Optimizing for three search engines at the same time is not an easy task. There were times, when the SEO community was inclined to think that the algorithm of Yahoo! was on deliberately just the opposite to the Google algorithm because pages that ranked high in Google did not do so well in Yahoo! and vice versa. The attempt to optimize a site to appeal to both search engines usually lead to being kicked out of the top of both of them.

Although there is no doubt that the algorithms of the two search engines are different, since both are constantly changing, none of them is made publicly available by its authors and the details about how each of the algorithms function are obtained by speculation based on probe-trial tests for particular keywords, it is not possible to say for certain what exactly is different. What is more, having in mind the frequency with which algorithms are changed, it is not possible to react to every slight change, even if algorithms’ details were known officially. But knowing some basic differences between the two does help to get better ranking. A nice visual representation of the differences in positioning between Yahoo! and Google gives the Yahoo vs Google tool.

The Yahoo! Algorithm - Differences With Google

Like all search engines, Yahoo! too spiders the pages on the Web, indexes them in its database and later performs various mathematical operations to produce the pages with the search results. Yahoo! Slurp (the Yahoo! spiderbot) is the the second most active spider crawler on the Web. Yahoo! Slurp is not different from the other bots and if your page misses important elements of the SEO mix that make it not spiderable, then it hardly makes a difference which algorithm will be used because you will never get to a top position. (You may want to try the Search Engine Spider Simulator and check what of your pages is spiderable).

Yahoo! Slurp might be even more active than Googlebot because occasionally there are more pages in the Yahoo! index than in Google. Another alleged difference between Yahoo! and Google is the sandbox (putting the sites “on hold” for some time till they appear in search results). Google’s sandbox is deeper, so if you have made recent changes to your site, you might have to wait a month or two (shorter for Yahoo! and longer for Google) till these changes are reflected in the search results.

With new major changes in the Google algorithm under way (the so-called “BigDaddy” Infrastructure expected to be fully launched in March-April 2006) it’s hard to tell if the same SEO tactics will be hot on Google in two months’ time. One of the supposed changes is the decrease in weight of links. If this happens, a major difference between Yahoo! and Google will be eliminated because as of today Google places more importance on factors such as backlinks, while Yahoo! sticks more to onpage factors, like keyword density in the title, the URL, and the headings.

Of all the differences between Yahoo! and Google, the way keywords in the title and in the URL are treated is the most important. If you have the keyword in these two places, then you can expect a top 10 place in Yahoo!. But beware – a title and an URL cannot be unlimited and technically you can place no more than 3 or 4 keywords there. Also, it matters if the keyword in the title and in the URL is in a basic form or if it is a derivative – e.g. when searching for “cat”, URLs with “catwalk” will also be displayed in Yahoo! but most likely in the second 100 results, while URLs with “cat” only are quite near to the top.

Since Yahoo! is first a directory for submissions and then a search engine (with Google it’s just the opposite), a site, which has the keyword in the category it is listed under, stands a better chance to be in the beginning of the search results. With Google this is not that important. For Yahoo! keywords in filenames also score well, while for Google this is not a factor of exceptional importance.

But the major difference is keyword density. The higher the density, the higher the positioning with Yahoo! But beware – some of the keyword-rich sites on Yahoo! can with no difficulty fall into the keyword-stuffed category for Google, so if you attempt to score well on Yahoo! (with keyword density above 7-8%), you risk to be banned by Google!

Yahoo! WebRank

Following Google’s example, Yahoo! introduced a Web toolbar that collects anonymous statistics about which sites users browse, thus way getting an aggregated value (from 0 to 10) of how popular a given site is. The higher the value, the more popular a site is and the more valuable the backlinks from it are.

Although WebRank and positioning in the search results are not directly correlated, there is a dependency between them – sites with high WebRank tend to position higher than comparable sites with lower WebRank and the WebRanks of the top 20-30 results for a given keyword are most often above 5.00 on average.

