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This is an article by Ben, who explained what is social bookmarking, and writes about other similar topics at his blog SEO Discovery. You've probably heard of the popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. These are examples of social bookmarking sites where users can share links to their favorite content from around the web. You may have also heard how some people are increasing their rankings with the use of bookmarks. So what is social bookmarking in SEO? The Spammy Way to Use Bookmarks for SEO Sadly, the popular and most discussed way of utilizing bookmarks for SEO is very spammy. The strategy is quite simple, make as many social bookmarks on as many different bookmarking sites as you can. That's it really. The theory behind it is that a bookmark is a link, and links help your site rank higher. However, one social bookmarking carries very little value in the eyes of the search engines. The obvious solution is to submit tons and tons of them. Commonly, spam link builders will create a few web properties on sites like Blogger and Squidoo and then link to them with hundreds of bookmarks. Usually, there are hundreds of article submission involved as well in this link building process, each of which also gets bookmarked. In the end, you have tons of very low value links built in the hopes that added together they will amount to something. I don't recommend using bookmarks like this. The Right Way to Use Bookmarks for SEO The right way to use bookmarks is harder in some ways, but much easier in others. It's also mind-blowingly simple. You ready? Create a piece of quality content and bookmark it on a handful of sites. That's it. Now let me explain why this works and isn't just the lazy way to bookmark. Let's recall what social bookmarking sites are really for. They're for sharing great content with other people on the web. This is the reason people visit them and vote on content, comment on it, and share it with others. The most important piece of the puzzle is the content itself. If you have taken the time to create something awesome, which can simply be a killer blog post, then you stand a really good chance of attracting lots of traffic from every bookmarking site you submit to. Now how does this help with your SEO? Your average web user will simply share a link on Facebook or a bookmarking site, but those with a web presence may opt to mention it in a forum or even in a blog post. This is how you end up getting quality backlinks from honest social bookmarking submission. To run through the cycle: Create something awesome Share it on bookmarking sites Sit back and get natural links The best part about it is you hardly spent anytime making bookmarks or doing anything besides making your site more awesome by creating some fresh new content. And that's how social bookmarking should be used for SEO.

Many webmasters get hung up right before they get started online. They're ready start their site and get the ball rolling, and then along comes SEO and the confusion it brings. A very common question is what domain extension is best for SEO. This is a reasonable and natural concern, but it's overly complicated by the vast amounts of false information on the web. Let's set things straight and go over the affect that domain extension have on SEO and if there even is a best extension. Do Domain Extensions Affect SEO? In short, no. In fact, there will not be any difference in your search engine performance whether you use a .com, .net, or a .org. Many people assume that a .com will perform better, but that opinion has no grounds in reality. It's simply not true. Furthermore, a .biz or .info domain also performs equally as well. A lot of people think that these domains for sure don't perform as well because they don't often see them in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Webmasters don't buy .info sites to rank because they don't think they will rank as well, so no one uses them, and the cycle continues. The only domain extensions that do affect SEO are country-specific domains. For example, a .us site will rank just fine in the US, but it's rankings will suffer in other countries. The same goes for other country codes. What is the Best Domain Extension for SEO This leads us back to the original question. Which domain extension then is best, and is one best at all? There is no best domain for search engine optimization. However, the best one to choose, for other reasons, is a .com. The .com extension is by far the most popular and is more memorable for this reason. It will be easier to make sure any direct traffic ends up at your site and not someone else's by using the most popular extension. This leads to another tactic that can be effective for domain selection. If the .com is available, buy it and use it as your primary domain. If the other extensions are available, you should also buy them. You can redirect all of them to your .com extension without any trouble. By doing this, you will ensure that everyone trying to find your site will end up at it, and you will also keep competitors from taking the similar domains and parking them. This is an article by Ben, who writes about the best domain extensions for SEO and similar topics at his blog SEO Discovery.

