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With millions of websites, offering the same business or service, ,the Internet is one large business directory. Amidst this infinite number of options, consumers are driven to the same sites over and over again. These sites are not more successful because they offer a better service or a better price, they are successful because they are unique. Having a unique website will brand your business as THE one to visit and drive your sales through the roof.

A unique website offers the consumer a new and fresh look at a business or service they are already familiar with. Fresh colors, cool interactive features and a definitive business branding will certainly set one website apart from another.

The look of a website can instantly turn a customer on to the offerings or have them browsing for another option. Websites need to look unique and original in order to tame the consumer beast. Bright colors, high resolution pictures and a plethora of information are at the heart of a unique website that will certainly be branded by consumers as the place to stop. This is truly important for websites with a lot of Internet competition. A website needs to be pleasing to the eye, yet stop a consumer in their tracks. This color edge is one of the easiest ways to set a website apart from others in the same genre.

Features, functions and gadgets are great ways to bring a fresh and fun felling to any website. The online consumer wants to be dazzled with the nature of information they can achieve from a website. These interactive tools and features capture the attention of the consumer and hold it in place. Thus giving the website that unique edge.
If a consumer sees a fantastic website that offers much information but little or no interaction, it will blend in with thee millions of other Internet websites. The name of the game is to be the one website the consumer remembers. Giving them a reason to return to your website via unique features and tools, is the perfect way to be remembered.

Business branding online is a different monster than business branding on land. The Internet is full of bits and pieces of information directly related to a specific business. The unique website will offer all of this information in one website. Collecting and displaying informative content, teaching content, related content and sales content together in one website, will brand the website as on all inclusive stop for the consumer. Thus branding the website as the perfect stop for a unique experience.

Websites are created and die everyday on the Internet. A unique website, on the other hand, will be a long lasting venture sure to succeed. Defining a website as unique is important for the Internet consumer simply due to the wealth of information literally at their fingertips. Give the consumer a fresh look, interactive tools and a business that is branded and a unique website will be born and live for a long time.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a byword among webmasters. Businesses can only prosper if they have customers and the latter usually arrive via the search engines. Optimizing our websites for search engines is therefore indispensable if we are serious about making money online.

After a week or two installing and tweaking and a few (or a thousand) dollars poorer, we’ve finally have a website ready for our content. Then, WHAM! We run into this search engine optimization stuff and realize our real work has only begun. Experts make search engine optimization sound like rocket science and, as a consequence, there is a flourishing web industry for eBooks peddling optimization “secrets.”

Fact is, the only secret about SEO is the algorithm used by the search engines in indexing content. It’s not a science either, more like 90% informed guesswork and 10% luck. Most regular guys can learn and do SEO basics in 24 hours. Fundamentally, Techniques are grouped into on-page and off-page SEO.

On Page SEO

On-page SEO is what we do in our websites. It usually revolves around the concept of keywords, which are simply the words mostly used by surfers to search for something using the SEs. We need to choose our keywords carefully.

As an illustration, both “search engine optimization” and “SEO“ are keywords. Wordtracker says that there were 24,416 searches for the former and 2,370 for the latter the past month. We want this page to rank high for “search engine optimization” so we spelled it out in the first two paragraphs. If possible, always spell out acronyms as almost every word is a keyword.

How do we use keywords for optimization? First, we use them judiciously in our content. Second, we put them in our meta tags and description. Third, we put them in the titles where they are automatically enclosed in header tags.

Fortunately, there are many plugins to popular content management systems that will enhance our SEO without us learning to code. Simple search for SEO and sitemap in the plugins directory.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is what matters most when it comes to page ranking. It is about getting quality and relevant inbound links or links from other sites to ours. How do we go about this? First, we submit our sites to the major search engines and directories. Second, we can request reciprocal links from fellow webmasters. Third, we can join forums, social networks, and blogs where we can place links back to our sites. Fourth, we can fill our site with quality and authoritative content so others will naturally link to our pages.

Please remember it’s called a web because all sites are ultimately linked together. A high PR site can also pull up our rank so we have to exchange links with those of our own level or higher than us. We also have to be careful linking (outbound) to bad sites like those selling drugs and porn as it can hurt our PR.

It didn’t even take us 15 minutes to read this article and we already have a fair idea of what SEO is and how we can implement it. We should focus more on delivering fresh quality content as both the SEs and visitors will love us for them and that’s the best SEO technique there is.

The Importance of Good Anchor Text in SEO

Too many webmasters think they can rank well in search engines just by buying a large number of links to their web site. This is simply not true, because search engines also evaluate the anchor text of the links. Getting a large number of links with the same non-optimized anchor text has limited traffic potential compared to using anchor text effectively.

