Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge.

What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.

Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.

Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.

To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

Watch For Nofollow Links
What is a nofollow link anyway? It can be complicated to explain. The short version is that Google recommends nofollow for paid links such as paid text link ads on websites. Nofollow generally means the link has no value to the search engines, and can also mean a “down vote” for the quality of the link. Unfortunately this practice has become more common place for many websites including websites that feature profiles. Most often this is due to spammers missusing a website to gain an excessive number of links or the website owner fears they may get in trouble from Google and the other search engines for allowing regular links on their website. For your backlink to count for link popularity you must be sure the link is a regular link.

How Do I Identify Nofollow Links?
There are ways to find out if a link is nofollowed or not. A handy tool is the Firefox extension SearchStatus. When you add this toolbar extension to your Firefox browser it highlights any link that is nofollowed making it much easier for you to identify links that are nofollowed. After downloading the tool to your browser choose “all” for the search engines, click on the “q” symbol from your browser and checkmark the “highlight nofollow links” section. You can download this helpful browser tool here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The Benefits Of Business Profile Links
Beyond the links back to your website a business profile tells the visitor about your company. Don’t skimp when it comes to providing information about yourself and your company in your profile. Be sure to provide information on services or products. Careful copywriting can interest website visitors who view your profile.

One thing to watch for is the possibility of your backlinks being nofollowed after you have added your business profile. Sometimes this happens with a website and suddenly the backlink no longer counts. The best you can do in this situation is know there continues to be benefit from visitors seeing your business information online. I know, an old fashioned idea marketing your website online with no links, but prequalified traffic is never a bad thing when it comes to your website.

The Search Engines Require Quality Links
In the long run Google and the other major engines want backlinks to be quality on topic links. A business profile is just that along with the option of sharing information about your business online. Examples of profile business websites include LinkedIn and Spoke as well as many other similar websites.

Using business profiles as part of your link building program will help provide long term quality backlinks to the most important web pages of your website and make your link building work easier in the long run.

Link Building Takes Time
There is no two ways about it: link building is time consuming and a great deal of work. Get that squared away before going forward with your link building plans. There are no easy quick answers when it comes to building links. Even paid links you have quickly purchased must be indexed by the search engine spiders in order to count and we all know it takes time for links to take effect. If you provide link building services you must set the correct expectations of link results for your clients.

Social Media’s New Link Territory
In the beginning much of link building had been relegated to submitting to directories, reciprocal links and paid links. This concept has changed in the past few years. With the growth of personalized search and social media link building has become super charged. Before you totally jump on the social media bandwagon take a look at what your client’s website actually needs to produce a solid link building strategy outcome.

Think Through Your Link Strategy
Newer link building methods such as social media websites may be popular now but using old linking techniques and new linking techniques together can work very well for your link building strategy. Eventually all new techniques become old techniques making way for yet more new techniques. We know some human edited directory links still provide good results. Reciprocal links can be dicey compared to one-way links. One-way links on topic still work well.

Articles and press releases work if carefully orchestrated to the right websites. Think quality not quantity links. Paid links can be problematic with Google so use them carefully. Think through your daily types of link building (blogging, digging, stumbling), your well known techniques (directories, articles, press releases) to your long range ideas (product reviews on blogs, creating new blog sites, business profiles, paid links) and on and on. Take a look at the whole picture: short term, long term, in the future…where do you want to be online?

Independent Thought For Link Builders
Quality links is still the name of the game when it comes to long term link building success. Yes there are probably quicker ways to get results and it may at times be worth this type of strategy. Think through what you find effective to build links. Not every technique works in every situation for every client. Instead of going with the popular choices come up with your own independent link plans then see what happens.

Individualized Link Strategies Work
Creating specific, individualized link building programs for each client will give you more ways to provide successful link building results. Combining traditional marketing, social media marketing and traditional link building can be a winning combination in your quest for good links.

You see, one can deploy all of the standard SEO tasks to a web page, and maybe if you’re lucky, you might at least rank somewhere (keeping in mind it’s probably not going to be in the first 20 pages if we’re talking about even a semi decent keyword), that is, until you start getting backlinks to that particular page.

