When posting links on other websites, make sure that the websites you are choosing offer valuable content.  Sites that end in .org or .edu are often given more credibility in search engine results.  If the site you are working with doesn’t end in .org or .edu, make sure that their content is geared toward fulfilling visitor expectation, and not merely there to improve SEO results.

You might also want to pay attention to other sites.  Watch for organic links and try to replicate the way they are used.  Don’t be shy about using links that read: “click here”, because that is how a lot of organic links are done, but be sure to use your URL as well.

You’ll also want to abandon the quantity over quality mentality that has worked for so long.  It is no longer about how many links you have, but rather about the quality of those links.  Quantity may have worked before the Penguin update came out, but that is no longer the case.  Again, the search engines will be looking for credible websites, like sites that end in .edu or .org.

The Penguin updates are also examining websites that are in a community of other websites, so you may want to be sure to target sites that share common themes and ideas with the site your are promoting.  Don’t post links to beauty supplies on a sports website, and don’t post an ebay store that sells DVDs on a gardening site.  Find sites that relate to each other and target them, because Penguin is about quality, not quantity.

Don’t use automated link building programs.  They will be viewed as spam and will actually hurt your SEO results.  I can’t stress this enough.  Links need to be created organically.  If they are viewed as spam this could hurt your website more than help it.  Go with manual link building techniques, such as webmaster out reach, guest blogging, social bookmarking and other such methods.

If you keep these things in mind, you should be able to weather the Penguin updates and soon see the steady flow of traffic you were getting before the Penguin updates came into effect.

Firstly if you are an investor, it might be a good idea to wait before putting your money into Facebook’s stock.  Don’t let your excitement over the product skew your business sense.  Mark Zuckerberg seems like the type who is most interested in improving the product and not necessarily the value of the stock.  Some investors may want to get in right away with the hopes that the stock will increase with time, but it might be a good idea to wait at least a few days and let all the craziness die down a bit, most especially because the Facebook IPO is looking to raise between 12 and 16 billion dollars, an astronomical sum for an IPO.

If you buy adds on Facebook, this will likely mean that the costs of these adds will go up.  GM has already pulled out of advertising on Facebook, saying that it is not worth the money, and with stockholders expecting dividends, there is really only one way to make money on Facebook, and that is via advertisements.  So expect to pony up a little more money if you are looking to buy ads on Facebook.

The good news is that there will still be ways for online marketers to generate buzz on Facebook without having to pay money.  One can still create fan pages for their products, and one can still post links on their own Facebook home page.  So all the things that you’ve been doing on Facebook for free, will still be free, and so you can still use the social networking site to build buzz and word of mouth.

Firstly, have an option on your page that allows people to give you their e-mail addresses.  Now it is likely that even if you have targeted traffic you may not get a lot of people giving you their e-mails, but always have that option available.  The people who take the time to leave their e-mail addresses are likely representative of people who would give you a high conversion rate.  And if they are willing to buy, you want to be able to contact them about any new deals, new products, or new content you may have.

Once you have a list built up, you may want to look into joining a joint venture site.  On such sites you can find people who work in the same field.  Perhaps you have an e-bay store that sells razors, and somebody on the joint venture site sells shaving cream.  Contact that person and see if they are interested in swapping e-mail lists.  People who buy some toiletries online are likely interested in buying others.  Maybe you have an e-bay store that sells DVDs.  You might want to share your e-mail list with somebody who runs a site that reviews movies.  You may sometimes even end up swapping e-mail lists with somebody who sells the same product as you, but if you have faith in your product and your prices, you shouldn’t be worried about sharing your list, because if you are competitively priced and offer a good product, your customers will be less likely to switch over to another supplier.

If you are having a hard time finding potential partners in the joint venture realm, you may want to just approaching people who have been sharing back links to your site.  If they’ve already shared a link to your site on their own website, that means the y likely trust you and may be willing to swap lists.  Again, this can be a mutually beneficial exchange.  You could help them drive in traffic to their free content site, while they would help drive in traffic to your website.

