Inbound links are now so important in the constant battle to achieve top search engine rankings, that tons of people are using every tactic under the sun to gain that one additional link. You must be careful when it comes to linking though. You could jeopardize your whole linking plan by getting links in a shady manner which could have an adverse affect on your search rankings. These inbound links are seen by search engines as votes for your site within a particular community of sites.

Anytime you’re being voted for, you want to have as many votes as possible. however you want to be using tactics which are going to pay dividends in your linking strategy, not do more harm then good. Below i list some of the best and safest methods around for generating inbound links for your website. Some can be more effective than others:

• Requesting Links: The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved in the market are. Then, you contact each one of the sites and ask them to link to your site. In most cases, the person you contact receives your request, but providing links to other sites is the least of their worries, so you may never hear from them. If you do, it can sometimes be months later. So, you put a lot of time into requesting links from other sites for a relatively small return on your efforts. For more on requesting links, i recommend you checkout The Do’s & Dont’s of Requesting Links.

• Writing Articles: One of the most effective methods of gaining inbound links is to offer an article for other companies to use as long as they include a paragraph at the bottom that includes credits for you as well as a link back to your site. This method of gaining inbound links works well, because web sites are always looking for good content to include on their pages. The catch here is that the article you write should be well written, accurate, and useful to other sites in your industry. Once you’ve produced an article that meets these requirements, you can begin to let others know you have content available for them to use for free; you can do this by having a ‘free articles’ page on your site or submit the content to article directories. For more on article marketing, view Bill Platt’s in-depth article, Article Marketing for Links.

• Blogs: Another way to get links back to your site is from bloggers. What started as a strange phenomenon that was mostly personal has now become a powerful business tool; many businesses rely on links back to their sites from the various industry bloggers out there. In most cases, though, bloggers aren’t just going to stumble onto your web site. It’s far better for you to contact the blogger with information about your organization, some product that you offer, or with news that would interest them. This information then gives the blogger something to use in his or her regular posts. Keep in mind, however, that you can’t control what a blogger might say, so it’s possible that the review you get won’t be favorable. Its possible to get reviews from small to mid-sized blogs without too much of a problem, but when it comes to getting reviews from the most popular blogger in your niche, it may cost you a few hundred $$$. For example, John Chow charges a whopping $500 for a review, which he doesn’t even write himself.

• Press Releases: Press releases are one of the mainstays of any marketing program. It can be so effective that many organizations hire companies to do nothing but distribute their press releases. What’s so powerful about a press release? It’s just the facts, including benefits, sent out to publications and organizations that might publish all or part of the press release. Use press release marketing to send out new items of all types, and send them as widely as you can. New organizations, publications, newsletters, even some forums will post press releases. When you write it, make sure a link back to your site is included.

• Affiliate Programs: Affiliate programs are a type of paid advertising. You provide a link to people who want to link back to your web site. They place the link on their site and when someone clicks through that link and makes a purchase (or converts any other goal you have arranged), the affiliate — the person who placed your link on their site — gets paid a small percentage. Usually the payment for affiliate programs is very low ($.01 to $.05 per click or a small percentage of the sale). But some people make a good living being affiliates, and many organizations receive additional traffic because of their affiliate programs. The trick with affiliate programs is to not allow them to be your sole source of incoming links.

• PPC and Paid Links: Pay-per-click advertisements are an acceptable business practice. There is no problem with using PPC advertisements to achieve inbound links to your site. Remember that, like affiliate links, PPC links are not direct links to your site. Paid links, on the other hand, are different from affiliate links — you pay to have a direct, or flat link, placed on a page. Some search engines frown on the practice of using these types of links. Using paid links (especially those that land on link farms) is a practice that carries some business risk.

• Link to Yourself: Linking to yourself is a technique that sits right on the line between ethical and unethical. Linking to yourself from other sites that you might own is an acceptable practice. But if you set up other sites simply to be able to link back to your own site and create the illusion of popularity, you’re going to do more damage than it’s probably worth to you. If you are linking to yourself and you suspect that you might be doing something that would adversely affect your search engine ranking, then you shouldn’t do it. There are plenty of links to be had without linking back to your own web sites; you just have to work a little harder for the higher quality links.

