After you have been dealing for some time with SEO on your own, you discover that no matter how hard you try, your site does not rank well or that your site ranks well but optimizing it for search engines takes all your time and all your other tasks lag behind. If this is the case with you, maybe it is better to consider hiring a SEO company to do the work for you. With so many SEO companies out there, you can’t complain that you have no choice. Or is it just the opposite – so many companies but few reliable?

It is stretching the truth to say that there are no reliable SEO companies. Yes, there might be many scam SEO companies but if you know what to look for when selecting a SEO company, the risk of hiring fraudsters is reduced. It is much better if you yourself have a substantial knowledge of SEO and can easily decide if they promise you the starts in the sky or their goals are realistic but even if you are not quite familiar with SEO practices, here is a list with some points to watch for when choosing a SEO company:

• Do they promise to guarantee #1 ranking?If they do, you have a serious reason to doubt their competencies. As the Google SEO selection tips say, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking in Google. This is true even for not so competitive words.

• Get recommendation from friends, business partners, etc.Word of mouth is very important for the credibility of a company. For instance, we do not perform SEO services but despite that we constantly receive e-mails asking for SEO services. We always direct these inquiries to Blackwood Productions because we have worked with this company for a long time and we know that they are competent and reliable.

• Ask in forums. There are many reputable Web master forums, so if you can’t find somebody who can recommend you a SEO company right away, consider asking in Web master forums. However, beware that not all forum posters are honest people, so take their opinion (no matter if positive or negative) with a grain of salt. Forums are not such a reliable source of information as in-person contact.

• Google the company name. If the company is a known fraudster, chances are that you will find a lot of information about it on the Web. However, lack of negative publicity does not mean automatically that the company is great, nor do some subjective negative opinions mean that the company is a scammer.

• Ask for examples of sites they have optimized. Happy customers are the best form of promotion, so feel free to ask your potential SEO company about sites they have optimized and references from clients. If you get a rejection because of confidentiality reasons, this must ring a bell about the credibility of the SEO company – former customers are not supposed to be a secret.

• Check the PR of their own site. If they can’t optimize their site well enough to get a good PR (over 4-5), they are not worth hiring.

• Ask them what keywords their site ranks for.Similarly to the page rank factor, if they don’t rank well for the keywords of their choice, they are hardly as professional as they are pretending to be.

• Do they use automated submissions? If they do, stay away from them. Automated submissions can get you banned from search engines.

• Do they use any black hat SEO tricks? You need to know in advance what black hat SEO is in order to judge them, so getting familiar with the most important black hat SEO tricks is worth before you go and start cross-examining them.

• Where do they collect backlinks from? Backlinks are very, very important for SEO success but if they come from link farms and other similar sites, this can cause a lot of trouble. So, make sure the SEO firm collects links from reputable sites only.

• Get some personal impressions, if possible. Gut instinct and impressions from meetings are also a way to judge company, though sometimes it is not difficult to get mislead, so use this approach with caution.

• High price does not guarantee high quality. If you are eager to pay more, this does not mean that you will get more. Just because a firm costs more DOES NOT make them better SEO’s. There are many reasons for high prices and high quality is only one of them. For instance, the company might work inefficiently and this is the reason for their ridiculously high costs, not the quality of their work.

• Cheap is more expensive. This is also true. If you think you can pay peanuts for a professional SEO campaign, then you need to think again. Professional SEO companies offer realistic prices.

• Use tricky questions. Using tricky questions is a double-edged sword, especially if you are not an expert. But there are several easy questions that can help you. For instance, you might ask them how many search engines they will automatically submit your site to. If they are scammers, they will try to impress you with big numbers. But in this case, the best answer would be “no automatic submissions”. Another tricky question is to ask them if they will place in you top 10 for some competitive keywords of your choice. The trap here is that it is them, not you, who chooses the words that are best for your site. It is not that probable that they will choose exactly the same words as you suggest, so if they tell you that you just give them the words and they push you to the top, tell them “Goodbye”.

• Do they offer subscription services? SEO is a constant process and if you want to rank well and keep on like that, efforts are necessary all the time. Because of this, it is better to select a company that includes post-optimization maintenance, than get a company that pushes your site to the top and then leaves you in the wild on your own.

We tried to mention some of the most important issues in selecting a SEO company. Of course, there are many other factors to consider and each case is different, so give it some thought, before you sign the contract for hiring a SEO company.

1. Start with a simple problem. All of the most successful online services start with a simple premise and execute on it well with great focus.  This could be Google with it’s command-line search engine, Flickr with photo sharing, Digg with user generated news.  State your problem simply: “I make it easier to do X”.  Focus on solving it elegantly and simply, only add features carefully.  Over time, complexity will become the enemy of both your product design and your software architecture, so start with as much focus as you can muster.

2. Create prototypes as early as possible.  Get your idea into a working piece of software as quickly as possible.  The longer you take to go through one entire cycle, the more unknown work you have ahead of you.  Not producing software also means that you are not getting better and better at turning the work of your team into the most important measurable output: Functioning software.  Throughout the life of your product, turning your ideas into software as quickly and inexpensively as possible will be one of the most important activities to get right.

3. Get people on the network to work with the product prototype rapidly and often.  The online world today is fundamentally people-centric.  If your product isn’t about them and how it makes their lives better, your product really doesn’t matter.  And if they’re not using your Web application as soon as possible, you just don’t know if you are building the right product.  Constant, direct feedback from real people is the most important input to our product design after your idea.  Don’t wait months for this to happen; get a beta out to the world, achieve marketplace contact in weeks, or at most a few months, and watch carefully what happens. This approach is sometimes called Web 2.0 Development .