Once you have a good list to build on, you need to find a good auto-responder supplier to handle all the e-mail addresses, because once you build the kind of list you want, it’s going to be hard to keep up with all the e-mails.  Once you are ready for an auto-responder, look around the web to find a good company.  AWeber  Communications is a great one.  They’ve been doing automated e-mail for almost fifteen years, which is a life time in this market.  Just follow this link: http://www.aweber.com/ and browse their website.

Once you have built the e-mail list, and maintain it, it’s just a matter of employing it with a quality auto-responder like the one AWeber Communications provides.  Remember, the people who are  willing to shared their e-mail addresses want to be contacted, so they are more likely to lead to conversations, and a high conversion rate is what every online business needs.

If you want a fast, easy and affordable way to analyze your traffic, your best option is Google Analytics.  Most of the features are free, and you can do a thorough investigation into your traffic without spending a dime.  To get Google Analytics you’ll have to go to www.google.com/analytic where you will have to sign in with your Google account.  If you don’t have one, create one, and don’t worry, it’s free.  Once you’ve done that, just follow the process and fill out the appropriate information, being sure to use your website’s correct URL.  You will be given a tracking code in HTML format which you can imbed anywhere on your website.  If you are worried about how to imbed this into your website, don’t be, because you will be given step-by-step instructions.  Once it is installed onto your website you will be able to track the traffic.  And if you have concerns about it showing up on your webpage, don’t worry, visitors will not be able to see it once it is imbedded.

There are several reasons why website analytics are important.  For one, it will allow you to see where the traffic is coming from.  Perhaps you are paying for some backlinks on a couple of sites.  Knowing whether or not those sites are bringing you traffic is as important as the actual sales.  Maybe they aren’t generating any traffic and you are wasting your money, or maybe they are and you can find similar websites which you can employ with the same kind of efficiency.  You might also have a couple of different ads out there, so knowing which ones are working and which ones are, is important.  If one is working better than another, then you can replace the ads that are underachieving with the ones that are performing well.  Website Analytics will let you know what traffic came directly, came from a Facebook, or Twitter, or Pinterest referral, and which came from backlinks.  This is all very useful information.  One of the ways you can tell which campaigns are working best for you is by creating different landing pages for each campaigns.  This will allow you to see which campaigns are generating the most traffic.

Once you get an idea of what is working and what is not, you will be able to maximize your efforts, increase your traffic and improve you SEO.

One of the first things you want to look at is content.  Good content generates buzz on social networking sites because people are more likely to share, “like” or comment on it, and when visitors see that people are engaged with the writing, they are more likely to come back to the site.  If you are having a hard time generating such responses, ask friends to leave comments to get the ball rolling.  When you are getting responses, that is a sign that your content is link worthy.  Keywords are obviously your starting point, and you want to keep up on what keywords your competitors are succeeding with, but the content has to be engaging.

You also might want to look into linking out.  Link building is a reciprocal process.  While you may not want to link out to your competitors, there may be sites that you do feel comfortable linking out to.  Find a website you trust and read frequently and offer to do a guest post for them, or post a link for them, and they will be inclined to do the same for you.  Because it is a site you know has great content, you can trust that your SEO results will benefit from this.  Likewise if you find somebody who has posted a link to your website, contact them and thank them, and while you’re at it, offer to do a guest post that can generate more links.  It will help you to get your name out there and brand yourself.

You’ll also want to take a good look at what your competitors are doing.  Visit a link extracting website and type in the ULR of some of your competitors, find out who is posting links to their sites and contact those people to see if they can do the same for you.  Again, offer to do a guest post, or link out to their website.  If it’s working for your competitors, then it will work for you.  Coupled with that, you need to keep up with your competitors if you want to maintain an edge on them.  And while you are at it, use whatever link extracting website you prefer to check up on your on site.  Find out if anybody is linking back to your site and start a conversation with them. 

