Allan Todd's Internet Marketing & SEO Blog

Inbound links, also called backlinks, are extremely important for a good search engine optimization (SEO) rank and placement.  Google in particular gives enormous SEO value to the quality of the back links to your site.

Notice I said quality, not quantity.  What is a quality inbound link?  A quality backlink is defined as a inbound link to your site from a website that is both 1) topically related to your site and 2) also has its own significant quantity of quality back links to it.  Think of each quality back link to your site as a "reputation vote" where the other site is verifying your importance and status by means of the link it is giving you.  To sustain and improve your search engine optimization results you must continuously check, monitor and increase the amount of quality inbound backlinks to your site.

If you need a great looking website with modern interactivity tools like a blog, forum, shopping cart, photo gallery or any combination of these, and you want to update the website yourself, then a web content management system (CMS) might be a great solution for you.

Tag, your it! Tags are the short, one or two word, descriptors that you can attach to your bookmarks on del.icio.us , your images on Flickr , videos in YouTube , audio at Last.fm and to blog posts appearing in Technorati . (Popular social/bookmarking Web 2.0 sites). Tags can be used to help direct others with similar interests to your products and services. As the Web evolves, it will become increasingly important for marketers to learn how to harness the power of tags.

Google gives you a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool that is a way for you to help Google help you.  It is a free service called Google Webmaster Tools, or GWT for short.  GWT provides you with an easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. The tools in GWT provide you with detailed reports about your site's visibility on Google. Specifically, GWT allows you to: