Free SEO Articles- Linking the Google Way

It is true that the more incoming links a site has, the higher it will rank in terms of its relevant keywords. This is especially true for the Search Engine Giant, Google. Besides inbound links, cross-links and outbound links also help in Search Engine Optimization as these forms the crucial part of the linking strategy.
Of all the three different types of linking strategies, inbound links are the important and should be evaluated carefully so as to optimize a site. Google takes into consideration the weight of every incoming links and allocate some Page Rank to the receiving page. Therefore, to make a page seems important to Google, it is advised to have more quality sites linking to our pages.
Anchor text is another critical factor when obtaining inbound links from the other sites. Anchor texts with ‘click here’ will not help much for Google in determining our page relevancy. Instead, you should always encourage incoming links to contain keywords that you are targeting. For example, a SEO site may have incoming anchor texts like 'SEO Tools' or 'SEO Articles'.
Google is capable of determining whether both linking pages are relevant. They consider links that are content-related as Natural Links. This is reasonable, as it makes no sense in linking an online casino with a government hospital site. Google will reduce the ranking of those pages that contain unnatural links eventually.
Having a well-structured linking system within a site is also important as it allows Google bots to access every page of our site. These cross-links have several advantages to a site because it can distribute Page Rank and help the search engine to determine the pages’ relevancy by looking at their anchor text.
Although cross-links are very beneficial to a site, we must always remember to keep the total amount of links on a page to fewer than 100 as advised by the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Pages with more than 100 of links may cause Google to classify them as Links Farm.
It may seems that outbound links do not have any effect on our site ranking as it directs the visitors away from our site but this linking strategy will help in building up our reputation. It is important especially for a content site to provide as much information as possible to the visitors.
Outbound links will not cause the page’s Page Rank to leak out. Therefore, sharing of other important sites and resources will benefit the site in the long run.
A site without links is like an isolated data center. In order to make our sites known to more users, links are important and should be carefully implemented throughout the whole site and eventually, the Internet.

5 Essential SEO Techniques

Essential SEO Techniques

Search Engine Optimization is becoming a more and more complicated area especially with the recent updates and data refresh done on the search engines' index. However, the basic concept for good ranking does not change. The following illustrates five most important SEO techniques as summarized from the Google Webmaster Guidelines that all webmasters should follow.
The first step into SEO is to create a site that allows the bots from the search engines to crawl. A web page is as good as offline if it does not appear in the search engine's index. It is advised to use clean and static urls for a page rather than lengthy url with complicated parameters.
It is stated clearly in the Google Webmaster Guidelines that they do not index urls with session ids. In addition, they will not index pages that require user authentication as the bots visit pages like a general user. Search engines also cannot guarantee that they will index all the dynamic urls. Therefore, in order to facilitate the search engines in crawling all the pages, static urls are always preferred.
The second technique is to create a site that holds unique and fresh content. Search engines like to index fresh content. A frequently updated site will find the bots returning to visit at a shorter interval. Adding unique content regularly will also help other users to find the site more easily as these pages will add on to the respective domain’s search index in the search engine database.
Third technique is equally important as it ensures that search engines can crawl every page in a site successfully. Having a text link navigation system is highly recommended for SEO purposes as it is almost guaranteed that the bots will visit all the pages via the text links. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash navigation system, as the bots will ignore them. Implement a Google Sitemap is also recommended, as this will help the search engines to find any pages that may be missed during the crawl.
After implementing a search engine friendly navigation system, the Webmaster should focus on the keywords allocation and place the targeted keywords in appropriate places. Of the entire HTML markup, the most important tags to take note are the title and the headers. It is advised to have a different title for every page and to adopt a proper hierarchy of headers so that search engines know what are the content that the pages are focusing.
The final step towards a good search engine ranking is to attract organic links. Organic links are natural links from content related pages. Google only takes into account of these natural links when ranking and indexing pages as stated in their guidelines. Although linking from the unrelated pages does not hurt its rankings, they will not help either.

