The links that point to your website are one of the most important factors that influence the position of your website in Google’s search results. The better the links to your website, the higher the position of your website in Google’s results.

High rankings without good inbound links?

It is possible to get high rankings with only a few links if you want to be listed for keywords that don’t have much competition. As soon as more than one website competes with you for the same keywords, the website with the best inbound links will outrank the other websites.

If you want to get high rankings for competitive keywords, you have to go out and encourage people to link to your website. It’s not necessary to get as many links as possible. It’s necessary to get better links than your competitors.

Relatively easy: finding the right websites for link building

The Internet has plenty of websites for every category. The following websites can be good link partners:

1. Websites that are listed for the keywords that you are targeting can be good link partners. If a website has high positions for the keywords that you are targeting and if the website is not a competitor, you should contact the owner of that website.
2. Some websites have content that is related to your keyword. If these websites have no examples or references, they could link to your website.
3. There can be many websites that contain a review or a comment about your company without linking to your site. These websites will often link to your website if you ask.
4. If another website links to your website and only uses your domain name to link to your website, ask the owner of the other website to link to your website with your keyword.
5. Blogs that deal with the topic of your websites are often willing to link to your website.
6. If a website links to one of your competitors, it is likely that they will also link to your website if you offer a similar product or service.

Easy to screw up: asking for a link

Finding websites that could link to you is the easy part. The difficult part is to convince the owners of the other websites that they should link to your site.

Contact the right person and use a personal salutation. Be polite and professional in your email message. Use a non-freemail email address and include your full contact information in the email message.

Focus on the benefits of the recipient (for example, that the webmaster will offer his website visitors a good resource if he links to your site and explain why).

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If you want to succeed on the Internet, it is extremely important that you choose the right keywords for both organic search engine optimization and pay per click marketing. If you choose the wrong keywords, you’ll waste a lot of time and money.

A new free online keyword tool helps you to find good keywords

KeywordIndex is a new online keyword suggestion tool that helps you to find good keywords for your website. It is available in English and in German.

KeywordIndex uses a unique keyword database that is not used by any other keyword suggestion tool on the market.

Many useful keyword resources

In addition to the keyword suggestion tool, KeywordIndex offers many other resources that will help you to find the perfect keywords for your website.

A number one listing on Google for the wrong keyword won’t help your business. It will be a lot of work to get that number one position and you won’t get anything in return. For that reason, it is very important to choose your keywords wisely before you start with your search engine optimization work.

Free white paper: the financial value of keywords and more

There are many factors that distinguish good keywords from average keywords! If you invest some time in finding the right keywords, you will have an edge on your competitors right from the start.

KeywordIndex offers a free white paper that deals with the following topics:

• How to avoid common mistakes.
• How to judge the financial value of keywords.
• Which keywords will cost you money with absolutely no return on investment.
• How to increase your sales with less traffic.
• How to get more targeted traffic without working more.

You can download the free white paper from the KeywordIndex website.

Tutorial: how to find the perfect keywords for your website

If you want to succeed on the Internet, it is extremely important that you choose the right keywords for both organic search engine optimization and pay per click marketing.

If you choose the wrong keywords, you’ll waste a lot of time and money. The keywords with the biggest search volume are not the keywords with the best return on investment. Details can be found in the keyword tutorial.

KeywordIndex is a powerful new tool that will help you to find great keywords for your website. You can access the new keyword suggestion tool here. It’s free and you can use it for as long as you want

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You’ve probably heard about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. This will have a major impact on the search engine landscape and there definitely will be effects on your website rankings and the number of visitors that your website will get.

The basic facts

Yahoo is going to give up their own search technology and use Microsoft’s search technology instead. Bing.com will power the organic and the paid search results on Yahoo (except for premium ads on Yahoo).

Self-serve advertising (i.e. the AdWords competitor) will be managed by Microsoft’s AdCenter. Microsoft will get access to Yahoo’s search technology and can use it to improve its own search technology.

What does this mean for your website?

You should optimize for Bing.com.

Yahoo/Bing will have a search market share of at least 15% (that’s the current market share of MSN and Yahoo combined – some statistics show a much higher market share).

If you do not optimize some of your website pages for Bing, you’ll lose a lot of visitors and sales.

Yahoo’s inbound link data will probably be lost.

Yahoo is the search engine that currently returns the most inbound link data. When Yahoo drops its index, that data will probably be lost.

1. A big PPC provider will be gone, an even bigger provider will appear.

   Microsoft will provide the search ads for Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo will close its own paid search offerings. That means that you will be able to manage your ads for both Yahoo and Bing in one user interface. It probably also means rising bid prices on Yahoo and Bing.

1. Yahoo might close some of their websites.

   Yahoo might put its Internet directory into question as well as their alternative search applications SearchMonkey and SearchBOSS. Applications such as Yahoo Maps might also be reconsidered because Bing offers similar services.

1. There will be two independent search result pages.

   Yahoo will have full control over the user interface of their search form. The ordering of the results, the layout and the whole search focus can be different from Bing. That means that you still might have to optimize your website for both search engines.

The deal still needs shareholder and legal approval. Yahoo and Microsoft hope that the changes will be in place by early 2010

Optimize different pages of your website for different search engines and different keywords. What works with one search engine might not work with another. Optimize each web page for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination to get better results.

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Getting high quality links is crucial if you want high rankings on Google for competitive keywords. Links from old and reputable high authority sites work best. Unfortunately, it’s often not easy to get links from high authority websites

You can benefit indirectly from high authority sites through second-tier links

Suppose you have found a great authority site that has something to do with the topic of your website. The authority site links to many other websites but for some reason, the webmaster doesn’t want to link to your site.

If the high authority website doesn’t want to link to your site, ask the websites to which it links if they want to link to your site. If you get a link from these sites, the high authority website will still have a positive influence on your own site.

This is what you should do:

1. Find a high quality, high authority website (it should be old, have many inbound links and good rankings on Google).
2. Ask the high authority website for a link to your website.
3. Visit the websites to which the high authority website links and ask the webmasters of these sites if they want to link to your site.

Of course, these second-tier links are not as valuable as links from the top-notch site. However, they are still very valuable and chances are that they are more valuable than many other links that you can get on the Internet.

If you want to get high rankings on Google, links from high quality websites are very important. The more links point to your website, the better. Optimize your web pages to tell Google for which keywords you want to be found. Then get the right links to show Google that your website is relevant to these keywords.

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