I wrote this article to sum up all you need to know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
We can divide SEO factors to 2:
1. On-Site SEO – The principles that apply to your website pages
2. Off-Site SEO – The principles that apply to other websites linking to your website.
Since Off-Site SEO is much more important than On-Site (I would say 90% goes to Off-Site), I’ll concentrate on it.
Off-Site SEO
Your site may be full of great and relevant content and your pages may be the best of any site in your niche, but if no one knows of your existence and no one has linked to you as an authoritative source, then how would Google notice? In order to rank at the top, you need a large number of high-quality incoming links, described using keyword-rich anchor text, from other websites.
How Do I get these incoming links?
Link-building activities fall into two groups: passive and active.
1. Passive Link Building
This involves link baiting. Link baiting means you need to create attractive content and thus passively invite others to link back to your website. It may be an interesting article, a funny picture or video, and so on.
2. Active Link Building
If you don’t have a good link bait, (and even if you do) you can actively contact other sites to submit or request a link. A lot of Web 2.0 sites allow you to pose a link with no need to way for a response like forums and blog comments.
A very effective software that helps with active link building is called “DoFellow”. It helps you find blogs that allow adding a link to your website (It also makes sure that it’s a valuable link, since most blogs have put a little tag called ‘nofollow’ which tells the search engine not to pass any authority to the website in the blog comment). For sufficient quantity and quality, I recommend that you actively
build at least 750 unique (one per domain, more than that will not count) inbound links, containing your keywords in the anchor text. This may be done in less than a week using the tool I mentioned above. In any case, even if your niche is very competitive, don’t get more then 1500 links. Google might consider it Link-Spamming, unless it’s done over a very long period of several years!
Another important note about link building is to vary the anchor keywords. This is most important for the same reason. If all links have the exact same anchor-text, Google might treat it as link spamming.
Home Page Links and Deep Links
Deep links are links that point to a page inside your website which is not your home page. It is important to have at least 15% of the links you get as deep-links.
Reciprocal link exchange
Another way to get links is reciprocal link exchange. This means you give a link to get a link. In some cases you can do “3 Way Link Exchange”, which means you give a link from one site to get a link to another site. This is better, because it is less obvious to the search engine that a reciprocal exchange is in place.
A good tool for automatic Reciprocal Link Exchange can be found here
Paying for links
There are a lot of directories that will give you links for money. I do not recommend it since you can buy the tools I mentioned and get many more links (unlimited) for less than what you’ll pay for one year to these directories.
Summary
SEO is mostly about getting incoming links. You can do it passively by creating link baits (great content that people want to link to), or actively by requesting links from other sites (dofollow blogs, forums, reciprocal link exchange).