Every blog has an RSS feed and many sites have a blog attached with a feed. If your site has an RSS feed then you have the opportunity to build some very easy backlinks with RSS submission. For each feed directory that you submit to, you will have a new, dedicated page on that site for your own feed. These pages usually link to your homepage, display an excerpt of your post or the entire post, and then link to each of your recent blog posts. Essentially, you are getting many links for just one submission. Furthermore, it's self-updating, so you will always have fresh links to your new blog posts. Not a bad deal right? The only problem with RSS feed directories is that many get destroyed by spam. Link builders create bots that submit at rapid speed and overwhelm the directories. This makes it much harder for those of us doing honest, manual submissions for legitimate feeds. There's nothing you can do about the spam, but what you can do is target the sites that are doing the best handling spam. RSS directories that are succeeding in combating spam will stick around longer, offer a better user experience, and often times pass more "link juice" back to your site.  They are the best RSS directories. How to Find the Best RSS Directories You know why you should be submitting your feed for links, and why you should submit to high quality directories. Now you just need to know how to find these high quality directories. I have a couple guidelines you can use during your search. A very quick indicator of a directories health is its homepage PageRank and it's Alexa ranking. You can install extensions on whatever browser you like to use in order to quickly check these metrics. Within a couple seconds, these factors give a rough estimate of the amount of traffic the site receives as well as its general authority in the eyes of Google. You're looking for sites with high PageRank and low Alexa ranking. Besides these metrics, the most important factor in deciding the quality of a feed directory is whether or not it requires a login. Simply by requiring that users sign up and login in order to submit a feed stops a vast majority of spam for a few reasons. First off, some programmers are lazy and would rather just make software that submits to the "easy" directories. Having a login required is deterrant because that would require more coding for the software to get past. Also, it adds a few more steps to the process which allows the software more margin of error, which results in fewer successful submissions. This all leads to less spam. With these factors in mind, you should have no trouble selecting the best RSS feed directories to submit to and build links with.

Guest Post: I am an established website designer and have been designing websites for many companies since the past 5 – 6 years. With the evolving world I want to grow my business for my existing clients and attract new clients. After some research and past experiences I have seen that clients require SEO as part of website designing as well. I made up my mind that offering SEO as part of my website designing business would be a good thing to invest into the current business. I looked up online and came across this great website that offered a free seo course to teach any beginner the seo basics. A well-written free seo course provides all the seo basics that one needs to know. The table of contents is listed on the website and provides information to beginners about all types of tags, files, presence of keywords and their importance. The seo basics include knowledge about the different types of keywords used in articles, blog sites, public forums and other social media like twitter, Facebook so as to increase the page ranking of a website on the internet. The seo course imparts complete knowledge about how to create backlinks, index backlinks and create a sitemap to promote backlinks. There is simply so much that you can learn about an seo that can help you to build strategies as well for promoting your website. The seo course has provided helpful information related to the use of keywords and latent semantic indexing. Seo basics are provided in the free seo course really helped me to design the website in a manner to increase the chances of getting the client’s websites on top of the list. The seo course also helped me to understand how to build links for a client and how to consult clients on using forums, blog sites and other social media websites to the optimum and hence gaining a niche along with launching a website. The seo course not only is helping me build better websites but also helping me to evolve as an internet marketing consultant. So if you are a marketing agent and want to break through into the world of internet marketing the free seo course is a great way to actually get started with the seo basics. Increase in business after an SEO Course The best part about doing the seo course is that I could apply it to my business as well. Within a month, I have increased the views to my business website by around 50%. There are loads of enquiries about the kinds of services that I offer and my number of clients has increased by 20%. At this rate I expect to well overdo my profits this year and expand by next year. Personally, I see that whilst site engine optimization is an ongoing process website designing is the process where it really begins and I am glad that I have my seo basic right with the help of a great free seo course. Resource Box: If you're looking to master SEO with an SEO course then you'll want to check out this free SEO course.