Inbound links are such an important part of any online marketing strategies that some organizations find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It’s not a bad thing to want to know where your links are coming from. And one of the places you can gather that information is from your web-analytics application. A great and free analytics program available is Google Analytics. Check it out.

So there are my top link snagging tips which i actively employ for most of my online businesses. Which tactics do you use for your website, and have i missed out any good link-snagging techniques? Have your say by leaving me a comment.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Duplicate content is a hotly debated issue when it comes to how it affects your web-site ranking. And it’s become an even bigger issue over time as spammers and other malicious Internet users have taken to the practice of content scraping, or scraping the content from a web site to use on their own with only minor changes to the appearance, not to the content itself.

Content scraping has become such a problem that search engines now look for duplicate copy, even when it’s hidden behind a link like the Similar Pages that Google uses for related content. If they find it, your site may be lowered in the rankings or even delisted completely.

Still, the duplicate-copy issue isn’t as simple as it may seem. Some people think there’s too much worry about it, whereas others insist the problem needs to be addressed. And both are right to some degree. Let me explain.

First, you need to understand that not all duplicate content is the same kind. You need to appreciate some differences.

• Reprints:This is duplicate content published on multiple sites with the permission of the copyright holder. These are the articles that you or others create and then distribute to create links back to your site or to sites that are relevant to the content of yours. Reprints are not bad duplicate content, but they can get your site thrown into the realm of Similar Pages, which means they’ll be buried behind other results.

• Site Mirroring: This is the kind of duplication that can cause one or more of your sites to be delisted from a search engine. Site mirroring is literally keeping exact copies of your web site in two different places on the Internet. Web sites used to practice site mirroring all the time as a way to avoid downtime when one site crashed. These days, server capabilities are such that site mirroring isn’t as necessary as it once was, and search engines now “dis-include” mirrored content because of the spamming implications it can have. Spammers have been known to mirror sites to create a false Internet for the purpose of stealing user names, passwords, account numbers, and other personal information.

• Content Scraping: Content scraping is taking the content from one site and reusing it on another site with nothing more than cosmetic changes. This is another tactic used by spammers, and it’s also often a source of copyright infringement.

• Same Site Duplication: If you duplicate content across your own web site, you could also be penalized for duplicate content. This becomes especially troublesome with blogs, because there is often a full blog post on the main page and then an archived blog post on another page of your site. This type of duplication can be managed by simply using a partial post, called a snippet, that links to the full post in a single place on your web site.

Of these types of duplicate content, two are especially harmful to your site: site mirroring and content scraping. If you’re using site mirroring, you should consider using a different backup method for your web site. If you’re using content scraping you could be facing legal action for copyright infringement. Content scraping is a practice that’s best avoided completely.

Even though reprints and same-site duplication are not entirely harmful, they are also not helpful. And in fact they can be harmful if they’re handled in the wrong way. You won’t win any points with a search engine crawler if your site is full of content that’s used elsewhere on the Web. Reprints, especially those that are repeated often on the Web, will eventually make a search engine crawler begin to take notice.

Once it takes notice, the crawler will try to find the original location of the reprint. It does this by looking at where the content appeared first. It also looks at which copy of an article the most links point to and what versions of the article are the result of content scraping. Through a process of elimination, the crawler narrows the field until a determination can be made. Or if it’s still too difficult to tell where the content originated, the crawler will select from trusted domains.

Once the crawler has determined what content is the original, all of the other reprints fall into order beneath it or are eliminated from the index.

If you must use content that’s not original, or if you must have multiple copies of content on your web site, there is a way to keep those duplications from adversely affecting your search rankings. By using the <robots.txt> or <noindex> tags, you can prevent duplicated pages from being indexed by the search engine.

The <noindex> tag should be placed in the page header for the page that you don’t want to be indexed. It’s also a good idea to allow the crawler that finds the tag to follow links that might be on the page. To do that, your code (which is a meta tag) should look like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

That small tag of code tells the search engine not to index the page, but to follow the links on the page. This small snippet of code can help you quickly solve the problem of search engines reading your duplicate content.

So in conclusion, my advice would be to avoid any type of duplicate content if your main goal is to achieve high search engine rankings on your website. By providing fresh & unique content on your website, you are not only pleasing the search engine, but more importantly, your pleasing your user, which should be your ultimate goal as a webmaster.

