How many times have you see ads like the above one? How many times did you encounter sales threads like that on webmaster forums? Have you ever considered outsourcing link building to companies/freelancers claiming to deliver thousands of backlinks to your money site? Think twice before doing this!

Search engines’ algorithms have evolved massively over the years and you should probably know by now that any unnatural link building campaign can do more harm to your website than raising its rankings. But how can this type of links harm your rankings?

First of all, link spikes play a major role in determining whether a company has engaged into using “black hat” methods to trick the search engines. It is unlikely that a website can receive hundreds of backlinks in a day or so, all anchored with a certain keyword and most of all coming from the same platforms (forums, blogs etc). When talking about massive linking we refer of course to:

Blogs – blog comments with Scrapebox/Xrumer

Forums – forum profiles with Xrumer/SenukeX/SickSubmitter

Social bookmarks – made with tools such as Bookmarking Demon and so on

The interesting thing is that these links have their place in a link building strategy, however not when it comes to linking to money sites. You can use these with great results on “buffer sites”, such as: social networking websites, guest posts, reviews and so on for getting more link juice to those, link juice that it is transferred to your money site, washed.

These days quality comes over quantity so before getting thousands of backlinks to your website, think twice and have a chat with an experienced SEO company that could tailor a safe strategy based on your requirements/website.

Although increasing the SERPs for a certain website is probably the best way of getting laser targeted visitors in need to buy the services/products you are selling, there are many other places from where you could grab a good piece of traffic.

Although community forums are mainly used by SEOs for link building, these are a great place to grab attention and to drive more customers for your business. There are probably tons of forums for each and any niche and thousands for more popular ones such as SEO, web design, weight loss and so on.

However, not just any post added on a forum could bring visitors to your website. Here are some great tips when replying/creating new threads on an industry related forum:

1.      Always use a signature – most important

Many forums allow adding a signature with a link back to your website after 1, 10 or 100 posts. Do not start spamming the boards with posts such as “great writing” etc only for getting a signature. Always try to add some value to what you reply.

However, use a great call to action when composing it. Probably the best way for doing this is to use this pattern: text url+anchor text.

2.      Create threads

Open threads containing tips related to your niche. Do not try to copy/paste from other places, people will notice that and you will not get the desired results.

3.      Be interesting

Always add some spice to a post. Search most viewed posts and try to add a little from your experience. Those posts are the most visited ones and your expertise in a certain niche will be rewarded with traffic.

4.      Check grammar/spelling

Always do that! We all make mistake but adding a post with many grammatical error will raise some flags here and there.

Once you have embarked on getting your business on the Internet, the possibilities of growing it with a much smaller budget are huge. On the other hand, one of the most important aspects of having a clean and reputable online business is to watch out for reputation management.

When it comes to the online environment, there are hundreds of websites where you company could be damaged by unsatisfied customers or even by competition trying to ruin your reputation. Searching for negative reviews, articles or complaints should be done on a regular basis, but what are the top places where your online reputation can be hurt?

1.      Review websites

Probably the worst places for getting negative reviews. Review websites are extremely popular nowadays and hold a lot of authority in the search engines, thus ranking immediately for a term such as “company name review” or “company name problems”. A single negative review could make the potential customers choosing other companies that are selling the very same services but that in the same time have a clean reputation.

2.      Community forums

There are hundreds of niche forums available for each and anyone willing to share his experience with a certain company. Most of them have thousands of registered members and again, if 2-3 folks complain about your business your reputation will suffer a lot, thus reducing the numbers of potential clients.

3.      Personal blogs

Whether we are talking about a customer or someone that “heard a story about your company”, negative blog posts about your company could be a big reputation-destroyer. As there are many popular blogs out there with thousands of readers you should definitely watch out for co

When it comes to search engine optimisation, one thing is clear: you can rank a website in a low competition market only with a perfect on-page optimisation and no backlinks, but you will not be able to rank a website with the worst on-page SEO and thousands of backlinks.

Considering SEO as a pyramid, the on-page part is best seen as the foundation on which your whole strategy should be built upon. Below are probably the best on-page SEO tips that should make a perfect start for any website.

1.      Google-friendly URLs

Always make sure that your URLs contain keywords and not some weird numbers and letters saying nothing about your page/website. For WordPress users, the easiest way of doing this is by tweaking the permalinks to show the post/page title instead of other long-ish phrases/characters.

2.      Title and meta description

Although title seems to be an easy pick, most of the times webmasters do not take full advantage of using it properly. On the other hand, meta description is not only a fantastic way to clearly show search engines what your website is about (and furthermore rank for some additional keywords) but also the piece of content that can make the difference between a good CTR or a poor one.

3.      H tags

H tags are perfect to have targeted keywords included, so definitely should be used. Advice: try to use only 1 H1 tag/page.

4.      Images

Not only that you should use the alt description of a certain image with the keywords you are trying to rank for but a big mistake many webmasters usually do is the fact that they are using not-optimised names for their pictures/photos. For example, you have probably encountered many pictures with names such as 189432.jpg when there is a big chance of getting higher rankings with an optimised image name. Moreover, Google Images can be a great source of traffic so ranking an image higher should also be a great move.

5.      Internal linking architecture

This is probably the best way to help your internal pages/homepage rank for some long tail keywords while internal links (with proper anchors) do really help in search engine optimisation. Check your previous published content, see what they can link from your website, choose your anchors wisely and start working on them.

Google has rolled out many changes lately, starting from big algorithm changes such as Panda to closing popular (or not) services such as Google Directory. The latest announcement is related to Google Places and the main things they have concentrated their efforts on are user reviews.

After getting into some disputes with Yelp not so long ago, Google folks decided to concentrate more on Google users reviews instead of those coming from 3^rd party websites, such as FreeIndex, Thomson Local and so on. With this change, we will no longer see review snippets from other websites on the Google Places page but they will be counted as reviews, no word about that.

It seems that with this change Google is trying to put more and more emphasis on reviews from Google users added directly to Google Places page (users-generated content anyone?); with 2 red “write a review” buttons, it is obvious that reviews added directly on the Places page are more than welcomed.

Other “pieces” that have been removed from Google Places pages are:

-          Citations and references – this is a big change while it was one of the best places for competitors to get important information about where a certain local business gets its review and strength

-          Snippets from reviews – not only that review snippets are gone but websites mentioning that very business have been moved at the bottom of Places page

More changes to come in the near future, according to Google folks, and things are about to be changing a lot when it comes to local search engine optimisation.

Keyword research is probably the most important aspect when trying to build a website that attracts targeted visitors for a certain product or service. Whether we are talking about long tail keywords or the most competitive one-word ones, without a proper research one business cannot survive (and expand) in the word-wide-web world.

Whenever we hear about keyword research we think about those so popular keyword research tools, from free ones like Google AdWords Tool to paid ones such as Market Samurai, however there are plenty of other methods for digging deeper and grab those words/phrases that might attract potential customers.

Here are two great ideas for your keyword research:

1.      Find related questions

Whether you are using forums or Q&A websites for this method, there are literally thousands of questions in every niche that could lead to potential customers. Say you are selling web design services, you should definitely check related forums, see what people are asking and simply build pages/blog posts that answer those questions. Although those might not get many searches (according to keyword tools), those are most of the times keywords that will bring you targeted visitors and prospects for your services.

2.      Offer a solution

This is quite easy: as per our above example, what problems do web design services solve? From creating a website for a business (or for affiliate marketers) to even partnerships with SEO companies, there are many answers that could translate into future business. List some solutions and start building related keywords ideas from those – you should end up with a nice list to build future content on.