Backlinking, backlinking, backlinking – it seems to be the only part of SEO anyone ever talks about these days! Let’s get our noses out of everyone else’s sites and back into ours. On-page optimization is often overlooked and neglected, but your on-page SEO builds the foundation for all of your off-page optimization efforts. We’re going to cover some of the basics here: domain names and title tags, but we’re also going to get to topics less discussed when dealing with on-page optimization. I’m talking about things like stemming, your outbound links, your use of synonyms and more. Let’s get to it! Domain Name Your domain name has a powerful effect on how you rank. Having an EMD (exact match domain) for your keyword is going to do a lot for your ranking. However, this is not crucial to your ranking success. Many people, such as myself, choose to have a domain name that they can brand. It depends on what you’re looking to do with your site. If you want to make a small niche site targeting a single keyword, then clearly you will want to get an EMD. But what if the EMD is not available? This is a very common problem for internet marketers. From an SEO standpoint, you want to choose an EMD with a non-.com extension first if available. If none are available, then tack another word onto the end of your domain name. You will still have your keyword in your domain and receive SEO benefits from this. For the record, it is better to start your domain with your keyword first. For example, it would be better to choose “dogtraineronline.com” rather than “mydogtrainer.com”. Another trick is making your domain name the plural or non-plural version of your keyword. Google now uses a process called “stemming” that understands plurality and –ing endings on words among other things. If you add plurality to your domain name, you will rank almost effectively as the non-plural version. These same principles can be applied to your title tags, header tags, and meta tags. Title and Header Tags We’re going to apply the same ideas to our title and header tags. You want to include your keyword, but you can’t always just use your keyword. In this case we are going to do the same thing we did with our domain name. Put your keyword first then add more text. Also, with stemming in mind, you can use different tenses or plurality for your keyword. There is also another clever strategy you can use to rank for your keyword without even using it! Ranking with Synonyms People don’t talk about this too often, but Google actually considers synonyms when choosing results for queries. What does this mean? It means that you can rank for the word “manual” with the word “instructions”. Do a Google search right now, seriously right now! Pick a word (manual if you’d like) and put a ~ in-front of it. Example search: ~manual. Every bolded word in the results page is considered to be a synonym. This means that using these words more often is going to help you rank for your keyword as well. They are like super-related LSI keywords. Text Formatting There are ways to optimize your text besides keyword density. Text formatting is using bold, italics, font-size, and word placement to increase the relevance of your page to your keyword. Making your keyword bold and/or increasing its font-size will add importance to it in the eyes of the Search Engines. Also, where you put your keyword has an effect as well. Placing your keyword in the first and last sentence of a body of text will increase the relevance of your page as well. With this in mind, here’s how you can make a super-optimized blog-post or article: 1) Place your keyword in the title 2) Include your keyword in the first and last sentences 3) Bold your keyword both times 4) Wrap your keyword in the first and last sentences with h1 and h2 tags respectively And here’s the final tip for internal linking or backlinking 5) Use your keyword as anchor text AND bold it This last trick gets ignored a lot. It’s a great way to add even more influence to the importance of your keyword and get more out of your anchor text. These are the little steps that people who say on-page optimization doesn’t really matter either forget or don’t know about. The biggest on-page optimization blunder of all is negligence of your link profile and how you link out. The links leading to your site aren’t the only ones that affect how you rank! Outbound Links How you link out to other sites affects how Google trusts and ranks your site. In the TrustRank white papers that included a patent adopted by Google, they mention how good sites link to other good sites. They also say that “good sites seldom link to bad ones”. Use this knowledge to enhance your own rankings. Link out to authoritative and trusted sites. If you have a ton of links leading to spammy sites it’s going to hurt how your site ranks. You can’t control who links to you, but you CAN control who you link to, so don’t harm your own rankings by linking to bad sites. As an example of this principle in effect, check out Huffington Posts homepage. Their articles rank very well in the search results and they have a PR 8 homepage. If you scroll to the bottom of their site, you will see a massive amount of “dofollow” links all leading to other major, authoritative sites. It’s no coincidence that they rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This is a clear example of a site benefitting from linking out to other good sites and gaining trust from Google. We have complete control over our on-page SEO, and this means our content and our links. We just talked about outbound links, and that leaves us with only one other type of link. Internal Links Internal links are the links that lead from one page on our site to another. Now is a good time to state a quick fact about search engines and how they index the web. Search engines do not index websites, they index web pages. This means that a site doesn’t have authority; rather a web page has authority. The reason all the pages rank well on an authoritative website is because of internal links. When a large authority site makes a new page, what does that page have? It has a ton of powerful links from other authoritative pages already on the site. This all occurs because of internal linking. So what does it mean for us? It means we need to have a solid internal link-structure to take advantage of our own link juice. There’s no exact science to how you link your pages. Just having a consistent nav-bar is a start, but there is a lot more you can do. If you use Word Press, there are many different related posts plug-ins you can use that will automatically create links to other related posts for you. I recommend having more internal links than external links. A 1 to 3 ratio is a good reference for your outbound to internal links ratio. There is a practice called PageRank sculpting that involves severely limiting the number of outbound links you have in order to keep more link juice internally. It sounds like a decent idea, but it fails in practice. PageRank moves more cyclically than recognized and a lot more will stay on your site naturally. Also, we just talked about how outbound links can help you rank – don’t be afraid to link to other great sites. Conclusion I know that many of us have read through (and possibly purchased) countless guides on SEO and been over the same on-page optimization basics again and again. But that’s the thing, they are just the basics! This is why everyone assumes that there’s nothing more to it and it’s deemed as less important than backlinking. Don’t fall into the trap! Take care of your site, optimize the way you use your text, optimize the way you use links, prune it daily like a precious shrub. Take the tips from this on-page SEO course, and use it to gain an edge on your negligent competitors. Ben Jackson is an SEO expert and founder of http://www.seodiscovery.org.