Why? Well, without going into a long explanation, Google pretty much ranks any page based around how many backlinks it has, and of course, the quality of said backlinks. The easiest way to explain it to someone would be – each link to your site is like a “vote” – not all “votes” are equal, but it’s a “vote” nevertheless. Generally speaking, the more “votes” you have for your page, the higher it’s going to rank. Obviously, the quality of the vote matters quite a bit too, but the bottom line is – if you don’t get these “votes” to your page, you won’t be ranking anywhere at all.

So listed below, are 10 ways you can start building more backlinks to your site to start getting better rankings. Some of these lean towards blogs, some towards static websites, but between them all, you’ll surely find some tips that you can start using today. Also it should be noted that a majority of the methods are ways to start “naturally” building links, which if you didn’t know, Google and other search engines love the most.

1. Be The Authority – Perhaps the easiest and most effective way to get people to link to you is establishing yourself as an authority in your subject of choice. It’s easier than you think to do this! First, make sure you double check your site for spelling and grammatical errors. Hire someone to edit it to perfection. That alone does wonders in making you look like an authority. Second, and very important – if you’re serious about becoming an authority, you need a site that physically looks the part. Splurge on design, make your site look like a rockstar, and eventually people will start to think, “wow, this site really knows its stuff”. Once you get to that point, visitors may naturally start linking to you, and it can do wonders for your backlink gaining strategy.

2. Create A Viral List – I can’t explain why, but people absolutely love lists – especially good ones. What I mean by creating a list would be along the lines of writing something like, “101 Ways To Turn A Peanutbutter and Jelly Sandwich Into A Nuclear Bomb”. I know it sounds crazy, but the point being – write something unique and useful. Promote it on the big social bookmarking sites, get some viral buzz, and if it’s good enough, you could quite possibly see hundreds of new links coming into your site, if not more. It’s happened to more than one webmaster in the past. Just be creative, and the sky is your limit.

3. The Local Hookup – Perhaps you run a site that offers local services or something similar. Good news for you, because often times (depending on your town or city), you can get links from the BBB, your local Chamber of Commerce, local library, other local businesses websites, church websites, community club websites, and similar locations. If you just open your eyes, there are usually many local links you can get, and these types of links can often do wonders for your rankings, since typically they’re from trusted sites.

4. Contests – People love free stuff! Create a contest that’s worth talking about (give away something nice, like a Nintendo Wii, cash, or something cool like that), and you’ll definitely get people linking to your site. Taking it a step further, tell them that if they link to your contest page, they’ll get an extra entry. Watch your links go up overnight!

5. Directory Links – Find a list of quality, SEO friendly directories (not spam directories), and get your site submitted. Usually a good rule of thumb that tells the quality of a directory is the price you have to pay to get in it. Not always true, but more often than not. The more quality incoming directory links you have, the higher your page will rank.

6. Yahoo Answers – This one is pretty cool. Basically, strive to become a guru at answering questions on Yahoo Answers. You can actually build your reputation up, and make sure you leave quality answers to obtain guru status. Point being, in your answers (where possible) leave a link to your site. This can often lead to natural linking depending on what type of question it is.

7. Squidoo And HubPages – These are community based websites that allow you to build a page on a certain topic. Not only can you use these types of sites to look like an authority on a subject, you can also use them to link back to your own websites. If your topical page becomes popular enough, you can bet that a link on it to your own site is very valuable.

8. Submit To Industry Sites – For example, if you’re in the Aromatherapy business, write up a great article on it, and submit it to one of the super authority sites in the aromatherapy world. If published, you can count on people seeing your article, and linking to your site, because you now look like an authority in the field.

9. Press Releases – Often times, hiring someone to write up a professional press release, and getting it submitted to sites like PR.com or similar press release sites, can land you tons of extra links. The trick with this one is – don’t make it sound commercial. Have someone write up a genuine piece about your site that would be newsworthy. If you hit the mega jackpot, and a local news outlet picks it up, get ready for instant website fame!

10. Great Content – Nothing wins over the hearts of your readers like consistently good content. Once you get people to your site, presenting them with nothing but quality content is often enough to get the natural linking process going in your favor. Don’t ever slack off…only give ‘em the best, and you’ll build more backlinks from this method over the course of time than any of the above. Simple, yet effective.