Building incoming links to your site is the most difficult aspect of SEO. Mostly because you have limited control over it. However, it doesn’t mean you have no control. Certain measures like commenting on blogs and forums are ethically suspect as well as useless due to the prevalence of the “nofollow” tag. The basic formula is, no pain, no gain. Commenting on a blog is almost painless and is therefore bound to be worthless.

Article submissions are an ethical and effective way to get inbound links. These are sites where you submit a useful non plagiarized article and claim credit in the “credits” section that allows a link back to your website. In this case, effort is required to produce good content and have it approved and is therefore much more useful than services that claim to bring you “hundreds” of links. Be wary of article submission sites that promise to submit your article to “thousands of directories.” Remember, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Sites like eZine have strict requirements for their articles and if you submit a good article to them, you deserve a backlink for your efforts. Later in this blog, we will explore more ways of getting backlinks into your site as well as different link building strategies.

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With Bing having reached a certain amount of popularity as well as the recent Microsoft/Yahoo! deal, SEO experts are beginning to wonder what this means for their business. Will customers start demanding SEO for Bing as well as Google now? Sooner or later they will. My Google Analytics data has already started showing Bing traffic to my blog.

While the basics of SEO remains the same for Bing, there are a few subtle differences. There are strong indications that Bing places a greater emphasis on old domains than Google. This is a good thing if you’ve been in business for a long time, but it’s taken out of your hands if you’re new obviously. Other factors imply that in Bing, keyword prominence has less of an influence than it does with Google.

Of course, you have much less control over inbound links than you have with other on page factors (and that is perhaps a good thing, or else everyone would be doing it), but one lesson we can take from this perhaps is that if you’re a new company with a new website, Google will be a bit more kind to you than Bing. For those of you whose sites have already been around for a long time – well you don’t really have to worry too much about your PageRank now do you?

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When SEO practitioners are performing keyword research, they will come across many that cannot be immediately ranked for. Such keyword phrases can be highly desirable with a huge number of monthly searches. Unfortunately, they will have an equally large number of pages that compete for the searcher’s attention. It will take a very long time for the website to rank well for these keywords.

What is to be done then? The answer lies in a long term strategy. Along with these highly desirable phrases, there will be many that can be immediately optimized for. Phrases with a relatively low number of searches, but an even lower relative number of pages optimized for it. The two types of keywords require different strategies. One is long term, and one is short term.

One way is to incorporate the long term keywords into the main body of the site. The short term keywords can be added to an ongoing text addition such as a wiki, a blog or a forum. These posts will then link back to the main site with the long term keywords as anchor text – thereby improving the internal linking architecture and drawing more focus to the long term keywords.

Once this is implemented, you can measure the success of your keyword strategy in order to track your progress.

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