So you decided to outsource your SEO, or maybe just some of it because of a lack of time. Where do you start for finding a reputable SEO service that won't break the bank? For starters, there are a lot of great SEO services provided by capable Warriors for hire in the Warriorforum that offer honest services. However, there are always going to be discrepancies with what SEOs anywhere on the web offer and what you get. So how can you tell if an "SEO Expert" can really put his money where his mouth is? 1. Testimonials This is the most important factor for gauging the honesty and effectiveness of an SEO service. Is it working for other people? If there are a lot of other individuals or businesses having great success with the service then you can probably assume the same results for yourself. However, things aren't always this clear-and-cut. You'll still want to look deeper in case the reviews were mostly by newbies or if there were not enough reviews to base your judgment off of. 2. Proof Proof of the SEO service's results goes hand-in-hand with testimonials most times. Where is this "SEO Expert's" own site in the SERPs? They should have sort of evidence that they can rank a site highly in the SERPs, otherwise how can they rank yours? Testimonials and case studies are definitely the most powerful form of proof since you can't guarantee that the service provider ranked his sites with only the method described. 3. Do they Index the links? This is actually a pretty effective way of picking out the pros from the joes. Building backlinks alone is fine, but the links need to get indexed. Any SEO professional worth his two cents is going to have some sort of indexing process built into his/her service. If you are looking at a service that doesn't even mention indexing the backlinks then it is likely that you are not looking at a service offered by a professional. Having an indexing process integrated into the service is a must-have for SEO outsourcing, and it's an aspect often overlooked or ignored by less savvy SEO service providers. 4. Be Wary of Profile Link Services! I'm not saying that profile links can't be effective for ranking or that everyone using profile backlinks is shady. Far from it in fact, there are many excellent SEO services that use profile backlinks. That being said, most of the lower quality, ineffective backlinking services that you'll find will be primarily profile backlinking services. Think about it from their perspective: it is very easy to do with the right software and takes next to no real knowledge to automate and fulfill. Just be cautious when approaching a service that is offering only profile backlinks for rankings. 5. Do They Address Nofollow Links? Not every SEO service is going to do this, but a lot (not all) of the successful and effective services will address nofollow links and their presence or admission in their service. A lot of great services won't reference this issue, but many will. Just keep it in your mental checklist of things to check for when picking out an SEO service. 6. PR Confusion This is most common with SEOs selling link packets and profile link services. They (purposely?) confuse the issue of PageRank and exactly how it works. For instance, they'll tell you that you're going to get high PR backlinks because you're going to get profile links from high PR forums. This just isn't true. The homepage of the forum might be high, but the page that your profile link is going to be on is a brand new page with a PR 0. Your link is not going to get any of the homepage PR. I would steer clear of anyone confusing these concepts, they're confused themselves or being deceptive to make sales. Conclusion Take your time selecting SEO services. Make sure that there are plenty of testimonials and proof of success. If there aren't, refer to some of the other points made to see if it will be a reliable and effective service. SEO is a big topic and it's easy to get confused or overwhelmed by the sales copy if you're still new to it. Just follow this checklist for gauging the credibility of a service and you should have no problems getting the results you want. The difference between two similarly priced services can be drastic, make sure you get your money's worth! Ben Jackson is an SEO expert and enthusiast. Master SEO for FREE with this SEO Course offered exclusively on www.seodiscovery.org.