4. Release early and release often.  Don’t get caught up in the massive release cycle approach, no matter how appealing it may be.  Large releases let you push off work tomorrow that should be done today.  It also creates too much change at once and often has too many dependencies, further driving an increase in the release.  Small releases almost always work better, are easier to manage, but can require a bit more operations overhead. Done right, and your online product with iterate and improve faster and more regularly than your competitors. Some online products, notably Flickr, have been on record as saying they make releases to production up to several times a day.  This is a development velocity that many new startups don’t understand and appreciate. Agile software development processes are a good model to start with and and these and even more extreme methods have worked well in the Web 2.0 community for years.

5. Manage your software development and operations to real numbers that matter.  The real problem with software is its fundamentally intangible nature.  Combine that with human nature, which is to manage to what you can see, and you can have a real problem.  There is a reason why software development has such a variable nature in terms of time, budget, and resources. Make sure you have as many real numbers as possible to manage to: Who is making how many commits a week to the source repository, how many registered users are there on a daily basis, what does the user analytics look like, which product features are being used most/least this month, what are the top 5 complaints of customers, and so on.  All of these are important key performance indicators that far too many startups don’t manage and respond to as closely as they should.

6. Gather usage data from your users and input it back into product design as often as possible.  Watch what your users do live with your product, what they click on, what do they try to do with it, what they don’t use, and so on.  You will be surprised; they will do things you never expected, have trouble with features that seem easy to you, and not understand parts of your product that seemed obvious.  Gather this data often and feed it back into your usability and information architecture processes.  Some Web applications teams do this almost daily, others look at click stream analytics once a quarter, and some don’t it at all.  Guess who is  shaping their product faster and in the right direction?

7. Put off irreversible architecture and product design decisions as long as possible. Get in the habit of asking “How difficult will it be to change our mind about this later?” Choosing a programming language, Web framework, relational database design, or a software interface tend to be one-way decisions that are hard to undo.  Picking a visual design, logo, layout, or analytics tool generally is not.  Consequently, while certain major decisions must be made up front, be vigilant for seemingly innocuous decisions that will be difficult to reverse.  Not all of these will be a big deal, but it’s all too often a surprise to many people where the architect should be malleable. Reduce unpleasant surprises by always asking this question.

8. Choose the technologies later and think carefully about what your product will do first.  First, make sure your ideas will work on the Web. I’ve seen too many startups with ideas that will work in software but not on the Web.  Second, Web technologies often have surprising limits, Ajax can’t do video or audio, Flash is hard to get to work with SEO for example.  Choosing a technology too early will constrain what is possible later on.  That being said, you have to choose as rapidly as you can within this constraint since you need to build prototypes and the initial product as soon as you are able.

9. When you do select technologies, consider current skill sets and staff availability.  New, trendy technologies can have major benefits including higher levels of productivity and compelling new capabilities, but it also means it’ll be harder to find people who are competent with them.  Having staff learn new technology on the job can be painful, expensive, and risky.  Older technologies are in a similar boat; you can find people that know them but they’ll most likely not want to work with them.  This means the middle of the road is often the best place to be when it comes to selecting technology, though you all-too-often won’t have a choice depending on what your staff already knows or because of the pre-requisites of specific technologies that you have to use.

10. Balance programmer productivity with operational costs.  Programming time is the most expensive part of product creation up front while operations is after you launch.  Productivity-oriented platforms such as Ruby on Rails are very popular in the Web community to drive down the cost of product development but can have significant run-time penalties later when you are supporting millions of users.  I’ve previously discussed the issues and motivations around moving to newer programming languages and platforms designed for the modern Web, and I encourage you to read it. Productivity-oriented platforms tend to require more operational resources during run-time, and unlike traditional software products, the majority of the cost of operations falls upon the startup.  Be aware of the cost and scale of the trade-offs since every dollar you save on the development productivity side translates into a run-time cost forever after on the operations side.

11. Variability in the productivity amongst programmers and development platforms each varies by an order of magnitude.  Combined together and your choice of programming talent and software development platforms can result in a 100x overall effect on product development productivity.  This means that some teams can ship product in as little as 3 months and some projects won’t ship ever, at least not without truly prohibitive time and resource requirements.  While there are a great many inputs to an Internet startup that will help or hinder it (take a look at Paul Graham’s great 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups for a good list), these are two of the most central and variable: Who is developing the product and what development platform they are using. Joel Spolsky’s write-up on programmer productivity remains one of the best at understanding this issue.  It usually turns out that paying a bit more for the right developer can often mean tremendous output gains.  One the other side of the coin, choosing a development platform not designed for creating modern Web applications is another decision that can sap your team of productivity while they spend months retrofitting it for the features they’ll need to make it work properly in today’s Internet world. 

12. Plan for testing to be a larger part of software development process than non-Web applications.  Cross browser testing, usability, and performance/load testing are much bigger issues with Web applications than many non-Web applications.  Having to do thorough testing in a half-dozen to a dozen browser types can be an unexpected tax on the time and cost of creating a Web product.  Doing adequate load testing is another item that often waits until the end, the very worst time to find where the bottlenecks in your architecture are.  Plan to test more than usual.  Insist on automated unit and integration tests that build up over time and run without having to pay developers or testers to do it manually.

