The biggest omission which I come across when viewing other internet marketer’s websites is the lack of a free giveaway. Most internet marketers feel as though their product or service is so good, that they visitor is going to find your website, buy your offer, and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, this rarely happens. Therefore, you need to entice your visitors to provide you with their e-mail address so that you can build a relationship with them, and make them your customer. Free giveaways, which must be delivered via e-mail, are the best way to capture a visitor’s email address. You just have to make sure that the giveaway is of high perceived value to your niche market.

Something else which I come across way too frequently, are long domain names. Long domain names are both unattractive, and difficult to remember. Generally, the individuals who use these long domain names are attempting to include a key term, such as “make money online”, in their URL. The problem with including these popular key terms in their URL, is the fact that someone beat them to it. For example, “makemoneyonline (dot) com” was registered way back in 1998. Hence, several online marketers will add an additional word to this already long key term. This is just way too long, and not very helpful from a marketing standpoint.

Many websites do not set themselves up to go viral. By this, I mean that they do not provide visitors with an option to email the website to their friends and family. This option is especially important if you use a blog, or a website composed of articles.

Something that you really do not want, is for your website to be a source of frustration for your visitors. It is not uncommon that someone will find an article or a story on your website via the search engines, and be taken right to that page. The problem is that if they come back to your website looking for that same content, it may be difficult to find. This will especially be the case if you have a larger website. Hence, it is important that you utilize navigation tools such as a search box and a sitemap. This will enable visitors to find what they are looking for quickly.

Nowadays, services such as “ShareThis” make it easy to add bookmarking capabilities to your website. Therefore, if a visitors likes what they see, and think that others on the internet will benefit from your website, they can choose from several bookmarking services to bookmark your website. There is no excuse for leaving this out.

As you can see, there are many tools available which will boost your ability to make money online. The best strategy is to utilize all of the tools which can make a positive impact on your success.

Search Engines can see the association, but when you do it in moderation the links count… I’ve done it for years! If your hosting company provides multiple c-class IP’s for each domain, take them, but don’t worry too much about the association between your own sites unless you’re dealing with hundreds of them!

You can also go out and find other sites in your niche to exchange links with. If you’ve owned any amount of Websites for very long at all you’ve probably already received loads of link exchange requests. Unfortunately most of them are automated, impersonal and basically spam! The trick is to do basically everything exactly OPPOSITE of these people!

Good link exchanges are the fruit of networking and being personable and REAL! If you send out an automated, or copy and paste email to hundreds of Webmasters, you can expect very few, if any, of them to respond and your email will probably get marked as spam on top of that! Here are a few “no-no’s” on doing link exchanges, followed by an example of an effective link exchange request: - Do NOT use a “link” page. The traditional way to do link exchanges is to create a separate page, usually titled “links” or “partners” where all of your reciprocal links will appear. This used to work, but it’s a bad idea these days! The best way to do a link exchange is to do selective, contextual link exchanges (links using anchor text within content.) -

Do NOT send automated or copy and paste emails requesting a link exchange!

- Do NOT explain the benefits of link exchanges! If they don’t know the benefits to incoming links, their site is probably trash in the first place. Plus, it’s an insult to explain it to those who know good and well what the benefits are!

- Do NOT ask for a link one click from their homepage, but offer a link 2 or more clicks from your homepage. Remember how authority is passed between pages and be fair!

- Do NOT accept a link deeper in their Website than their link is in yours! In other words, if they’re offering you a link that is 3 clicks from their homepage and they want a link on your Website 1 or 2 clicks from your homepage, tell them where they can shove it, in a nice way of course.

- Do NOT use a link exchange script! There are many scripts out there that you can buy, install on your domain and it basically acts as a directory and link management tool hosted on your domain to make money online. They are handy, but they will get you in trouble with Search Engines quick, fast and in a hurry! Most of them are unfair to link exchange partners too, as their link will be a minimum of 4 clicks from the homepage and that page probably won’t even be indexed. Anyone who knows anything at all about SEO will deny your request in a heartbeat.

- Do NOT use shady tactics that prevent search engines from seeing your link partners links. It’s a 2-way commitment and if you break that commitment you’re going to lose good link partners. Shady people who use nofollow, or exclude certain pages with robots.txt lose in the end!

Don’t be that person! If you don’t want to link out, then don’t do link exchanges, or else you won’t make money online with your tactics.

Websites with more quality backlinks will rank higher with the search engines for a given search term.

The results of an internet search for any given term, words or phrases are displayed in what has been determined to be the most relevant Website to that particular search in the number one spot at the top of the list on the first page. The rest of the Websites that are found are displayed in what are considered to be a descending order of relevance.

A higher rank on search engines will almost certainly result in more traffic. The more traffic a website receives the higher it will rank.

The search engine weighs the amount of traffic or visitors a website receives, or has received recently, as well as the number of backlinks that the website has. The more backlinks and traffic a website receives means to the search engine, that the site is important and very relevant to the word, words, phrase or question being searched for.

A website needs to have as many, if not more backlinks, and backlinks of a higher quality than any websites that it competes directly with for a given search term or key word.

Search engines weigh the quality of backlinks as much as they weigh the quantity. To a search engine a high-quality backlink comes from a website that it trusts with a high PR “page rank” and that is also very relevant or closely related to the site which it links to.

Simply put, a backlink is a vote. One website is voting for, or recommending another website to it’s visitors, and in so doing a website is staking it’s own reputation on that recommendation.

The more votes or recommendations a website receives the more relevant that website is considered to be.

Some website promoters will often try to employ different techniques to manipulate the ranking of the website that they are promoting.

To prevent or at least minimize this kind of manipulation the search engines continually change and update their algorithms, the way in which they decide which website is the most relevant to a given search term. They are looking for natural high quality backlinks and are constantly looking for patterns or signs that might suggest some kind of manipulation.

Page rank is determined simply by the amount of visitors that a website receives. A backlink coming from a trusted website in the same, or very similar category with a very high page rank will be considered far more relevant than the backlinks coming from very low ranked, low quality, unrelated or what the search engines might even consider to be undesirable websites.

Search engines never encourage people to pay for links to their website but paid links are a little bit of a grey area because, a paid advertisement on a website for another website is exactly what it is “an advertisement” but to the search engine if this advertisement is clickable it will also show up as a backlink. The search engine’s filter will decide if it’s to be counted or not.

The Yahoo directory carries a lot of weight with search engines because even though Yahoo does charge a fee to have a website listed in their directory, they are very discerning and quite expensive. Search engines consider a link from the Yahoo directory to be a very relevant high quality backlink.

The DMOZ directory does not charge a fee for inclusion but is also a very discerning directory and it is very difficult, and takes a long time to get a website listed on DMOZ. Because of this the DMOZ directory also carries a lot of weight with the search engines.

Websites with high quality content that many people find interesting or useful will, over time, almost certainly, automatically receive many natural back links.

Natural backlinks are of course are what really count.

One segment that I’ve noticed this in, quite frequently, is in the realm of electronic cigarette affiliates. I have seen many, and when I say many, I mean MANY, good stop smoking articles butchered by spinning programs that included their brand of e-cig product. I, myself, have had numerous Ezine articles spun and manipulated to appear that I endorse their products. Which, of course, I do not.

I’m not going to call out any of these affiliates by name, because that just isn’t my way. However, it did irk me enough that I wanted to write an article expressing my frustration with these mislead internet users. I would like to list a few reasons as to why spinning other people’s articles is a bad idea and does not help you with your long term SEO plan.

1. First of all, the articles do not spin very well. It is obvious that the articles in question are spun, and spun rather poorly. This does not really help your business other than to get your anchor text on the internet. But, because they are spun so poorly and are very hard to read, people do not keep them published for very long. So all those efforts to get your anchor text on the web, disappear rather quickly. Google does not appear to like rapid fire bursts of anchor text splattered hither and yon for short period of times.

2. Lets say the spun article gets read by a couple of thousand people. They will quickly realize that the information has been stolen and manipulated. They will see what company is linked AND what site is posting the bogus information. This will soil (for lack of a better word) your brand identity or message. People will not think very highly of your product or service and will often ignore it, even if it’s the number 1 rank on the web. The publishing site may also view the hard to read information and then no longer post your content.

3. Finally, article directories will begin to find out who you are and not accept your plagiarized work. This simply makes it a little harder for you to get your message out. Not impossible, but it is just one more inconvenience for you as you implement your SEO plan. Plus, Google seems to heavily weight organic growth in their formulas. Although it is true that plagiarized work is simple and easy to get out to the masses, it is also true that Google doesn’t seem to view that kind of burst as organic growth. So, it may boost your rankings a tiny little bit, but in the end, your goals will not become realized.

I hope you are now inspired to build your online presence the ethical way, through honesty and hard work. I’m sure many are simply laughing at this article, and thinking to themselves, “poor idiot, he really thinks honesty and integrity are the best policy”. Well, they’d be right. But at least, I’ve said my peace and I can now go back to my naive ways.

Only 50 more original articles to go and maybe then I’ll get off the 25th page of Google. Wish me luck.

Webmasters argue about that. Personally, I feel that all links are effective to a certain extent. If you only create links from one social network or website, then you have basically bet all of your money on one horse.

To continue with the gambling scenario for just a moment, if you go to a race track and you spread your money around, betting on several different horses in the same race, your odds of winning some money are better. Of course, at the track, you will lose money on the horses that don’t win.

Unless you pay for back links, there is no way that you can lose. Posting at some of the directories is a waste of time, in my opinion, because they don’t allow relevant links within the text or they don’t have an author’s box at the end of each article.

Of course, time is money, so without further delay, here are a few more link building SEO tips. These are all free options.

- Find related websites and offer to trade space. You allow the website owner to put a link on your site. He allows you to put a link on his.

- Create a daily blog with links to your website. Provide helpful information related to the products that you sell or promote on your sit.

- Write informational articles and post them at EzineArticles, Amazine or Go Articles, three of the top article directories online. Posting is free and each of the ezines allows back-links in the body and in the article box.

The next link building SEO tips have to do with social networks. You should have enough confidence in your products or the ones that you are promoting to encourage your friends and family to buy them.

If you do not have a Facebook and a MySpace page, then you are a little behind the times. Twitter is the latest thing, but for user friendliness and beginners, I would recommend Facebook, first.

The more links that you have leading to your website, the more traffic you will get. You cannot have too many links. If you also have outgoing links, then your site ranks higher in the search engines.

So, those are my link building SEO tips for the day. Hope they help you drive more traffic to your site.