A very common SEO myth that is perpetuated all throughout the web is that.com sites naturally rank higher than other domain extensions. There are all sorts of variations of the myth:.edu and.gov sites rank higher,.org sites rank higher than.com sites,.info and.biz sites rank the worst - they are all nonsense. The fact is that your domain extension does not have an effect on how your site ranks. There is no reason that a.com should rank higher or lower than.org and.net sites. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam team, has said many times on his blog and elsewhere that domain extensions do not affect SEO. It's people selling.com sites for a fortune that spread such contradictory information. Often times, you can find a.info for very cheap that would cost a ton as a.com,.net. or.org. Don't be afraid to go for the.info! You have probably noticed that you don't see a lot of.info or.biz sites in the SERPs. Many people will take this to mean that sites with these domain extensions don't rank well. However, it is actually only evidence that people believe that sites with.info and.biz extensions don't rank well. There aren't as many of these sites ranked highly because people don't choose to use them because they believe that they will not rank as highly. We are simply observing our own perceptions rather than the reality of the situation. This is the reason that this myth is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Similarly, people believe that.edu and.gov sites rank higher simply because of their domain extension. We see these sites ranking highly somewhat often in the SERPs. When you see a.edu or.gov site ranked highly in the SERPs, I have to ask, what kind of site do you see? Is it a small niche site? I'll take initiative and tell you it's not. These are always large authority sites with many powerful backlinks. So what's surprising about these sites ranking highly? Nothing. They are exactly the type of site that should rank highly - large and authoritative with a great link profile. The fact that they are also.edu or.gov sites is happenstance. It is not the reason they rank well. While all the before mentioned domain extensions don't affect the SEO of your site, there is one type of extension that does. Country code domains will not rank as well in other countries. For instance, a.us site will not rank as highly in other countries. Country codes are the only exception to the fact that domain extensions won't affect the way your site ranks. The reason for choosing a certain domain extension should be based on other non-SEO factors. For instance,.com sites are easier to remember because they are the standard extension. However,.org sites are sometimes viewed as being more trustworthy. Don't base your decision when choosing your domain extension simply on some SEO misconception. Rather, focus on getting your keyword in your domain, purchase the more affordable option, or the one that you believe your visitors will trust and like most and forget about the SEO Myths. Ben Jackson is an SEO expert and founder of www.seodiscovery.org.

What is a Backlink? What's all this hoopla over backlinks? Every SEO forum and blog you stop by is constantly touting the power and necessity of backlinks they must be a pretty big deal! So what exactly is a backlink? Simply put, a backlink is a link on another website (external) that leads to a page on your website. For instance, a link on this page to a page on another website would be a backlink for THAT webpage. How do Backlinks Help us Rank? Think of it like this: backlinks are human citation. In a sense, we decide what pages we, as internet users, want to show up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by linking to the content we like. A page with more links of a higher quality than others will rank higher. The part about quality is really important. It's not just about who has the most backlinks it's about where those links are from. If you were trying to lose weight, would you be more inclined to trust the opinion of some Joe Shmo or from a professional health expert? This principle is applied to backlinks and the way they affect our rankings. Links from sites that are established as authorities (like the health expert) carry much more weight than a link from someone commenting in a fitness forum somewhere. Google weighs out these links and their value using their complex algorithm and uses this data to decide how to rank your website/webpage. Your site does not have to be a monster authority site to rank highly. Rather, you can rank highly by getting high quality backlinks from other authority sites. Let's pretend that the health expert from earlier told us that Joe Shmo actually made some good points and his opinions are quite valid. Wouldn't we start to trust Joe Shmo more and see more value in his opinion? Similarly, if an authority health site linked to Joe Shmo's small niche site, Google would realize that maybe Joe's site is more authoritative then they realized, and they would rank it higher. The web is not controlled by computers. It is run by people, and this is reflected in the way we act and link online. Search Engines know this and respond accordingly to try to give us the results that we demand and construct ourselves. How do we get Backlinks? Now that we know the importance of