13. Move beyond traditional application hosting. Single Web-server hosting models are not going to suffice for your 2.0 applications.  Reliability, availability, and scalability are essential and must be designed into your run-time architecture and supported by your hosting environment.  Solutions like 3Tera, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and Google’s App Engine are three compelling, yet very different solutions to the hosting problem.  Either way, grid and cloud approaches to hosting will help you meet your growth and scalability requirements while managing your costs.

14. Have an open source strategy.  This has two important aspects.  One, developing and hosting a product built with open source software (the ubiquitious LAMP stack) is almost always much less expensive than using commercial software and is what most online products use.  There are certainly commercial licenses that have fair terms for online services, but almost none of them will match the cost of free.  This is one reason why you won’t find Windows or Oracle embedded in very many Web 2.0 services.  Two, you’ll have to decide whether to open source or commercial open source your product.  This has entirely to do with what your product does and how it does it, but an increasing number of Web 2.0 hosted products are releasing their offerings as open source to appeal to customers, particularly if they are business customers. Done right, open sourcing can negate arguments about the size of your company while enlisting many 3rd party developers to help enrich and make your product better.

15. Consider mobile users as important as your regular browser customers.  Mobile devices will ultimately form the majority of your user base as the capability and adoption of smartphones, Internet tablets, laptops, and netbooks ushers in mobile Web use as the dominant model.  Having an application strategy as well as well-supported applications for the iPhone, Android, and RIM platforms is essential for most Web products these days.  By the time you get to market, mobile will be even more important than it is now.  Infoworld confirmed today, in fact, that wireless enterprise development will be one of 2009’s bright spots.

16. Search is the new navigation, make it easy to use in your application.  You have 5-10 seconds for a new user to find what they want from your site or application.  Existing users want to directly access what they need without going through layers of menu items and links.  Search is the fastest way to provide random access navigation.  Therefore, offer search across data, community, and help at a minimum.  A search box must be on the main page and indeed, every page of the modern Web application. 

17. Whenever users can provide data to your product, enable them.  Harnessing collective intelligence is the most central high-level principle of Web 2.0 applications.  To be a major online competitor, getting your millions of users to build a valuable data set around the clock is the key to success. Many product designers look at this too narrowly and usually at a small set of data.  Keep a broad view of this and look for innovative ways to get information from explicit contributions to the database of intentions can form your architecture of participation.

18. Offer an open API so that your Web application can be extended by partners around the world.  I’ve covered this topic many times in the past and if you do it right, your biggest customers will soon become 3rd party Web applications building upon your data and functionality.  Critically, offering an API converts your online product into an open platform with an ecosystem of 3rd party partners.  This is just one of many ways to realize Jakob’s law, as is the next item.

19. Make sure your product can be spread around the Web by users, provide widgets, badges, and gadgets.  If your application has any success at all, your users will want to take it with them and use your features elsewhere.  This is often low-effort but can drive enormous growth and adoption; think about YouTube’s badge. 

20. Create features to make the product distribute virally.  The potency of this is similar to widgets above and everything from simple e-mail friend invites to importing contact lists and social graphs from other Web apps are critical ways to ensure that a user can bring the people they want into the application to drive more value for them and you.   

21. The link is the fundamental unit of thought on the Web, therefore richly link-enable your applications.  Links are what make the Web so special and fundamentally makes it work.  Ensuring your application is URL addressable in a granular way, especially if you have a rich user experience, is vital to participate successfully on the Web.  The Web’s link ecosystem is enormously powerful and is needed for bookmarking, link sharing/propagation, advertising, makes SEO work, drives your page rank, and much more.  Your overall URL structure should be thought out and clean, look to Flickr and del.cio.us for good examples.

22. Create an online user community for your product and nurture it.  Online communities are ways to engage passionate users to provide feedback, support, promotion, evangelism and countless other useful outcomes.  While this is usually standard fare now with online products, too many companies don’t start this early enough or give it enough resources despite the benefits it confers in terms of customer support, user feedback, and free marketing, to name just three benefits.  Investing in online community approaches is ultimately one of the least expensive aspects of your product, no matter the upfront cost. Hire a good community manager and set them to work.

23. Offer a up-to-date, clean, compelling application design.  Attractive applications inherently attract new customers to try them and is a pre-requisite to good usability and user experience.  Visual and navigational unattractiveness and complexity is also the enemy of product adoption.  Finally, using the latest designs and modes provides visual cues that conveys that the product is timely and informed.  A good place to start to make sure you’re using the latest user experience ideas and trends is Smashing Magazine’s 2009 Web Design survey.

24. Load-time and responsiveness matter, measure and optimize for them on a regular basis.  This is not a glamorous aspect of Web applications but it’s a fundamental that is impossible to ignore.  Every second longer a key operation like main page load or a major feature interaction takes, the more likely a customer is to consider finding a faster product.  On the Web, time is literally money and building high speed user experiences is essential.  Rich Internet Application technologies such as Ajax and Flash, albeit used wisely, can help make an application seem as fast as the most responsive desktop application. Using content distribution networks and regional hosting centers.

25. User experience should follow a “complexity gradient.”  Novice users will require a simple interface but will want an application’s capabilities to become more sophisticated over time as they become more skilled in using it.  Offering more advanced features that are available when a user is ready but are hidden until they are allows a product to grow with the user and keeps them engaged instead of looking for a more advanced alternative. 