Popularity: 14% [?]

I’ve discovered first hand that online advertising can be a great way to jump-start interest in a new website or augment traffic to already established websites. It’s quite easy to get effective ads up and running, and campaigns can be designed to match any budget. Since it’s an avenue few bloggers  & webmasters currently use to expand their readership, it can give you an edge in a world of increasing competition over eyeballs. Companies are also finding success by adding websites or even blogs to their long-running ads.

I buy text advertisements using mostly the Google AdWords system and Yahoo!’s Overture network. These ads appear on the search engines when people type in search terms that match phrases I’ve purchased, and also appear on Google and Yahoo! partner sites that fit the profile for these terms.

The easiest way to get started in the online advertising game is to sign up for a Google AdWords account. All you need is a credit card and the five minutes or so it takes to fill out the online forms. Go to Google to get the process started. You’ll be prompted through the steps required to get your first ad posted. Since you pay only when someone clicks on an ad, you don’t need to worry about paying for ads that don’t generate traffic.

I’ve also purchased and traded for graphical banner ad space on a variety of sites. That type of buy is a little more complex than buying search text ads, but can yield effective results. Like a roadside billboard, many banner placements will cost you money regardless of how many clicks you get, so i advise clients to begin with simple text ads to get a feel of how much traffic they want to achieve per dollar spent. Worry about buying banner space after you get some experience with search ads.

Another kind of advertising system which is highly popular among bloggers is the StumbleUpon advertising network. With StumbleUpon, you can buy site visitors for only $0.5 cents each, and you can be up and running with your campaign within minutes. The good thing about StumbleUpon is you dont have to worry about creating an attractive advert. You simply enter the URL you want to promote, choose a daily budget and watch the visitors flow in. StumbleUpon also has a tracking system which shows how many people have visited your site and what percentage of those visitors liked or disliked your website. For more on StumbleUpon advertising, view Darrens post, Run A StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign.

Which type of advertising do you use to attract new users to your website? Which advertising networks have worked particularly well, or didn’t work at all? I would be interested to hear your views on this kind of marketing, and what experiences you have had using them.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The search engines are aware of the many sneaky ways that webmasters try to achieve undeserved ranks (in SEO lingo, these sneaky activities are called spamming). If they discover that you’re trying to do this, your site may be penalized: Your rank may be downgraded, or your page—or even your whole site—could be banned. Even if your site is never caught and punished, it’s very likely, we dare say inevitable, that your tricky technique will eventually stop working. Here are some practices that have been on the search engines’ no-no list for so long that they can safely be labeled as “Eternally Bad for your Site”:

Cloaking When a search engine robot visits your site, it expects to see the same content that any normal human visitor would see. Cloaking is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pages that are different from what human visitors see. This thwarts the search engines in their attempt to deliver the most accurate search results to their users. In the vast universe of website technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not one of them. For more information on what cloaking is and how to avoid it, checkout SEO Tactics to Avoid Cloaking.

Duplicate content Are you the kind of person who thinks, “If one aspirin works, why not take two?” If so, you might be thinking that if one paragraph of keyword-rich text will help your ranks, why not put it on every page in your site? Or worse, if one website brings you sales, why not make a bunch of identical websites with different names and get even more sales? The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the big headache it causes for searchers. If the search engines listed identical content multiple times, it would destroy the diversity of their results, which would destroy their usefulness to the searcher. So, if the search engines catch on to duplicate content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks. For more tips on duplicate content, see my recent article, Cut Duplicate Content to Increase SEO Results.

Keyword stuffing Adding a keyword list to the visible text on your page is not exactly scintillating copy. We’re not talking about overly optimized text, which may come off as pointless and dry. We’re talking about repeating the same word or words over and over again so that your page looks like an industry-specific grocery list. At best, sites that do this cause eyestrain for their visitors. At worst, they’re risking penalties from the search engines. There’s a place for your keywords list: It’s called your meta keywords tag! Avoid Keyword Stuffing at all costs!!

So my advice to you would be to stay away from these ‘black hat’ SEO methods like the plague. They will not only cause your search rankings to plummet, but could even have your site banned all together. Stay with white-hat SEO techniques and you wont go far wrong.

Popularity: 10% [?]