You also want to be sure that you are dealing with sites that are seen as an authority.  Sites that end in .edu or .org are often lent more weight when it comes to SEO results, so try to engage with these sites and generate some links with them.  Use a website like Open Site Explorer to view the authority ranking of websites you are looking at, and see which ones rank highest.  If you can get these sites to share a link to your site, it will help improve your SEO results.

Following all these tips when help you score better SEO results with the new Google Penguin Update and ensure you will maintain and increase the traffic to your website.

1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.  Make sure everything it presented in a straight forward and honest manner.

2. Don’t send automated queries to Google.

3. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords, make sure that the keywords you use are representative of the content on your page.

4. Don’t create pages with duplicate content.

5. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

6. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

7. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

8. Don’t use tricks to improve your SEO results. Whenever you are doing something to improve your SEO results, ask yourself a couple of important questions.  Would you feel comfortable explaining your tactics to Google?  Does what you are doing help your site’s visitor?  Would you be ok with your competitors using the same tactics.

9.  Remember that your website ranking will take a hit if you have links posted websites that aren’t trusted by Google.  Before posting link on a site, ask yourself: Do I trust the information on this site?  Is this spam?

10. Make sure when you use programs submit pages and check rankings that they are programs that are authorized by Google.

11.

In order to be prepared for the investigation, you really need Google Webmaster Tools, so if you don’t have it now, sign up for the service.  Usually when you are given a penalty, you are also issued a corresponding notice detailing the reasons for the penalty.  Without this service it can be hard to determine the root cause of your penalty and it will therefore be hard to correct the issues.

Once you have read the note explaining the penalty you need to assess the extent of the penalty.  You may want to look at your website.  Is it still indexed?  This is the most drastic of penalties.  Having your site removed from Google’s index can cause serious and permanent damage to your website’s traffic.  This penalty however is reserved of only the most serious infractions.  If this isn’t the case then you can move forward.

A site-wide penalty or total ban can destroy your website’s potential for traffic, but perhaps it is simply a single keyword that is your issue.  If this is the case you may want to remove all tags with that keyword and do a little research online to find out which keywords you can use instead.  See what your competitors are using, or do a little reading and see if there is new terminology being used.

You may want to review the Terms Of Service (TOS) as defined by the search engines you hope to do well with.  See how your site does when compared to the guidelines laid out by the search engines.  If you see some areas where your site is not meeting the criteria laid out in the TOS, then make the appropriate changes so that your site will meet the criteria set out by the search engines.  Make sure that the content on your site is trustworthy.  Make sure you don’t have redundant articles that recycle the same information over and over.  Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors.  Make sure that the information on your site is factual.  It may take a little time for you to climb back up to where you were, but you’ll eventually be back to where you want to be.

Once you have assessed and addressed the areas of concern, look into getting search engines to reconsider your site.  Google has instructions which you can follow to do this.  Patience is a virtue, and you will need it as it may take time to ensure your site has high quality content.  Delete backlinks that may be devaluing your site.  While these back links may provide some inbound traffic to your site, your search engine results are often times more important than the few people you may bring in via a backlink on a poorly rated site.  Take the long view.

What do you do if you haven’t been issued a notice by Google explaining a penalty?  Maybe you haven’t been issued one.  Sometimes it is not a penalty that has impacted your traffic.  In fact often times a drop in traffic can be the result of a link building campaign.  Have you been posting links on other websites?  While it is a great way to generate inbound traffic, it can also create problems for Google when it comes to ranking your site.  It may take a couple of weeks, but once the reevaluation process is completed, your site’s ranking will settle down.  If this is the case, be patient.

It is also possible that some of all of your backlinks are hurting your SEO.  This is not a penalty, but essentially what will happen is that you will initially enjoy extremely high rankings because of these back links, but once the search engines devalue the backlinks, your rankings will drop through the floor.  Before you get backlinks posted on a site, ask yourself some questions.  Do your trust the information on this site?  Would you give your credit card number to this site?  If the answer is no, then it may be a good idea to skip this site and instead find a site where you answer yes to those questions.