26. Monetize every page view.  There is no excuse for not making sure every page is driving bottom-line results for your online business.  Some people will disagree with this recommendation and advertising can often seem overly commercial early in a product’s life.  However, though a Web application should never look like a billboard, simple approaches like one line sponsorships or even public service messages are good ideas to maximize the business value of the product and there are other innovation approaches as well.

27. Users’ data belongs to them, not you.  This is a very hard strategy for some to accept and you might be able to get away with bending this rule for a while, that is, until some of your users want to move their data elsewhere.  Data can be a short-term lock-in strategy, but long-term user loyalty comes from treating them fairly and avoiding a ‘Roach Motel’ approach to user data (”they can check-in their data, but they can’t check out.”) Using your application should be a reversible process and users should have control of their data.  See DataPortability.org for examples of how to get started with this.

28. Go to the user, don’t only make them come to you.  The aforementioned APIs and widgets help with this but are not sufficient.  The drive strong user adoption, you have to be everywhere else on the Web that you can be. This can mean everything from the usual advertising, PR, and press outreach but it also means creating Facebook applications, OpenSocial gadgets, and enabling use from mashups. These methods can often be more powerful than all the traditional ways combined.

29. SEO is as important as ever, so design for it.  One of the most important stream of new users will be people coming in from search engines looking for exactly what you have.  This stream is free and quite large if you are ensuring your data is URL addressable and can be found via search engine Web crawlers.  Your information architecture should be deeply SEO-friendly and highly granular.

30. Know thy popular Web standards and use them.  From a consumer or creator standpoint, the data you will exchange with everyone else will be in some format or another.  And the usefulness of that data or protocol will be in inverse proportion to how well-known and accepted the standard is.  This generally means using CSS, Javascript, XHTML, HTTP, ATOM, RSS, XML, JSON, and so on. Following open standards enables the maximum amount of choice, flexibility, time-to-market, access to talent pools, and many other benefits over time to both you and your customers.

31. Understand and apply Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA). The Web has a certain way that it works best and understanding how HTTP works at a deep level is vital for getting the most out of the unique power that the Internet has to offer.  But HTTP is just the beginning of this way of thinking about the Web and how to use its intrinsic power to be successful with with it.  This includes knowing why and how link structure, network effects, SEO, API ecosystems, mashups, and other aspects of the Web are key to making your application flourish.  It’s important to note that your internal application architecture is likely not fundamentally Web-oriented itself (because most software development platforms are not Web-oriented) and you’ll have to be diligent in enabling a WOA model in your Web-facing product design.  The bottom line: Non-Web-oriented products tend not to fare very well by failing to take advantage of the very things that have made the Web itself so successful.

32. Online products that build upon enterprise systems should use open SOA principles. Large companies building their first 2.0 products will often use existing IT systems and infrastructure that already have the data and functionality they need.  Although they will often decouple and cache them for scalability and performance, the connectedness itself is best done using the principles of SOA. That doesn’t necessarily mean traditional SOA products and standards, although it could, often using more Web-oriented methods works better.  What does this really mean? Stay away from proprietary integration methods and use the most open models you can find, understanding that the back-end of most online products will be consumed by more than just your front-end (see API discussion above for a fuller exploration).

33. Strategically use feeds and syndication to enable deep content distribution.  This is another way to use Jakob’s Law to increase unintended uses and consumption of an application from other sites and ecosystems.  Feeds enable many beneficial use cases such as near real-time perception of fresh data in your application from across the Web in feed readers, syndication sites, aggregators, and elsewhere.  Like many other techniques here, knee-jerk use of feeds won’t drive much additional usage and adoption, but carefully designing feeds to achieve objectives like driving new customers back to the application directly from the feed can make a big difference.  Failing to offer useful feeds is one of the easiest ways to miss out on business opportunities while giving your competitors an edge.

34. Build on the shoulders of giants; don’t recreate what you can source from elsewhere.  Today’s Internet application usually require too much functionality to be cost-effectively built by a single effort.  Typically, an application will actually source dozens of components and external functionality from 3rd parties.  This could be off-the-shelf libraries or it could be the live use of another site’s API, the latter which has become one of the most interesting new business models in the Web 2.0 era.  The general rule of thumb: Unless it’s a strategic capability of your application, try hard to source it from elsewhere before you build it; 3rd parties sources are already more hardened, robust, less expensive, and lower defect than any initial code could that you could produce. Get used to doing a rapid build vs. buy evaluation for each major component of your application.

35. Register the user as soon as possible.  One of the most valuable aspects of your onine product will be the registered user base.  Make sure you application gives them a good reason to register and that the process is as painless as possible.  Each additional step or input field will increase abandonment of the process and you can always ask for more information later. Consider making OpenID the default login, with your local user database a 2nd tier, to make the process even easier and more comfortable for the user.

36. Explicitly enable your users to co-develop the product.  I call this concept Product Development 2.0 and it’s one of the most potent ways to create a market-leading product by engaging the full capabilities of the network.  The richest source of creative input you will have is your audience of passionate, engaged users.  This can be enabled via simple feedback forms, harvested from surveys and online community forums, via services such as GetSatisfaction, or as the ingredients to mashups and user generated software. As you’ll see below, you can even open the code base or provide a plug-in approach/open APIs to allow motivated users and 3rd parties to contribute working functionality.  Whichever of these you do, you’ll find that the innovation and direction to be key to making your product the richest and most robust it can be.  A significant percentage of the top online products in the world take advantage of this key 2.0 technique.