backlinks and why they affect our rankings the way they do, we need to figure out how we can get some. A full answer to this question might take some hundreds of pages, so we're going to take a broad view of some backlinking strategies to get a good idea of how to get quality backlinks. Sadly, backlinking isn't as simple or straight forward as our health expert example above. You're not so likely to be granted a link from some powerful authority such as CNN or Apple just for creating great content. Our techniques are going to have to be a little more guerilla-esque. This isn't to say that the quality of your content doesn't matter, it's quite the opposite. At the core of your promotion and backlinking strategy should be great, quality content. We'll assume you already know how to make great content and get on with the backlinking. There are many different ways to get backlinks and each of the methods takes time to learn and master. Rather than getting super-in-depth with any single backlinking strategy, I'm going to provide you with a list of ways to get backlinks. We are going to continue this SEO course by covering the governing principles of backlinks and how to measure their quality - knowledge you can apply to every single backlinking method successfully. Here's a comprehensive list of ways to get backlinks: Free blogs (blogger, wordpress, squidoo) Profile backlinks Blog commenting Article Marketing Press releases Social Bookmarks Website directories Blog Carnivals Video marketing Forum Commenting Document Distributors Podcast Directories Software Distributors Each of these methods can be deeply explored to achieve the best results. For this SEO Course, we are instead going to cover the factors that make a great backlink. Anchor Text Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyper-link. For example, if you look at the links in the resource box for this article, one of them has the anchor text "SEO Course" while the other simply has my website's URL as the anchor text. Anchor text is very powerful and has a big impact on how effective a backlink is. Anchor text gives search engines a quick glimpse of what the page on the other side is going to be about, so you want to use your keyword and other keyword variations as often as you can. Google and other SEs look at the text closest to a link to decide what it's about, and in essence, your anchor text is technically the closest text to the link (it IS the link!). You won't always have the option to use anchor text, but don't give up an opportunity when one presents itself. Relevance Relevance is another factor that decides how effective a backlink is. Relevance really is the name of the game when it comes to ranking in the search engines. Google says over and over again, their goal is to provide the most relevant search results. This means having relevant content and having relevant backlinks pointing to your content. A relevant backlink appears to be very relatable to your keyword. The same factors that make any page relevant to a keyword are the factors that would make a backlink relevant to your keyword. For instance, an article with a good keyword density for your keyword and your keyword in your anchor text would be pretty relevant. To increase the relevance of any backlink you can use proper anchor text, surround the link with relevant text, and use a relevant title if possible. PageRank The effect of PageRank on you rankings is often completely overrated. The honest truth is that PR is NOT that important in how well you rank for your keyword. It is but one of over 200 factors that affect your ranking and its value is often exaggerated. It's always better to get backlinks from high PR pages when you can, but don't place too much importance on it. One really obvious misconception is that if the home page of a site has a high PR, then any page you get a link from on that domain is going to pass a lot of PageRank. For example, people who sell link packets sometimes tout how they have high PR forums you can get links from. This doesn't make any sense at all because your link is not going to be on the home page. It is called PAGE Rank, not SiteRank - it's right in the name! If you create a profile link on any forum, it's going to be on your new profile page with a PR 0. Getting links from High PageRank pages (pages - not sites) is great and definitely helpful, but it's not the holy grail to ranking. Nofollow Vs. "Dofollow" Another factor that affects links is whether or not they have the nofollow link element applied to them. The nofollow link attribute was created to tell Google to ignore certain links. In essence these would be links to sites that you aren't completely comfortable linking out to. Google states that the nofollow tag should be used for links that are paid or lead to untrusted content. Also, they are a little vague about how they crawl nofollow links. They say that they generally do not, but they do sometimes:/ (I know right?) So what does this mean for our backlinking? Google states very clearly that nofollow links do NOT pass anchor text or PR. Matt Cutts, Google's outspoken web spam engineer, has also said plainly that there is no SEO benefit in a nofollow link. He might have said that in an effort to slow down people spamming sites/pages with nofollow links, or he might have been