CSS Templates for Search Engine Optimization

Most Search Engine Optimizers already know that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has great advantages on Optimizing web pages for the search engines but some may not be aware that most CSS Templates also helps the web masters in saving a lot of valuable time when designing a site.
Some of the more popular free CSS template providers like oswd.org and csstemplates.net constantly uploads professional templates for the worldwide webmasteres. These templates come with standard and validate codes which not only helps in optimizing the site but also conforms to World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) guidelines.
One of the most significant advantages of using CSS templates to start off a website is that it increases the overall Text-to-Codes ratio. Some experienced Search Engine Optimizers believe that search engines favors the indexing of pages that have a high amount of content rather than codes. In addition, a page with high amount of HTML or Javascript codes is likely to create errors than a page with less codes. Therefore, CSS template helps greatly in this codes reduction to increase search engine optimization results.
Another factor worth considering is the amount of time needed by the search engine bots to index a page. With the implementation of CSS, especially with the external style sheets, the file size will be much smaller than normal pages that use conventional tables design. It is to our advantages if search engine can index our pages in a shorter time. This not only saves us valuable bandwidth but also reduces the chance of encountering errors during indexing since now the file is smaller and more compact.
In conclusion, using CSS templates to start off a website helps greatly in reducing the effort needed to optimize a website.

A Good SEO eBook: From Novice to Expert

Learning Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be confusing especially when all kind of information can be found on the Internet. For most of the time, webmasters will learn SEO through forums and SEO 'experts'. In this article, I will illustrate how a person can learn the correct Search Engine Optimization techniques from a reliable source- the SEO e-Book.
As there are countless amount of SEO e-books published on the Internet, it is becoming more difficult to find and determine a reliable e-book in this domain.
The first thing to look out for when evaluating an e-book is its author. Performing a search in Google for the author's name will reveal the author's enriching profile if he / she is a professional Search Engine Optimizer. Some of the few SEO experts are Aaron Wall, Peter Kent and Dave Taylor. On the other hand, if you could not find anything related to the author in the search engines, chances are the author is not experienced enough in this field.
The next important point to look out for is the coverage of the SEO e-book. A peek at the Table of Content will determine how useful is the particular e-book. A good SEO e-book must cover an introduction of how search engines work, how are the pages indexed etc. Basic on-page SEO optimization like unique titles and descriptive header tags should be included in the e-book as well.
A good SEO e-book should also contains how to achieve good rankings by link baiting, which attracts relevant inbound links to a designated page and hence, generate highly targeted traffic to the site.
Popular SEO e-books often contain additional advices other the above mentioned. For example, some professional SEO authors will include topics like copywriting, marketing and Pay Per Click (PPC) strategy.
In conclusion, a useful SEO e-book must not only contains basic optimizing techniques but also how to outrank your competitors by off-page optimization and promotion strategies.

Understand Backlinks from Search Engines

Most Search Engine Optimizers understand the importance of the backlinks in order for a website to succeed. Most search engines take into account of the backlinks quality for their ranking algorithm. We will cover the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) here and discuss how they treat backlinks from their point of view.
The most popular search engine, Google, places great emphasis on backlinks. In fact, relevant backlinks is all a website needs to achieve a high ranking in Google result page. Google, however, does not shows all the indexed backlinks when user queries with the link: operator. In addition, Google does not update their backlink index as frequent as their search results.
It is believed that multiple backlinks from a same domain does not have the stack effect in Google. For example, links from forum signatures and directories will have minimum weigh in Google's ranking algorithm.
Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to display all the backlinks to the users. A search with the link: operator often reveals most of a page's backlinks to screen. Although they display most of the backlinks, it does not mean that they value them as much as in Google. Unfortunately, backlinks are not as important as they are in Yahoo than in Google.
Yahoo has introduced a site explorer interface to aid the webmasters in locating the backlinks and other useful information. Yahoo also provides one of the best API for the web masters' usage.
MSN also offers to display all the backlinks to the user with the link: operator query. The backlinks update in MSN also seems to be the most updated among all the three search engines. It may seems that MSN focus a lot on backlinks but this is usually not the case. Backlinks are not as important as keyword domain in MSN's point of view.
In conclusion, Google is the only search engine that put a lot of focus on backlinks in their ranking formula and since they are the most popular search engine, backlinks are important for every website. It is recommended to use Yahoo or MSN to check for backlinks because they show a more complete listing.