37. Provide the legal and collaborative foundations for others to build on your data and platform.  A good place to start is to license as much of your product as you can via Creative Commons or another licensing model that is less restrictive and more open than copyright or patents. Unfortunately, this is something for which 20th century business models around law, legal precedent, and traditional product design are ill-equipped to support and you’ll have to look at what other market leaders are doing with IP licensing that is working.  Giving others explicit permission up-front to repurpose and reuse your data and functionality in theirs can be essential to drive market share and success. Another good method is to let your users license their data as well and Flickr is famous for doing this.  It’s important to understand that this is now the Some Right Reserved era, not the All Rights Reserved era.  So openly license what your have for others to use; the general rule of thumb is that the more you give away, the more you’ll get back, as long as you have a means of exercising control.  This is why open APIs have become as popular as they have, since they are essentially “IP-as-a-service” and poorly behaving partner/licensees can be dealt with quickly and easily.

38. Design your product to build a strong network effect.  The concept of the network effect is something I’ve covered here extensively before and it’s one of the most important items in this list.  At their most basic, Web 2.0 applications are successful because of they explicitly leverage network effects.  It is how most of the leading Internet companies got so big, so fast.  Measuring network effects and driving them remains one of the most poorly understood yet critical aspects of competing successfully online.  The short version: It’s extremely hard to fight an established network effect (particularly because research has shown them to be highly exponential).  Instead, find a class of data or a blue ocean market segment for your product and its data to serve.

39. Know your Web 2.0 design patterns and business models.  The fundamental principles of Web 2.0 were all identifid and collected together for a good reason.  Each principle is something that must be considered carefully in the design of your product given how they can magnify your network effect. Your development team must understand them and know why they’re important, especially what outcomes they will drive in your product and business.  It’s the same with Enterprise 2.0 products: There is another, related set of design principles (which I’ve summarized as FLATNESSES) that makes them successful as well.  And as with everything on this list, you don’t apply 2.0 principles reflexively; they need to be intelligently used for good reason.

40. Integrate a coherent social experience into your product.  Social systems tend to have a much more pronounced network effect (Reed’s Law) than non-social systems. Though no site should be social without a good reason, it turns out that most applications will benefit from having a social experience.  What does this mean in practice? In general, social applications let users perceive what other users are doing and actively encourage them to interact, work together, and drive participation through social encouragement and competition.  There is a lot of art to the design of the social architecture of an online product, but there is also an increasing amount of science.  Again, you can look at what successful sites are doing with their social interaction but good places to start are with user profiles, friends lists, activity streams, status messages, social media such as blogs and microsharing, and it goes up from there.  Understand how Facebook Connect and other open social network efforts such as OpenSocial can help you expand your social experience.

41. Understand your business model and use it to drive your product design.  Too many Web 2.0 applications hope that they will create large amounts of traffic and will then find someone interested in acquiring them.  Alternatively, some products charge too much up front and prevent themselves from reaching critical mass. While over-thinking your exit strategy or trying to determine your ultimate business model before you do anything isn’t good either, too many startups don’t sit down and do the rigorous thinking around how to make their business a successful one in the nearer term.  Take a look at Andrew Chen’s How To Create a Profitable Freemium Startup for a good example of the framework on how to do some of the business model planning.  Taking into account the current economic downturn and making sure you’re addressing how you offering can help people and businesses in the current business climate will also help right now.

42. Embrace emergent development methods.  While a great many of the Web’s best products had a strong product designer with a clear vision that truly understood his or her industry, the other half of the equation that often gets short shrift is the quality of emergent design through open development.  This captures the innate crowdsourcing aspects of ecosystem-based products, specifically those that have well-defined points of connectedness with external development inputs and 3rd party additions.   Any Web application has some emergent development if it takes development inputs or extensibility with via 3rd party plug-ins, widgets, open APIs, open source contributions, and so on.  The development (and a good bit of the design) of the product then “emerges” as a function of multiple inputs.  Though there is still some top-down control, in essence, the product becomes more than the sum total of its raw inputs.  Products like Drupal and Facebook are good examples of this, with thousands of plug-ins or 3rd party apps that have been added to them by other developers.

43. It’s all about usability, usability, and usability.  I’ve mentioned usability before in this list but I want to make it a first class citizen.  Nothing will be a more imposing barrier to adoption that people not understanding how your product works.  Almost nothing on this list will work until the usability of your application is a given.  And hands down the most common mistake I see are Web developers creating user experiences in isolation.  If you’re not funded to have a usability lab (and you probably should be, at some level), then you need to grab every friend and family member you have to watch how they use your application for the first time.  Do this again for every release that makes user experience changes.  You will change a surprising number of assumptions and hear feedback that you desperately need to hear before you invest any more in a new user experience approach.  This now true even if you’re developing enterprise applications for the Web.

44. Security isn’t an afterthought.  It’s a sad fact that far too much of a successful startup’s time will be spent on security issues.  Once you are popular, you will be the target of every so-called script kiddie with a grudge or with the desire to get at your customer data, etc. Software vulnerability are numerous and the surface area of modern Web apps large. You not only have your own user experience but also your API, widgets, semantic Web connections, social networking applications, and other points of attack.  Put aside time and budget for regular vulnerability assessments.  You can’t afford a public data spill or exploit due to a security hole that will compromise your user’s data, or you may well find yourself with a lot of departing customers.Web 2.0 applications also need unique types of security systems, from rate limiters to prevent valuable user-generated data from being systematically scraped from the site (this is vital to “maintaining control of unique and hard-to-re-create datasets”) to monitoring software that will screen for objectionable or copyrighted contributions.

