If you don’t have a WebmasterTools account, you need to learn about it and use it. WebmasterTools gives you a glimpse into your website through the eyes of Google. It also has some great tools to help make your site seo efficient.

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SEO Power Suite

Link Assistant offer a range of software products designed to help you handle a variety of SEO tasks from link building to monitoring your search engine ranking. All and all it is a great package. The programs tend to take a very long time to open, but once running it speeds through tasks like lightening.

You can try SEO PowerSuite for free .

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We all know that linking is a major factor in your search engine ranking.  Here is a glimpse of how Google treats links on your page.  Matt Cutts is specifically talking about footer links in this video but is basically saying that editorial links get a stronger value than non-editorial links.  So links in the body copy rather than primary and secondary navigational links are much better.

Remember that when building your onpage editorial links, refrain from using generic anchor text such as, click here – read more – download, and use descriptive anchor text such as, learn about applying red rivots to your bunny – read our Herculean strength improver whitepaper.  Before you choose your anchor text…  do a little keyword research and pick solid keywords.

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This is a great video of Matt Cutts from Google talking about what you can do to make your blog rank better in search engines. How you can use keywords to find niches and get traffic, wordpress plugins used by Matt Cutts and more.

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UPDATE — Well not long after I posted this blog, the page finally got indexed in Google. Not in Yahoo or Bing. So we know the page got indexed from the Yahoo Profile blog. After running search engine spider simulators on the Yahoo answers pages and the Yahoo profile page, I am quite certain that there is a clear path for the engines to get back to our desired websites.
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Well, it is almost certain that you can no loger get any link love from Answers.Yahoo.com.  This isn’t to say it is a complete loss, you can still get some decent direct traffic but there doesn’t seem to be a way to get anything from them anymore.

My Answers.Yahoo.com Test…

So, I was hoping that I could use an entry that would eventually trickle down to the Yahoo Profile Blog…  which would link to the target website. So the order would look like this:

1. Answer questions…  each answered question includes a link to your Yahoo Answers profile.
2. Answers Profile is set to include link to Yahoo Profile.
3. Yahoo Profile has blog entry.
4. Blog Entry has link pointing back to target page.

I setup a dummy page on this site over three weeks ago with a link from a Yahoo blog pointing to it.  My logic was that the Yahoo Answers would help the blog get crawled with would in turn get my dummy pages crawled and indexed.

I know it is only three weeks but I am still posting the results as I think three weeks should be at least long enough to get put into the index.

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So you want to know a little bit about Search Engine Optimization? Here is a very basic primer.

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Commenting on blogs is a great way to build links back to your website (backlinks). It is also a great way to develop a following for your own blog and website. To do this, it is important to take some consideration in commenting on blogs.
A successful comment will:
1. Build Attention
2. Build Backlinks
3. Build Brand Affinity
Your blog comment should be insightful enough to build attention from other readers and the owner of the blog itself. It is important to try and be the first person (or top ten) to comment on the blog. Past that, the comments are less noticed. Time is also a factor. It is most effective to post on recent blog posts. Twitter can be an excellent tool for this.
Most blogs will allow you a little link love. With your comment, you are permitted to offer a link back to your website. Take advantage of this. With your comment, add a link to your blog/website home page or better, a link to a page on your blog or website that is relevant to the topic you are commenting on.
Building Brand Affinity is always an important consideration. When posting, be respectful, knowledgeable and most of all, be helpful. Mention your company even if only in closing as part of your signature.

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There are three things you have to concern yourself with when you are looking int improving your search engine optimization: Content, Structure, Linking.

Content- Content is what you put on your pages. Keep each page focused to one main idea. That idea should be the key phrase you are looking to target. Do some keyword research to see how often your key term is searched. Google has a good free keyword tool.

Structure- It is very important that search engines can crawl your website.  Crawling can be affected by how you code the pages.  You also have to be careful about headings.  Make sure you are using 301 redirects over 302 redirects. WebConfs has some great tools including a Search Engine Spider Simulator and a Header Checker.

Link Building- This is one of the most important aspects of building website traffic.  Think of a link pointing to your site as a vote.  The more you have the better.  Not all votes are equal but for now, just worry about getting links.  Joing forums that are related to your website.  Create a Twitter account and search on industry terms.  This will help you find blogs related to your website that you can post on.  Most of these blogs will allow you a link back to your website.  A great way to build links is through press releases (PR News Wire and PR Web can distribute them for a fee).  Use your imagination and check your competitors to see who is linking to them.  You can use Yahoo to do that by typing in your query like this: linkdomain:www.site.com -site:www.site.com.

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LinkedIn offers some excellent opportunities to build links back to your website if done properly. This tutorial will help you set up your linkedin.com profile for maximum search engine optimization benefit.

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