By Rune Risom

A great deal of effort and time can go into improv­ing a website’s rank in search engines, with a major­ity of the tasks poten­tially tak­ing days or weeks depend­ing on the size and nature of the pages in ques­tion. These large, mon­u­men­tal tasks are a nec­es­sary part of any SEO plan, but there are also sev­eral smaller, more com­pact tasks that you can pre­form for an hour a day both dur­ing and after your site’s SEO over­haul that can cause a large jump in your page’s rank on the results pages of sev­eral search engines out there.

All of these tasks actu­ally deal with ‘off the page’ fac­tors, and focus pri­mar­ily on inbound links and gen­er­at­ing traf­fic. Since that’s the goal of all SEO cam­paigns, these tasks are a nat­ural fit into any plan to reach it.

One of these ‘hour a day’ tasks is con­tact­ing other web­sites request­ing inbound links. In return, there could be some form of pay­ment nego­ti­ated or you could return the favor, link­ing their site from yours. While link swap­ping can be use­ful, it should be known that they can have a neg­a­tive effect if overused. This is thanks to spam­mers abus­ing this method of traf­fic gen­er­a­tion in the early days of the Inter­net. Trad­ing links with a site known by search engines can also have a neg­a­tive impact on your SEO efforts, but such sites are usu­ally very easy to rec­og­nize. As long as you pay atten­tion to who you’re deal­ing with, this poten­tial pit­fall can be eas­ily avoided.

It is also worth men­tion­ing that inbound links from sites in the same field of busi­ness or study as yours can boost your rank­ings the most, as search engines inter­pret such links as a ‘vote of con­fi­dence’ from knowl­edge­able sources. Hav­ing a site about physics and the mate­r­ial laws of the uni­verse link to your site about alter­na­tive can­cer treat­ments would not ben­e­fit you much, or vice versa.

Hav­ing your web­site listed in sev­eral direc­to­ries is also a good idea, as direc­tory links can increase traf­fic and raise you search engine rank fairly quickly. With direc­to­ries avail­able on the Web for every sub­ject imag­in­able today, there is no short­age of poten­tial inbound links you can gen­er­ate with a lit­tle effort an hour a day.

Get­ting blogs to link to your web­site is also a task that can be per­formed briefly each day. This task, like the oth­ers men­tioned above, can bring rich reward — even more so if the blog reg­u­larly cov­ers sub­jects related to your website.

These sim­ple tasks that can be per­formed briefly each day are a nat­ural fit into almost any sched­ule, and the poten­tial ben­e­fits such tasks have make them worth the time. Not only are such tasks an excel­lent use of time and money, but the con­tin­u­ing great results will put you in a pos­i­tive light in terms of how your boss will look at you.

About the Author:

About the author: Rune Risom, com­mited SEO inno­va­tor from free seo ser­vice SEOsupporter.com. Also behind web direc­to­ries like BestLinksAround.com and GuideToTheWeb.net where you can sub­mit free links.

By Win­son Yeung

The links that are incom­ing to your web­site or web page are called Seo back­links and will give you a good idea what kind of inter­est you are gen­er­at­ing. Search engine opti­miza­tion mea­sures the num­ber of back­links to gauge the pop­u­lar­ity. Besides the search engine opti­miza­tion, the web­site back links will give you a great insight into who is vis­it­ing the web­site and can be of great value.

Any link that a direc­tory, top-level domain or web­site can receive is a back­link from another area that is very sim­i­lar. Some call back­links inbound links, inlinks, or inward links. They also help a search engine deter­mine the search engine rank­ing of a website.

The own­ers of the web­sites will nat­u­rally want to increase the num­ber of back­links going into their web­site and will look for all dif­fer­ent tech­niques. Some are free and avail­able to every­one, while some oth­ers will require a good deal of plan­ning and mar­ket­ing. ‘Linkbait­ing’ is a good exam­ple of this. A great story that will attract a lot of atten­tion would be ‘linkbait­ing’ and other web­sites will be anx­ious to link to that site to take advan­tage of the ‘bait­ing’ website’s attention.

Search engines have a built in mech­a­nism they employ to record the num­ber of back­links that was recorded for a cer­tain web­site. By going to Google and search­ing with ‘link.’ in front of the web­site name it will tell you the num­ber of pages that are point­ing to the web­site. Yahoo!‘s Site Explorer is the same pro­gram and will actu­ally show more than Google. Besides these pro­grams, some web­site soft­ware will track their own backlinks.

Some ways that peo­ple go about get­ting back links that are high qual­ity to their web­site are sub­mit­ting arti­cles, com­ment­ing on blogs and even post­ing on some blogs. Some peo­ple think these ways are the best way to raise their stand­ing on the search engines. Other peo­ple will sub­mit their web­site to as many Inter­net direc­to­ries they can find. This is a good way but one neg­a­tive about it is that it can take quite a while to have a new web­site included.

Build­ing back links now is very easy and using an advent called Web 2.0 is even eas­ier. Gain­ing the back­links is no longer a chore and the owner can meet peo­ple and have fun while doing it. Try­ing new strate­gies will always pay off in the long run and you may learn quite a bit in the process.

About the Author:

Visit my web­site on link build­ing ser­vice that builds high author­ity incom­ing links to improve your search engine rank­ing. You might also want to check out this free back­link checker.