45. Stress test regularly and before releases.  It’s a well known saying in the scalability business that your next bottleneck is hiding just behind your last high water mark. Before your launch, data volumes and loads that work fine in the lab should be tested to expected production volumes before launch.  The Web 2.0 industry is rife with examples of companies that went down the first time they got a good traffic spike.  That’s the very worst time to fail, since it’s your best chance of getting a strong initial network effect and may forever reduce your ultimate success.  Know your volume limits and ceilings with each release and prepare for the worst.

46. Backup and disaster recovery, know your plan.  This is another unglamorous but essential aspect for any online product.  How often are backups being made of all your data? Are the backups tested? Are they kept offsite? If you don’t know the answers, the chances that you’ll survive a major event is not high.

47. Good Web products understand that there is more than the Web.  Do you have a desktop widget for Vista or the Mac? Might you benefit from offering an Adobe AIR client version of your application? How about integration and representation in vitual worlds and games?  How about linkages to RFID or GPS sensors? Startups thinking outside the box might even create their own hardware device if it makes sense (see Chumby and the iPhone/iPod for examples).  If one thing that is certain is that the next generation of successful Web startups will only partially resemble what we see today.  Successful new online products will take advantage of “software above the level of a single device” and deliver compelling combinations of elements into entirely new products that are as useful and innovative as they are unexpected.  A great Web 2.0 product often has a traditional Web application as only part of its overall design, see the Doritos Crash the Superbowl campaign for just one small example of this.

48. Look for emerging areas on the edge of the Web.  These are the spaces that have plenty of room for new players and new ideas, where network effects aren’t overly established and marketshare is for the taking. What spaces are these? The Semantic Web seems to be coming back with all new approaches (I continue to be amazed at how much appears about this topic on http://delicious.com/popular/web3.0 these days.) Open platform virtual worlds such as Second Life were hot a few years ago and may be again.  Mobile Web applications are extremely hot today but slated to get over crowded this year as everyone plans a mobile application for phone platforms.  What is coming after this?  That is less clear but those that are watching closely will benefit the most.

49.  Plan to evolve over time, for a long time.  The Web never sits still.  Users change, competitors improve, what’s possible continues to expand as new capabilities emerge in the software and hardware landscape.  In the Perpetual Beta era, products are never really done.  Never forget that, continue to push yourself, or be relegated to a niche in history.

50. Continually improve yourself and your Web 2.0 strategies. While process improvement is one of those lip-service topics that most people will at least admit to aspire to, few have the time and resources to carry it out on a regular basis.  But without that introspection on our previous experience we wouldn’t have many of the “aha” moments that drove forward our industry at various points in term.  Without explicit attempts at improvement, we might not have developed the ideas that became object-oriented languages, search engine marketing, Web 2.0, or even the Internet itself. This list itself is about that very process and encapsulates a lot of what we’ve learned in the last 4 years. Consequently, if you’re not sitting down and making your own list from your own experiences, you’re much more likely to repeat past history, never mind raising the bar. Like I’m often fond of saving; civilization progresses when we make something that was formerly hard to do and make it easy to do. Take the time, capture your lessons learned, and improve your strategies.

Robots.txt

It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you’d rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search engines do not index these pages (although in this case the only sure way for not indexing sensitive data is to keep it offline on a separate machine). Additionally, if you want to save some bandwidth by excluding images, stylesheets and javascript from indexing, you also need a way to tell spiders to keep away from these items.

One way to tell search engines which files and folders on your Web site to avoid is with the use of the Robots metatag. But since not all search engines read metatags, the Robots matatag can simply go unnoticed. A better way to inform search engines about your will is to use a robots.txt file.

What Is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit.

Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of password protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door – e.g. you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will not open to door and enter. That is why we say that if you have really sen sitive data, it is too naïve to rely on robots.txt to protect it from being indexed and displayed in search results.

The location of robots.txt is very important. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory (i.e. http://mydomain.com/robots.txt) and if they don’t find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything they find along the way. So, if you don’t put robots.txt in the right place, do not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

The concept and structure of robots.txt has been developed more than a decade ago and if you are interested to learn more about it, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/ or you can go straight to the Standard for Robot Exclusion because in this article we will deal only with the most important aspects of a robots.txt file. Next we will continue with the structure a robots.txt file.

Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

User-agent:

Disallow:

“User-agent” are search engines’ crawlers and disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded from indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at the beginning of the line:

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

The Traps of a Robots.txt File

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to find but in some cases validation tools help.

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except the /temp directory. Up to here it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user agents (including Googlebot itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ – including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made easily.

Tools to Generate and Validate a Robots.txt File

Having in mind the simple syntax of a robots.txt file, you can always read it to see if everything is OK but it is much easier to use a validator, like this one: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml. These tools report about common mistakes like missing slashes or colons, which if not detected compromise your efforts. For instance, if you have typed:

User agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

this is wrong because there is no slash between “user” and “agent” and the syntax is incorrect.