completely truthful. We can't really tell, so I'll let you be the judge. So do we care or not if a backlink is nofollow? Here's a logical way to decide which links will be worth your time: When blog commenting, if you come across a blog, and all the comments are "nofollowed" ask yourself this: Will I get traffic from this link? If the answer is yes then post a comment, if not, you might want to just move on. Don't forget - the whole point of doing SEO is to get targeted traffic, so why would you ever turn down targeted traffic just because a link is nofollow? I will still leave comments on blogs that use nofollow on comment links, but only if there are signs of decent traffic on the blog. Indexing Our Links The last thing you need to know about backlinks is that they need to get indexed. Search engines won't give you credit for a link they don't know exists. You need to get one of their spiders/bots to the page with your backlink on it so that they crawl your link and find that it leads to your site. There are two easy (and FREE) ways to go about getting your links indexed. 1) Social Bookmarking Social bookmarking sites get crawled constantly by the search engines. When you post a bookmark on one, you're link will likely be crawled in a matter of hours. It really is that easy. Of course, you can never guarantee anything that Google or other search engines will do, but you're link/page is more than likely to be indexed in a relatively short period of time with just a bookmark or two. 2) Pinging The actual technical process of pinging isn't important to us. Put simply, pinging notifies the search engines that you have new content, and in response, they crawl that new content. This is another fast and effective way to get your backlinks indexed. There are a number of good, free pinging services, but the one I use most is pingomatic.com SEO Course Conclusion Backlinks are essential to getting the top rankings that you desire. They give your site authority and relevance in the eyes of the search engines. Backlinking doesn't have to be a dry, tedious process, nor does it need to be confusing and complicated. If you follow all of the above guidelines in this free SEO Course, you should have no problem getting the high quality backlinks from any backlinking strategy or source that will get your site to spot #1. Ben Jackson is a Search Engine Optimization expert and founder of www.seodiscovery.org.

You made a backlink, so what? Here's an important revelation that every new SEO and webmaster must have: just because you put something on the web doesn't mean that Google knows about it. If you build it, they will NOT come. Most of the time you need to help Google find the content that you have generated be it your site or some article in a directory. In other words, you need your web properties to be indexed. So how do you do this? I'm glad you asked;) Getting backlinks indexed can be tricky. Sometimes it happens quickly and painlessly, but other times you have to work at it a bit more. You can't spend all your time constantly checking up on links especially if you just made 1,000 profile backlinks, so you need a consistent strategy that you can apply to every backlink you make. In essence, getting your backlinks indexed means pointing more backlinks to your backlinks. There are two simple ways to go about doing this. 1. Social Bookmarking Social sites get crawled CONSTANTLY by Google. Any bookmark you post on a site like Digg or Delicious is going to get indexed rather quickly. This is what happens: One of Google's spiders is busy crawling the social site and comes across the web page that has your bookmark on it. The bookmark you posted has a link to the page with your backlink on it. The spider follows the link in your bookmark and finds the page with the backlink you made on it - it is now indexed. In all honesty, this is all you have to do most of the time to get your links quickly indexed by Google or any of the other Search Engines. 2. Pinging Another very easy and efficient way to get backlinks indexed is by pinging. Think of pinging like this: you create a page on the web, but no one knows about it yet (ie Google). When you ping the page, it's like you've raised a red flag - you're saying "Hey! Come look at this!" And the search engines respond appropriately. If used in conjunction with social bookmarking, you shouldn't have too much trouble getting any of your backlinks indexed. The above strategies are the most efficient, cost-free methods of indexing. If you find that it is taking too long to carry out this process for backlinking, you can always purchase an automation software to do everything for you. There are also programs for more intense backlink indexing such as Backlink Index Express, Backlink Energizer, and SEO Fast Indexer. These tools do more than just pinging and social bookmarking and they do it well.  Backlinking is crucial to your site's success in the SERPs, but it doesn't stop there. Simply creating backlinks is not enough to ensure high rankings; you have to make sure that these links are found by the search engines.You can do this through social bookmarking, pinging, or with paid tools recommended in this SEO Course. Ben Jackson is an SEO expert and founder of www.seodiscovery.org: Master SEO for FREE - No Payments, No Opt-ins, Just Knowledge.