If you haven’t been adding links it may be another issue.  Perhaps there has been a change in the search engine ranking algorithms.  These reprioritized algorithms can themselves cause a major drop in traffic.  How do you know if this is the case?  You might want to start out by checking SEO news sites for recent updates.  Check your favorite SEO news sites and see if there is any new information regarding rollouts.  When there are such changes webmasters often check out various forums to discuss the changes and the problems that accompany them.  It is a great place to get information.

Use these dips in traffic as a learning tool.  Find out what is working and what is not working and apply it to your website.  It may take time, but in the end your site will benefit from the lessons you learned and you will see your placement on search engine improve dramatically.

The first thing you want to do is look at the inbound links coming into your competitor’s website.  You need to evaluate these links.  Are they merit-based?  Are they freely volunteered?  Are they an editorial choice?  If your answer is yes to these questions, then you need to look into doing the same thing, because these are the types of things Google looks for when determining how highly somebody is ranked on the Google search engine.  If not, then there is a good chance that Google spiders might see the links as spam, and that is something you don’t want.  So evaluate the links, and if they pass the test, try to post inbounds links to your page on the websites where your competitor has.  There are a number of ways to get similar links, such as press coverage, creating content, commenting on blogs and vlogs, or press releases.  Once you do that, try and find some related pages that your competitors didn’t get links on and apply to those pages for assistance.  It is one sure way to get ahead of the competition.

You may be asking: How do I get this information?  Easy, go to opensiteexplorer.org  and simply type in the URL of your competitor and you will find a comprehensive list of where they have posted inbound links.  Once you have done that you can organize the data on a spread sheet and really see how your competitors are optimizing search engine rankings and you will be able to copy and improve upon that blueprint.

Keep a few things in mind.  Search engines give a lot of weight to domain names, which defines a site credibility.  Is it an authority?  Does it have credibility?  If so, then the search engine rankings will be higher.  So be sure to sort things by domain authority.  You might also want to explore the “anchor text”.  It is the text attached to the link that describes the link.  Investigating this will give you a better idea of which keywords they are using and allow you to maximize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Don’t just copy their words though, expand on them and use other terminology, that way you can put yourself in a position to rank higher in search engine results. Part and parcel with this is the “landing page”.  Though many believe that homepages generate the most first-time traffic, this isn’t always the case.  Sometimes blog entries, or specific services or products are the destination page for first-time traffic, so be sure to explore where the backlinks are taking people.  And if you want to make sure your links get the maximum weight in search engines, pay attention to the URL.  Does it end in .Com?  .Gov?  .Edu?  Most search engines give greater weight to sites end in .edu as they are usually educational institutions.  See if you can find some .edu sites that your competitors haven’t used, and you’ll quickly see your pages improving on search engine rankings.    

Once you have sorted these things out and applied the knowledge you obtained, you will see your traffic increase tenfold, or better.  Find out which domains have a policy of linking to companies in your field and approach them.  It’s a good idea to offer free content to these sites.  You’ll also know which media outlets and reporters/bloggers are covering news related to your business, and you can, in turn, pitch them some content ideas relating to your online business.  And while you are at it you can adjust your keywords so that you are able maintain your competitive edge against your competitors.

One thing that it is always important to revisit is your keyword search.  Too frequently online business owners believe that they only need to set up once and be done with it.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  See which of your keywords are performing well, and which ones aren’t, and while you’re at it, investigate competitor’s sites and see which words are performing well for them.  They may have some keywords that you don’t, and with the fluid nature of the internet, things are always changing, so it is important to make sure that you are maximizing your potential when it comes to your keywords.  Find out if there are emerging trends in user behaviour and see what new terminology has popped up since the last time you updated your keywords.  Staying on top of trends will give you an edge on your competitors.

You might also want to ensure that your site has fresh content, though this is something you should be doing on a weekly basis.  The more content you create, the better your SEO results will be.  If you add two articles a week, and your competitor is only adding two articles a month, then you will put yourself at a distinct advantage over your competitors.  The truth of the matter though is that a lot of your competitors will likely already be adding content at least once a week, so maintaining fresh content will be key to ensuring you are staying competitive.  Adding new content also allows you to add new keywords, and when working in concert with social networking sites, your content can be shared and get you exposure with more potential clients.  It might also be a good idea to revamp your website as websites can appear to become dated after a while, though this need not be done every quarter.