In those cases, when you have a complex robots.txt file – i.e. you give different instructions to different user agents or you have a long list of directories and subdirectories to exclude, writing the file manually can be a real pain. But do not worry – there are tools that will generate the file for you. What is more, there are visual tools that allow to point and select which files and folders are to be excluded. But even if you do not feel like buying a graphical tool for robots.txt generation, there are online tools to assist you. For instance, the Server-Side Robots Generator offers a dropdown list of user agents and a text box for you to list the files you don’t want indexed. Honestly, it is not much of a help, unless you want to set specific rules for different search engines because in any case it is up to you to type the list of directories but is more than nothing.

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is the lion’s share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you do, topping Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not literally but in terms of effort and time) to top Google and keep there is too high. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate SEO nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can’t use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about possible alternatives.

What are Google Alternatives

The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for the other major search engines, if you have not done it already. Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors, though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, do not expect much.

Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.

Naming all Google alternatives would be a long list and it is outside the scope of this article but just to be a little more precise about what alternatives exist, we cannot skip SEO instruments like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

Web Directories

What is a Web Directory?

Web directories (or as they are better known – search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop directories, where you gather files in a directory based on some criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind (otherwise it will be impossible to browse thousands of pages for let’s say Computers), search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore) and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search directory.

The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Examples of Web Directories

There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites. Other popular general-purpose search directories are Google Directory and Yahoo! Directory. The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites.

Besides general-purpose Web directories, there are incredibly many topical ones. For instance, the The Environment Directory lists links to environmental sites only, while The Radio Directory lists thousands of radio stations worldwide, arranged by country, format, etc. There are also many local and national Web directories, which accept links to sites about a particular region or country only and which can be great if your site is targeted at local and national audience only. You see, it is not possible to mention even the topics of specialized search directories only because the list will get incredibly long. Using Google and specialized search resources like The Search Engines Directory, you can find on your own many directories that are related to your area of interest.

Specialized Search Engines

What is a Specialized Search Engine?

Specialized search engines are one more tool to include in your SEO arsenal. Unlike general-purpose search engines, specialized search engines index pages for particular topics only and very often there are many pages that cannot be found in general-purpose search engines but only in specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for every imaginable topic and it is always wise to be aware of the specialized search engines for your niche. The examples in the next section are by no means a full list of specialized search engines but are aimed to give you the idea of what is available. If you search harder on the Web, you will find many more resources.

Examples of Specialized Search Engines

Probably specialized search engines are not that numeric as Web directories but still certainly there is no shortage of them either, especially if one counts password-protected sites with database accessible only from within the site as a specialized search engine. As with Web directories, if there were a list of specialized search engines it would be really, really long (and constantly changing), so instead, here are some links to lists of search engines: Pandia Powersearch, Webquest, Virtual Search Engines, the already mentioned The Search Engines Directory, etc. What is common for these lists is that they offer a selection of specialized search engines, arranged by topic, so it is a good starting point for the hunt of specialized search engines.

1 Targetting the wrong keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can’t think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2 Ignoring the Title tag

Leaving the <title> tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title.

3 A Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don’t like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can’t read Flash content and therefore can’t index it.

4 JavaScript Menus

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

5 Lack of consistency and maintenance

Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6 Concentrating too much on meta tags

A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don’t except to rank well only because of this.

7 Using only Images for Headings

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text.

8 Ignoring URLs

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

9 Backlink spamming

It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. Here are some more information on The Importance of Backlinks

10 Lack of keywords in the content

Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

If you’ve read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you would have come across the term “backlink” at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are “backlinks”?

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters. A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine’s assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can’t build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don’t practice black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain: interlinking sites doesn’t help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won’t hurt you.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.

Another tool to help you with your link building campaign is the Backlink Builder Tool. It is not enough just to have a large number of inbound links pointing to your site. Rather, you need to have a large number of QUALITY inbound links. This tool searches for websites that have a related theme to your website which are likely to add your link to their website. You specify a particular keyword or keyword phrase, and then the tool seeks out related sites for you. This helps to simplify your backlink building efforts by helping you create quality, relevant backlinks to your site, and making the job easier in the process.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link’s anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like “click here” which probably won’t relate in any way to your website, using the words “Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten” is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink. A good tool for helping you find your backlinks and what text is being used to link to your site is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something incorporating relevant keywords. This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.

It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don’t post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

Search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is set of methods aimed to improve the ranking of a website in search engine results page (SERPs). The term also refers to an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients’ sites.

The Search Engines have there own set of algorithm defined by their Engineers to rank the websites. There are more than 200+ factors defined, that influence any web site’s ranking. To achieve a top ranking (first page) a website needs to follow certain rules that are ethical and come under the guidelines of Search Engines.

If done properly then search engine optimization can work as a magnet to the Search Engine robots. Search Engines bring about 85% of traffic to the Web sites. So it’s very important to rank well in the search engines otherwise you are losing a lot of targeted traffic and that too comes for FREE!

Undeniably RSS is one of the best things that has happened to the web after email. Not only has it made browsing a lot more productive, convenient, fun … you name it, but it has also introduced a number of new ways to interact with content that we could never have imagined before. While you’re most probably already familiar with the idea of RSS feeds and Feedreader (No? See this video) , there are several other ways you can make use of feeds.

(1) SendMeRSS – Send RSS feeds to email

SendMeRSS – Also known as R-mail. If you’re more of an email person and like to follow-up on everything from your email inbox then this is for you. SendMeRSS can take any feed and forward updates to your email. It checks for updates at least once in every two hours so whenever something new gets published it lands in your inbox within at most 2 hours. [All Features].