The practical value of WebRank as a measure of success is often discussed in SEO communities and the general opinion is that this is not the most relevant metrics. However, one of the benefits of WebRank is that it alerts Yahoo! Slurp that a new page has appeared, thus inviting it to spider it, if it is not already in the Yahoo! Search index.

When Yahoo! toolbar was launched in 2004, it had an icon that showed the WebRank of the page that is currently open in the browser. Later this feature has been removed but still there are tools on the Web that allow to check the WebRank of a particular page. For instance, this tool allows to check the WebRanks of a whole bunch of pages at a time.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can’t go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In ‘Introduction to Sitemaps‘, Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

Why Use a Sitemap

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.

Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).

If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.

Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.

Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.

Generating and Submitting the Sitemap

The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.

Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.

The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.

After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.

Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don’t post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

SEO experts often forget that there are three major search engines. While there is no doubt that Google is the number one with the most searches and Yahoo! manages to get about a quarter of the market, MSN has not retired yet. It holds about 10-15 percent of the searches (according to some sources even less – about 5%) but it has a loyal audience that can’t be reached through the other two major search engines, so if you plan a professional SEO campaign, you can’t afford to skip MSN. In a sense getting high rankings in MSN is similar to getting high rankings for less popular keywords – because competition is not that tough you might be able to get enough visitors from MSN only in comparison to the case when you have optimized for a more popular search engine.

Although optimizing for MSN is different from optimizing for Google and Yahoo!, there are still common rules that will help you to rank high in any search engine. As a rule, if you rank well in Google, chances are that you will rank well in Yahoo! (if you are interested in the tips and tricks for optimizing for Yahoo!, you want to have a look at the Optimizing for Yahoo! Article) and MSN as well. The opposite is not true, however. If you rank well in MSN, there is no guarantee that you’ll do the same in Google. So, when you optimize for MSN, keep an eye on your Google ranking as well. It’s no good to top MSN and be nowhere in Google (the opposite is more acceptable, if you need to make the choice).

But why is this so? The answer is simple - the MSN algorithm is different and that is why, even if the same pages were indexed, the search results will vary.

The MSN Algorithm

As already mentioned, it is the different MSN algorithm that leads to such drastic results in ranking. Otherwise, MSN, like all search engines, first spiders the pages on the Web, then indexes them in its database and after that applies the algorithm to generate the pages with the search results. So, the first step in optimizing for MSN is the same as for the other search engines – to have a spiderable site. (Have a look at Search Engine Spider Simulator to see how spiders see your site). If your site is not spiderable, then you don’t have even a hypothetical chance to top the search results.

There is quite a lot of speculation about the MSN algorithm. Looking at the search results MSN delivers, it is obvious that its search algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google’s, or even Yahoo!’s and many SEO experts agree that the MSN search algorithm is years behind its competitors. So, what can you do in this case? Optimize as you did for Google a couple of years ago? You are not far from the truth, though actually is is not that simple.

One of the most important differences is that MSN still relies heavily on metatags, as explained below. None of the other major search engines uses metatags that heavily anymore. It is obvious that metatags give SEO experts a great opportunity for manipulating search results. Maybe metatags are the main reason for the inaccurate search results that MSN often produces.

The second most important difference between MSN and the other major search engines is their approach to keywords. Well, for MSN keywords are very, very important, too, but unlike Google, for MSN onpage factors are dominating, while offpage factors (like backlinks for example), are still of minor importance. Well, it is a safe bet that the importance of backlinks will be changed in the future but for now they are not a primary factor for high rankings.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

It is hardly surprising that keywords are the most important item for MSN. What is surprising is that MSN relies too much on them. It is very easy to fool MSN – just artificially inflate your keyword density, put a couple of keywords in file names (and even better – in domain names) and around the top of the page and you are almost done for MSN. But if you do the above-mentioned black hat practices, your joy of topping MSN will not last long because, unless you provide separate pages that are optimized for Google, your stuffed pages might pretty well get you banned from Google. If you decide to have separate pages for Google and MSN, first, it it hardly worth the trouble, and second, the risk of duplicate content penalty can’t be ignored.

