting these type of products/services as well.

3.      Domain authority

Domain authority is calculated based on many factors, such as page rank, age, number of backlinks, relevancy of backlinks etc. You can easily check a website’s authority by using a free tool such as SEOQuake.

4.      Anchor text

We cannot stress enough for the importance of anchor text. You want to rank for a term like web design, then try to get backlinks to your website anchored with that very text. Important: never overdo it! You should try to also get backlinks with variation of your keyword and also containing your brand name in anchor, so that your entire link building campaign will seem natural.

You have probably used before Google Webmaster Tools to check your traffic, keywords and many other aspects concerning your website. However, have you ever considered using this very powerful tool from Google to tweak your already published articles and to get a boost to your content, in terms of visitors?

If your response is a concise no than this blog post is definitely for you. There are some small steps you should follow for getting the most out of a blog post:

1. Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account

2. Check the Search Queries that lead traffic to your blog

3. Now here comes the most important part:

-          Pick up the keywords you are ranking high for but have a very low CTR

-          Optimise them – create a more appealing call-to-action title, tweak your description and watch out the click-through-rate increasing in a matter of days/weeks

4. The last part is related to keywords that get a large number of impressions but you do not rank high for them (such as position 6-7 or below)

5. See if the blog posts contain that very keyword in title and description; if not, add them!

6. Link Links Links – build links to those blog posts; as they have large numbers of impressions they are definitely some good traffic-bringing keywords, just that they need an extra-push in the SERPS

Important tip: before building backlinks to your blog posts from external places, always check out other opportunities on your website! You probably have tens of places where you could place an internal link, with the desired anchor text. Internal linking is a very important aspect when it comes to link building and SEO in general.

When it comes to search engine optimisation, one thing is clear: you can rank a website in a low competition market only with a perfect on-page optimisation and no backlinks, but you will not be able to rank a website with the worst on-page SEO and thousands of backlinks.

Considering SEO as a pyramid, the on-page part is best seen as the foundation on which your whole strategy should be built upon. Below are probably the best on-page SEO tips that should make a perfect start for any website.

1.      Google-friendly URLs

Always make sure that your URLs contain keywords and not some weird numbers and letters saying nothing about your page/website. For WordPress users, the easiest way of doing this is by tweaking the permalinks to show the post/page title instead of other long-ish phrases/characters.

2.      Title and meta description

Although title seems to be an easy pick, most of the times webmasters do not take full advantage of using it properly. On the other hand, meta description is not only a fantastic way to clearly show search engines what your website is about (and furthermore rank for some additional keywords) but also the piece of content that can make the difference between a good CTR or a poor one.

3.      H tags

H tags are perfect to have targeted keywords included, so definitely should be used. Advice: try to use only 1 H1 tag/page.

4.      Images

Not only that you should use the alt description of a certain image with the keywords you are trying to rank for but a big mistake many webmasters usually do is the fact that they are using not-optimised names for their pictures/photos. For example, you have probably encountered many pictures with names such as 189432.jpg when there is a big chance of getting higher rankings with an optimised image name. Moreover, Google Images can be a great source of traffic so ranking an image higher should also be a great move.

5.      Internal linking architecture

This is probably the best way to help your internal pages/homepage rank for some long tail keywords while internal links (with proper anchors) do really help in search engine optimisation. Check your previous published content, see what they can link from your website, choose your anchors wisely and start working on them.

Google has rolled out many changes lately, starting from big algorithm changes such as Panda to closing popular (or not) services such as Google Directory. The latest announcement is related to Google Places and the main things they have concentrated their efforts on are user reviews.

After getting into some disputes with Yelp not so long ago, Google folks decided to concentrate more on Google users reviews instead of those coming from 3^rd party websites, such as FreeIndex, Thomson Local and so on. With this change, we will no longer see review snippets from other websites on the Google Places page but they will be counted as reviews, no word about that.

It seems that with this change Google is trying to put more and more emphasis on reviews from Google users added directly to Google Places page (users-generated content anyone?); with 2 red “write a review” buttons, it is obvious that reviews added directly on the Places page are more than welcomed.

Other “pieces” that have been removed from Google Places pages are:

-          Citations and references – this is a big change while it was one of the best places for competitors to get important information about where a certain local business gets its review and strength

-          Snippets from reviews – not only that review snippets are gone but websites mentioning that very business have been moved at the bottom of Places page

More changes to come in the near future, according to Google folks, and things are about to be changing a lot when it comes to local search engine optimisation.

Years ago, directories were a great place for getting backlinks to a website (and some of them still are), but nowadays it seems that they are not playing such a great role in link building as before. Among the most authoritative directories you could find DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and Google Directory, but lately the guys at Google decided to no longer continue their “manually approved” directory.

Although Internet directories were back in the days when the www was just starting to increase in popularity a great place for finding information and websites, it seems that nowadays they are almost forgotten; when search engines deliver (almost) exactly what you are searching for, is there a need for directories?

Well, by looking at how popular local business directories have become yes, there is still a big demand for this type of resources, as well as for sub-niches ones. This was not the case with Google Directory thus it being shut down. In its place, Google folks have placed a statement:

“We believe that Web Search is the fastest way to find the information you need on the web.”

Furthermore, Google Labs is to be closed as well, according to Google SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure Bill Coughran. He added that many “experiments” will be shut down while others will be incorporated into different areas. According to a late update on Bill’s post:

“To clarify: we don’t have any plans to change in-product experimentation channels like Gmail Labs or Maps Labs. We’ll continue to experiment with new features in each of our products.”

These latest products being shut down follow a large number of other services being closed such as Google Notebook, Google Video and so on.

Anytime Google updates PageRank thousands of webmasters joyfully open new threads claiming their websites got a higher PR, others sadly announce their PR was lowered and all in one, although PR has nothing to do with  rankings/traffic/earnings people are still loving it.

About three weeks ago the PageRank of millions of websites was updated, again forums were filled with new threads but two interesting things happened: Google’s PageRank went from 10 to 9 and Twitter’s went from 9 to 0! Each and every webmaster started asking questions regarding this and many of them saw this as an algorithmic error.

And it seems that all was a mistake as yesterday Google conducted yet another PageRank update, fixing both Twitter’s and its own PR. Yet again, Google has a PR10 and Twitter a PR9. Though you might be inclined to believe this update was only for fixing these 2 small problems, fact is that the newest PR update changed things when it comes to other thousands of websites as well.

Sites that went from PR1 to PR6 “regained” their previous PR, sites that went from PR4 to PR1 regained their PR and others kept their “positions” without any movement.

PageRank  lost its trust and “value” in the eyes of webmasters and SEOs but it is still a huge criteria on a huge market – the link selling market. It has been proven several times that high PR links (bought one) are not way better than industry-related ones from lower PR sites however many folks are still running for “high PR links”, as if they would be the Nirvana of link building.

Is this going to stop in the near future?