Link building is probably the most important thing you can do to increase traffic to your website. It is among the top things that search engines look for when ranking a website. Yes, it does take a lot of work and yes it can be frustrating waiting for the search engines to catch those websites with links to your website, but in the end, everything you do will pay off and turn into higher traffic for you.  If you aren’t sure how to start building up your backlinks, here are just a few tips to start you off

Give other blogs a reason to link back to you. Blog owners are always on the prowl for new content and if you can provide something useful to them, they will link to it. Articles such as this one would be a great way to get information out in the world and also set you up as an authority on the subject. Be sure to request that the full article not be published on their website. Instead, ask for a short description of the article and a link back to your website to view the entire article.

Create a list of resources that others may want to share with their website visitors. For example, if you run a website for photographers you may include a resource list of all vendors that a photographer may use in their business along with links to their websites. These resource lists are very popular for other people to link to.

Write about other businesses or individuals either in a review style or as a “what’s new” type post that will highlight that business. Be sure to send them a link to what you wrote about them. Many times, these businesses will post on their own website about what you wrote and may include a link back to your website.

Search engines are great but don’t forget directories as well. These are organized by category and are a perfect way to get permanent links to your website. Check out DMOZ.com as a starting directory and then head over to Google.com and search for more directories to submit to.

Don’t be afraid to ask your friends and family for help too. Enlist them to help you out by tagging your content on such websites as Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. The more tags you get the better chance you have of getting more people to see your content and possibly linking to it.

Be sure that if you frequent any website forums that you are including your website link in your signature. Be sure not to spam forums, instead leave informative and quality responses. Readers of these forums will often time follow links in signatures which can lead to more links when they see what you can offer their website visitors.

Hold a contest or a giveaway. People love to win free stuff. By posting about your contest on your blog, your readers may in turn tell their readers about your contest and link to your contest page. On top of those who find it on your blog, you can submit the website link to online news reporters who may in turn write a piece up about your contest and share it with their readers.

Review products through information articles on your website. These reviews should come from firsthand experience and link to either the product maker’s website or to an affiliate link URL.

There are several things you will do to your website to optimize it for search engines and one of those things is to optimize your website meta tags. Meta tags are snippets of code filled with keywords and phrases that are found between the < HEAD> and < /HEAD> tags of your website and will help you get your search engine ranking up. In this article I will cover strategies that you can use to generate meta tags for your own website.

Formatting of your meta tags:

Meta tags have a pretty straightforward format that consists of a meta name and its content. For example, the keyword meta tag would look like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1,keyword2”>

Other meta tags can be created by simply replacing the “name” variable with whatever tag you are generating. The most important meta tags are the keyword and description tags and are generally what search engines look at when it comes to determining the content on your website. You may also want to consider using the “revisit” meta tag to let search engines know that your content changes regularly and should be revisited at a determined interval.

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days”>

What content should be in the meta tags:

Over the years, meta tags have regularly been abused by spammers and have actually caused the importance of meta tags to go down in search engine criteria. However, it is still considered so let’s make the most out of it. Keep your keywords in your meta tag consistent with the written content on your website. In other words, if your website isn’t about sex, don’t include sex in your keyword list just because it’s a popular term and you’re hoping to reap the benefits of a highly searched keyword. It won’t work. When it comes to the keyword meta tag start by including the keywords that you used in your websites “<title>” tag.  The first words in your meta tag are generally given the most weight so make them count. Get all of your keywords from the content that is on the web page. If you list a word or phrase in the keyword meta tag, it should also be a word found on the public view of your website.

Use Meta Robots Tags:

There are several meta tags that you can include in your website that will specify the way you want your website to be indexed by the search engines. If you don’t include a robot meta tag, the default is assumed to be “Index,Follow”. There are four basic meta robot tags:

Index,Follow – Your website will be crawled by the search engine starting from your main website home page and will continue crawling all other pages within your website.

Index, NoFollow – Only your main home page of your website will be crawled by the engines. All other links to other pages within your website are not indexed.

NoIndex, Follow – Your main home page of your website will not be indexed by the search engine but all other pages will be.

NoIndex, NoFollow – Nothing on your website will be indexed.

Example: <meta name=”robots” content=” Index,Follow”>

How can images help:

While not directly related to a meta tag all of the images on your website can actually help you improve the rankings that your meta tags receive. All images can have a “alt” attribute in the code that inserts an image onto your page. You can use this “alt” attribute to insert one or two keywords from your meta tag to help increase the keywords showing on your website content as well as enforce the validity of the words listed in your meta tags.

The all important TITLE tag:

The title of your website is placed within the <title> and </title> tags on your website and plays a very important role in your search engine ranking. The title tag must work in conjunction with your meta keyword tag and contain the words found within it. Each page within your website should have its own title with the website to help the search engines know what that page is about. Try to use your title phrase several times within the content of your website.

Important Notes To Remember

*Keep in mind, meta tags are not the only or even the best method to increase your search engine ranking. Meta tags are simply one of several steps you can take to ensure that your website is covering all possible avenues for search engine optimization.

*Repetition of keywords in your meta tags does not help you. In fact, it will most likely hurt your ranking and possibly get your website blacklisted.

*Try to focus on one or two particular keywords per page within your website rather than trying to include dozens of ideas. This will greatly increase the likelihood that an individual page will appear in the search engine for that focused idea.