Link-building is a famous SEO technique of attaining links from external websites to your own to improve both direct referrals (people clicking on the links) and search engine ranking. There are both paid and non-paid links.

Importance of Link Building in SEO/Online Marketing

Link building technique is used for increasing the visibility and popularity of a product/service on internet by displaying the links of its website on other websites. The main purpose of linking a website (the targeted website) to other sites is to direct the visitors of those websites to the targeted website. This way it generates more visibility and more traffic.
Also, the website links on other sites show the search engine robots that the respective website is legitimate and deserves attention.
However, to actually gain from link building strategies, the links should be built with websites relevant to your own site. If the link building website is not related to your website, search engines consider it as spam or a black hat SEO.

Types of Link Building

One way Link building: It is a one way process where one site gets a link on another website due to the quality and usability purpose. The website whose link is posted need not provide exchange link of the site on which it is posted.

Reciprocal Link Building: It is a two way process where links are exchanged between two websites on one to one basis.
Three Way Link Exchange: It is a one way link exchange between three websites. Example- site A gives link to site B, site B to site C & site C to site A.

As we all know link building is one on the main strategies for online marketing a website through SEO process. This SEO technique of attaining links from external websites to your own site is an easy and faster way to improve direct traffic and search engine ranking.
There are different ways to get back-links. They are both paid and non-paid link exchange. Since SEO is a long-run process and demands stability, building links from your own resources is considered as the soundest practice by the SEO experts. The webmasters prefer blog posting to get relevant, reliable and cost-effective links for their websites.
How blogging work as an efficient link building technique?
Blog writing is a simple way to write about the industry you are working in, its new developments and updations. This way the blogs are relevant to your website and provide relevant links. We all know irrelevant link exchange is considered as a black hat SEO practice which may lead to spam of the website by the search engines. Hence, link building through self written blogs eliminates the chances of spamming.
Secondly, blogs are simple way of writings to express your thoughts or information that you would like to share with others online. Thus, they need to be reader-friendly only. Expert content writers may not be required for this if the webmasters are good enough to express their views in writing and has the capability of using relevant keywords appropriately for hyperlinking.

Internet Forums are customary in developed countries. Japan is leading the world with over 2 million posts daily on the forum named ‘2 Channel’. Even China has millions of posts per day on the forums like Tianya Club.
Webmasters using Internet Forums to promote their websites
The rising popularity of internet forums has aroused the interest of the webmasters to use them as an internet marketing strategy. The SEOs are using internet forums to put their links in forum websites and get additional backlinks through them.
How backlinks are obtained through internet forum postings?
Internet Forum websites usually allow the regular posters posting comments or starting threads to use signatures. Signatures give the forum members to update their website links with their names. Hence, whenever a comment or thread is posted, the website link is displayed along with the name of the member. This way webmasters obtain backlinks for the website that helps in SEO (internet marketing).
How to write on internet forums?
Internet Forums postings and comments are easy to write. It need not be an official language. All you need to do is to register yourself as a member of the forum.

Popular internet forums

www.digitalpoint.com
www.lonelyplanet.com
www.travelforum.org
www.travelblog.org/Forum/
www.tripadvisor.com

One of the great problems that many online business companies are facing is –how to cope up with the changing keywords. For example, if a tour website containing few information pages and a blog page is focused on a niche keyword, say Golden Triangle Tour, and has been ranking well on search engines, how it should maintain high rank on the new keywords being searched such as Green Triangle Tour with Khajuraho.
A few may think to change the page titles, URLs, domain name etc. But this way the website may lose the SERP on the existing keywords. Thus, changing domain names and existing titles may place in a dicey position.
The best way to cope with the changing keywords is adding new content with new keywords or starting a new website and maintains both the websites simultaneously.

Facebook has now 500 million people globe-wide actively using it to stay connected with their friends, family and the world as whole. Launched in the year 2004, Facebook has now become the pioneer social networking site. Isn’t this astounding, it took 4 years for Facebook to get 100 million members and 2.5 years only to reach 500 million users.

No rivals anymore for Facebook
After reaching 500 million registered users Facebook is now left with no credible rivals. Just have a look at the status of the other social networking sites.
• Twitter-75 million users till date
• Orkut- now allures Brazilians only
• LinkedIn- more a business networking site
• Flickr- membership rate is falling

So what are the webmasters waiting for? Indian SEOs have already started using Facebook for brand promotion and are reaching the targeted audience in a more convenient and faster way.