(2) MailBucket – Forward Emails to RSS feed

MailBucket – Ever wanted to forward emails to your feedreader? Enter MailBucket, a simple online app that can generate custom RSS feeds for your emails. The implementation is quite simple, first you need to create a filter in your email program and set it to forward filtered messages to XYZ@mailbucket.org. Next, open your feedreader and following feed: http://mailbucket.org/XYZ.xml (where XYZ can be anything you choose). While it may be neither convenient nor secure to forward all emails to feeds, it certainly makes sense in some cases, i.e. daily reports, newsletters etc. [All Features]

(3) TwitterFeed – Send RSS feeds to Twitter

TwitterFeed – I have been using Twitterfeed for sometime now and recommend it to everyone. It’s a free service that can be set to track several RSS feeds and send updates to a Twitter account. If you got a blog, you may also consider setting up a separate Twitter account for your blog and ‘twit’ all your blog feeds so that other Twitter users can “follow” it. We have one for MUO as well, you can check it out here.

(4) Pingie – Send RSS feeds to Phone

Pingie (US only) – Get feed updates as SMS messages. It’s absolutely free and works with any cell phone that can receive standard text messages. Nothing to install or download.

(5) FeedJournal – Print RSS feeds to PDF

FeedJournal – Here you can subscribe and convert multiple RSS feeds to an elegant printable newspaper. Just grab your favorite feeds, set preferred layout (i.e. 3- column) and generate a printable newspaper-style document. This is something that would go extremely well with news and lengthy articles.

(6) Wigitize – Add RSS feeds to your Website

Wigitize – If you ever need to add some RSS feeds to your website, Widgitize offers a quick and simple way to do that. Unlike other similar services, Wigitize gives you a really light and plain widget that you can style yourself.

(7) ReminderFeed – Send Reminders to Feedreader

ReminderFeed – Quick and simple way to schedule one-time or recurrent reminders to your feed reader. Just fill-in the reminder form, set start and end dates, and press ‘create’ button to generate custom feed for your reminder.

(8) TagMindr

TagMindr – Another tool to schedule RSS reminders. More than anything else, Tagmindr offers a simple way to remind yourself of webpages or some images you find while browsing the web. Once it’s set you willl be able to easily remind yourself of a link or image that gets bookmarked in your Delicious, Twitter, Flickr or Magnolia accounts. See how it works.

(9) FeedBlendr – Merge RSS feeds

FeedBlendr / FeeDoor – Combine muliple RSS and Atom feeds into one. You can even merge video and audio feeds (such as podcasts) with text feeds.

(10) FeedCrier – Send RSS feeds to IM

FeedCrier – Receive feed updates in your chat program. Feedcrier supports AIM , MSN Messenger, Jabber and Google Talk clients.

(11) ZapTXT – Monitor feeds for Keywords

ZapTXT – ZapTXT enables you to monitor RSS feeds for specific keywords and get alerts as soon as there is a new article that includes specified keywords. Alerts can be set to be delivered to email, instant messaging program or mobile phone.

(12) SpokenText – Convert RSS feeds to Speech

SpokenText – Automatically convert RSS news feeds to speech and subscribe to them as podcasts (via iTunes). You can also download your recordings as an mp3 file.

(13) RSSMixer – Combine RSS feeds

RSSMixer – This nifty tool lets you combine multiple feeds into one master feed and make it accessible via a regular feedreader, iPhone or Apple Dashboard. No-registration requied, simply enter the feeds you want to combine and click “Mix”. Next you will be prompted with a page where you can chose how you want to access it.

(14) AideRSS – Filter RSS Feeds

AideRSS – If you’re subscribed to dozens of popular sources and are having difficulties keeping up with feeds, then AideRSS is for you. Basically, it can take your current subscription list and filter out less popular stories leaving only the BUZZ. Please note, the best way to use it would be on multiple popular sources which publish more than 10-15 stoies per day (Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable etc.)

Did we miss anything ? Let us know in comments.

What is search engine optimization and how does it increase traffic for your site? Internet users usually go to search engines like Google or Yahoo to find the sites that they visit. Chances are that your site, new as it may be, would already be listed in these search engines’ databases. However, even if you appear in the search results page of Google and Yahoo, without search engine optimization, your site could be buried in page ten of the results page. That makes it unlikely for visitors to easily find your web site, even if your site is what they are searching for. The sites on page one of the results page are the sites that employ search engine optimization techniques.

A simple search engine optimization strategy involves the use of popular keywords or keyphrases. Sites like Wordtracker or Google adwords can show the keywords that are often entered on search engines. By making sure that these keywords appear often on your sites’ pages or on pages linked to your site, you increase the frequency that your site is displayed on the results page, as well as improve the ranking for your site.

Another search engine optimization strategy often employed is link farming. This involves a group of web sites linking to each other’s pages. Since search engines often rank sites with lots of other sites linking to them quite highly. Having as many sites as possible linking to your own site is a good way for search engine optimization.

Article marketing is another useful search engine optimization technique that you could use. If you can write interesting articles and post these online with a link to your site, then the search engines would count all these links from all these articles and thus, give you higher rankings. Using the article marketing search engine optimization technique along with extensive keyword use will also further increase the visits your site gets since more people could find these articles using search engines