So, what is the catch? The catch is that if you try to polish your site for MSN and stuff it with keywords, this might get you into trouble with Google, which certainly is worse than not ranking well in MSN. But if you optimize wisely, it is more likely than not that you will rank decently in Google and perform well in Yahoo! and MSN as well.

Metatags

Having meaningful metatags never hurts but with MSN this is even more important because its algorithm still uses them as a primary factor in calculating search results. Having well-written (not stuffed) metatags will help you with MSN and some other minor search engines, while at the same time well-written metatags will not get you banned from Google.

The Description metatag is very important:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Place your description here” />

MSNBot reads its content and based on that (in addition to keywords found on page) judges how to classify your site. So if you leave this tag empty (i.e. CONTENT=””), you have missed a vital chance to be noticed by MSN. There is no evidence that MSN uses the other metatags in its algorithm that is why leaving the Description metatag empty is even more unforgivable.

The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for is the first and crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your client’s) money and time. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to increase your chances of success, additional research is never too much, especially when its results will save you the shots in the dark.

Dreaming High - Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?

After you have made a long and detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have chosen popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have chosen keywords for which top positioning is achievable with reasonable effort. If you have many competitors for the keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every SEO knows, if you can’t be on the first page (or on the second and in the worst case on the third one) of the organic search results, you’d better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those particular words is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can’t count on that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the good results?

You can feel discouraged that all lucrative keywords are already occupied but it is too early to give up. Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition. The SEO experts from Blackwood Productions confirm that it is possible with less effort and within budget to achieve much better results with low-volume search keywords than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.

Get Down to Earth

The best way to estimate how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword is by using the appropriate tools. If you search the Web, you will see several keyword difficulty tools. Choose a couple of them, for instance Seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, Cached’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and Seomoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and off we go. The idea behind choosing multiple tools is not that you have so much free time that you need to find a way to waste it. If you choose only one tool, you will finish your research faster but having in mind the different results that each tool gives, you’d better double check before you start the optimization itself. The Seomoz’s tool is a kind of complicated and if you want to use it you need to make several registrations but it is worth the trouble (and the patience - while you wait for the results to be calculated).

You may also want to check for several keywords or keyword phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance, if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly with credits and loans, and some of your keywords are finance, money, credit, loan, and mortgage, running a check with the seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool produces results like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the idea): finance - 89%, money - 76% credit - 74% loan - 66% mortgage - 65%.

It seems that the keyword finance is very tough and since your site is targeted at credits and loans and not on stock exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance, there is no need to cry over the fact that it is very difficult to compete for the finance keyword.

The results were similar with the second tool, though it does not give percentages but uses a scale starting from Very Easy to Very Difficult. I did not check all the results with the third tool, because it seems that the seomoz report on keyword difficulty for a particular word needs ages to be compiled but the results were similar, so it becomes clear that it is more feasible to optimize for mortgage and loan, rather than for the broader term finance.

You may want to bookmark some of these tools for future use as well. They will be very useful to monitor possible changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have optimized your site for the keywords you have selected, occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you are already optimizing for because the percentages are changing over time and if you discover that the competition for your keywords has increased, make some more efforts to retain the gained positions.

If you’ve read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you’ve come across the term “backlink” at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine’s assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can’t build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don’t practice black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain: interlinking sites doesn’t help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won’t hurt you.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.

Another tool to help you with your link building campaign is the Backlink Builder Tool. It is not enough just to have a large number of inbound links pointing to your site. Rather, you need to have a large number of QUALITY inbound links. This tool searches for websites that have a related theme to your website which are likely to add your link to their website. You specify a particular keyword or keyword phrase, and then the tool seeks out related sites for you. This helps to simplify your backlink building efforts by helping you create quality, relevant backlinks to your site, and making the job easier in the process.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link’s anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like “click here” which probably won’t relate in any way to your website, using the words “Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten” is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink. A good tool for helping you find your backlinks and what text is being used to link to your site is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something incorporating relevant keywords. This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.