Links audits are also a great idea.  This may be a tedious process, but it is a necessity in maintaining your SEO.  Do a complete link audit.  Visit each and every link.  Ensure that your link portfolio is effective and that the links are all working properly.  While doing this it is also a great time to look at where else you can be adding links.  Perhaps a blogger who shared a link some months ago can repost a link to your website in a more recent blog so that some fresh eyes will get to see you page and potentially share it on a social networking site like Pinterest or Facebook, generating even more potential traffic.  This is also a great time to take a look at and inbound links and ensure that there are no inbound links which may be questionable and cause consumer concern with your potential clients.  While you’re on it, you can also run a link audit on your competitors and see if there are any link building opportunities that you have missed out on and can capitalize on.

During the audit you may want to check your navigation for broken links.  It is important that potential customers come away from your site with a positive experience, and part of ensuring they have a positive experience is making sure that your site can be easily and efficiently navigated.  Go through your site thoroughly and ensure that there are no broken links, missing pages or redirects or other internal linking problems that could potentially impact your website’s performance.  If you have deleted or added content, ensure that the site has had the corresponding updates.  These types of issues not only impact your customer’s experience, but also create problems for search spiders and prevent them from properly indexing your website which can, in turn, hurt your long term SEO.

Ensuring that all these things are in order will help maintain a high ranking with search engines, while creating more exposures for your site while helping to create exposure and in turn generate more targeted traffic, and also ensures that customers have a positive experience when they visit your site.

First and foremost is keeping in mind that a good link building campaign is about quality, not quantity.  You want to build enough links to rank first on search engines, but you don’t want too many links because they could be seen as spam links by search engines and in turn your site may be excluded from search results by the search engines.  So the key is to build a reasonable number of links.  Don’t post links to your page anywhere you can, but in places that make the most sense.  You want to find websites that relate to whatever product you are selling and place links on those site specifically.  If you are selling sports jerseys, post links on sports site, not on entertainment sites.  Likewise if you are selling DVDs, posting on websites related to the film industry makes the most sense, not websites related to cosmetics.  It seems like common sense, but these tactics will get you the targeted traffic you want without getting your links highlighted as spam by the popular search engines.

Include recent news and tag keywords.  Doing these two things in concert will ensure maximum search engine optimization.  By including recent news in your content, you can piggyback the trending stories in the news and gain maximum exposure for your website, most especially when you have tagged keywords in your content.  Find a recent story that is trending in the search engines, create content that speaks on that topic, and let the search engine do the rest.  This will give you an advantage over competitors who don’t employ this technique and in turn bring more traffic to your website.

Keep tabs on your competitors.  Search the key words you are using and see who else is popping up.  Read through their content and find the topics and words they are using to generate traffic and then create original content with the same keywords.  This will ensure that your website will rank at least as high as your competitors and give you an edge over your competitors.  By indentifying what content is most popular for others, you can create content that caters to those topics specifically, you will optimize your search engine results, and if you improve on it then you may soon find yourself being placed ahead or your competitors in search engine results.

Networking is also keep to building a healthy network of links.  Finding blogs, vlogs, and forums that are related to whatever product you are selling is key.  If you can build a positive working relationships with the people who put together the blogs and vlogs, you can get your links posted with their latest content in real time.  When your competitors search for trending news, you will have the advantage of already having had a link associated with trending topics.  Coupled with that, the people who go to the forums, or blogs or vlogs trust the content they are reading and will likely, in turn, trust the links that are shared by the bloggers or vloggers.  You may have to offer to create content for them in return, or share links to their blogs, and for some you may have to pay, but being included in fresh content will be crucial to finishing above your competitors in search engine results.

These are just a few simple strategies to keep in mind when building a network of links to your site.  Employing these tactics will ensure that your search engine results will maintain a competitive edge in the open market.