A four-day SEO training session by the world renowned webmaster, Bruce Clay, will be observed in India from August 03 to August 06 this year. Just a few couple of days left for the training. The web freaks and webmasters in India have already started the countdown to attend the training by Bruce Clay, an international consultant, speaker and instructor for search engine optimization.
This SEO training program is based on decades of research on search engines and successful search engine optimization by Bruce Clay. It will definitely be a great honor for the audience to have a face to face discussion on SEO principles, strategies and techniques with the master of SEO, Bruce Clay.
This SEO training event by Bruce Clay will be of great benefit for the companies, organizations and individuals endeavoring to drive more targeted traffic to their websites. The targeted audience includes anyone working with search engines or involved in SEM, be it be IT managers, marketing consultants, marketing directors or webmasters.
Venue: The Palms Town and Country Club, Gurgaon, India
Event Organizer: Bruce Clay India

Image Optimization is the Step 5 in SEO.

Optimizing images for online marketing is a tricky business. It endeavors to make images crawler friendly.

Image Optimization involves:
• Image Renaming
• Image Alt Tag Optimization
• Image Title Tag Optimization

Image Renaming: Image Renaming means to give a unique name to your image which describes the image and its relevancy with the web page.

Image Alt Tag Optimization: Image Alt (Alternative) Tag tells what a .gif or .jpg is. It is a quick way to describe your image. ALT tags filled with keywords boost the keyword frequency and help in achieving better rankings.

e.g : <img src=”images/services-pic.jpg” alt=”India Tour ” width=”100″ height=”78″ />

The title attribute on tags is recognized by most modern browsers. It is the text visible when the mouse hovers over an image. Image title is also called a “tooltip”.

Step 4 of SEO deals in regulating the behavior of the search engine crawlers.
The Robot .txt file is an important tool for site management and implementing site level restrictions specially when you have    e commerce site for SEO .

Functions of Robot.txt files

• To allow/disallow the search spider to crawl any particular files, directory and sub-directory.
• To hide security based information such as credit card information, any important business related data and so on.
• To conceal any unused data or any part of a website which is under-development
Robot.txt Files through Examples

Example 1:

Sitemap: hhtp://www.xyz.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The “User-agent: *” means this section applies to all robots. The “Disallow: /” tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.

Example 2:

Sitemap: hhtp://www.xyz.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /junk/

Sitemap: http://www.xyz.com/robots.txt
User-agent: google-bot

Disallow: /junk/

This way the webmasters instruct the web robots-which information to crawl or which not to crawl.

For all the webmasters, a few months ago there was a shocking news by Google. Google has officially announced that Meta Keywords will not be considered by them anymore for assigning ranks to a web pages or creating any search results based on Meta Keywords.


Reason for not considering Meta Keywords for creating search results
It was constantly found webmasters easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw traffic to their web page. In September 2009, Google finally announced that they will no longer take keywords into account. Google now crawl keywords from the page copy itself.

Why webmasters are still making/using Meta Keywords for SEO?
Though Google and a few other search engines have stopped considering Meta keywords, yet many search engines like Yahoo, Bing etc are still using them to generate search results.

Google is the most popular search engine but not the only search engine. Thus, webmasters still have the scope of online marketing through meta keywords.

(Meaning and Types of Meta Tags)

Before we start up with the Meta Tag Generation-Step 3 in SEO, let’s first understand the meaning of Meta Tag.

MEANING OF META TAGS

Meta Tags, in very simple words, mean special markups/indicators which tell the search engine crawler the purpose of creating the respective web page and provides him with detailed information about the respective web page.

Thus, the motive of creating Meta Tags is:
•    Telling the crawler-Why the page is created?
•    Giving related information about the respective web page

Now, let’s move ahead on the types of Meta Tags.

TYPES OF META TAGS

•    Title Tag: Meta Title Tag is the title of the web page created.
•   Meta Description: Meta Description describes the Meta Title.
•    Meta Keywords: Meta Keywords are the targeted words on phrases on which you desire to upbring your website for search results.
•   Meta Robots: How you want the crawler to treat your web page?
•    Meta Author Name: Name of the author/writer of the web page.

There are other meta tags as well. But these are the most common meta tags.  These basic meta tag elements help to understand thoroughly the contribution of meta tags  in SEO.