The most common anchor text found in links to a web site is generally the name of the site. The effect of such links to search engine ranking depends on the name of the site. If site name is well optimized for keywords, such links may be good for search engine optimization. Often this is, however, not the case, and links with other, more descriptive anchor texts would have a much greater effect.

Adding Search Terms

No web site should target only one keyword, or key phrase in search engines. Having the site rank well for multiple keywords may multiply the organic traffic. Anchor text in inbound links is a good way to help search engine ranking for secondary keywords, which you will not want to make more prominent on-site.

Particularly in Google, pages may rank quite well for anchor text keywords, even if the page did not feature the term at all. An example of this are the Google bombs, where pages about George Bush have ranked for “dumb motherfucker”, and Microsoft at one time ranked for “more evil than satan himself”. The same technique can be brought to SEO use too.

Anchor Text with Long Tail Keywords

If a page has a large number of inbound links with the same keyword as the anchor text, if will rank high for the term. It is especially easy to use this technique with low competition search terms, where there is no clear best page to show for the term yet. Long tail keywords - targeted key phrases with multiple words - are just these kinds of keywords, as they have little competition.

Researching long tail keywords relating to your web site content, and acquiring links with those phrases as the anchor text can increase the number of terms your site can be found with. By getting ranked for multiple such long tail keywords, a web site can get a large total number of visitors for search engines. The best part of it is that it also works with new web sites, and sites with relatively little backlinks.

A webmaster always dreams that his site should rank high on Search Engines so that he can get as many natural visitors through search engines as possible. Also wants his site to get high Google Page Rank which shows the reputation of a site according to Google.

But it’s not an easy task. You have to do a lot of work – so called Search Engine Optimization – to get better Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics include Off-page and On-Page optimization.
On-Page Optimization includes some of the ways like:

1. Creating Meta - Tags
2. Writing Unique Content
3. Keyword optimization
4. Image Alt Tags
5. Using header tags (H1, H2), bold and italic keywords.

Off-Page Optimization means building incoming links (with relevant anchor texts) for your website. This is also a way to increase a site’s Google Page Rank (PR). Also, Off-Page SEO has got more importance than On-page SEO.

Link building can be of different types:

1 - Oneway links – Your link is placed on someone else’s site.

2 - Reciprocal/Two way link exchange – Both site owners agree to place each others link

3 - Three way link exchange – E.g. site A links to site B , site B to site C and site C to site A.. So indirectly it’s a way to fool search engines.

But out of all the above ways, building One-way links pointing to your site is the best part of SEO. Reciprocal links are not considered SEO friendly.

Now - What are the ways of Building One way links?

You can either get natural backlinks or have to buy them. If your site provides useful, unique and interesting content to the vistors, or if the site is offering some tools, free/paid stuffs etc., then webmaster may give reference to your site on their blog, forum or site. But that may be a hard part for some lazy webmasters.

The other way is buying links from other sites. You can either get monthly / yearly links or permanent link placements.

Various sources of buying links:

1. Directory submissions – you can submit your link on a web directory for a small review fee.
2. From various Text-link selling sites like Text-Link-Ads, TextLinkBrokers and so on – But they are a costly option.
3. You can get permanent contextual links by buying blog post reviews from PayPerPost , ReviewMe , Contextual@v7n, SponsoredReviews etc.

Directory Submission – I would like to give emphasis on directory submission as a way of link building.

The advantages of directory submission are :

* Cheap price – Most of the directories offer permanent or yearly link placement at a price ranging from $0 (free directories) to $75 .
* Submitting a listing with Anchor text, Meta Tags, Meta Keywords and Description. Also, many of the directories offer SEO friendly url’s to a listings detail page – All these add up to give the maximum SEO benefit.

There are lots of directories coming up day after day. But not all are worth submitting. You have to do some research to find the best directory..

Points to consider before getting directory links :

* What’s the Page Rank of the category where your link will get listed ?
* What’s the Page Strength of a directory ?
* Is the directory SEO friendly or not ? What’s the url structure? Also check that your links are not in the “nofollow” tags – Nofollow links are not crawled by Search engines and so no SEO value.
* Number of links on a particular page – Should not be greater than 20.
* Domain Age – Check that the directory is not built on a recently expired domain name.

Now there are two types of directories – Free and Paid.

Other than Dmoz , its hard to find a quality free directory. Most of the free directories (which keep on popping every day) are not strong enough, don’t have high category PR, contain spammy links, not well-categorized, not promoted and not well-managed (due to 100s of submissions per day). You may have to wait for years to get your site approved on Dmoz unless it’s a high quality site.

So it’s always better to spend some bucks by submitting to premium/paid strong directories. If you meet submission guidelines of the directory, in most instances, your site will get approved within 48 hours.

Some of the strong, high PR and quality directories worth submitting are :

Aviva Directory

Alive Directory

Directory Mix

DirectoryDump

bqtm

So start your link building campaign now and achieve high Rankings.