Although there are many methods to use in your link building strategy, according to Matt Cutts editorial links (in-content) seem to play a major role when it comes to search engine positioning. There are a few great ways for getting this type of backlinks for your website but your whole SEO strategy should not rely only on these.

Here are a few of them below:

1.      Reviews

There are certain websites that offer reviews for a service/product/other website, in exchange of nothing. It is quite difficult to find those and you should be aware of two things: a) the review will be most of the times un-biased, so expect negative “words” as well and b) you will not get most of the times the anchor you might want.

2.      Paid blog posts

There are lots of bloggers/webmasters that want to some more money in their pockets and most of them reveal this on their websites. You can search for “advertise” pages on the web (related to your niche) and see if they are offering paid blog posts or not.

3.      Guest blogging

Probably the most effective/safe method for getting contextual backlinks. Basically you are offering free content for their blogs in exchange of 1-2 backlinks pointing to your website, with the desired anchor text.

4.      Blog networks

With the arise of “in-content links” popularity, there are many investors raising networks of thousands of blogs made exactly for selling blog posts with contextual links. If you go with this route make sure you are choosing the right network and do not overdo it!

5.      Build My Rank

We have talked in the past about this great service and would still recommend it further. With about 1,000 websites in their “arsenal”, you are getting some good links from aged websites with PageRank, for the cost of $59/month.

Keyword research is probably the most important aspect when trying to build a website that attracts targeted visitors for a 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.

It is a well known fact: all webmasters are running to rank higher for those short keywords that could bring a massive amount of traffic/prospects/sales but most of the time this seems like an impossible thing to accomplish. However, with the right keyword strategy anyone can rank for some really competitive keywords – of course, this should not be seen as a “rank quickly without any work” formula.

The most important part of this strategy is, yet again, keyword research. We all know that long-tail keywords are probably the best “targets” for any niche/website but above this there is yet another way of getting higher rankings for competitive terms, through “keyword pyramids”.

Let’s say your main keyword is web designers, a term that gets thousands of searches each month within the UK and you are targeting a certain area (for the sake of this blog post, let’s say London). Although you might be inclined to work hard on web designers keyword, you should be probably creating first sets of keywords that incorporate that term (in order of their easiness). So we have:

-          Layer 1: web designers

-          Layer 2: cheap web designers

-          Layer 3: cheap web designers in UK

-          Layer 4: cheap web designers in London UK etc

As you may see, the deeper we go the lower the competition we get for a certain keyword. Once you have got your set of keywords (you should not limit yourself to only one set, the possibilities are endless) you should try and rank the keyword from last layer, then the 3^rd layer and so on.

As many keywords you rank related to your “goldmine” phrase/word, the more chances you have to grab the highest spots for the most searched/competitive one. So basically this is again related to long-tail keywords but with a twist – search engines will give you credit for the related keywords and after a while you will notice gaining rankings for the main key phrase without any particular work on it.

Building a website and leaving it online without any future work on it is probably the worst choice an online business owner can do. Unfortunately, there are still many folks that believe just by having an online presence they will get visitors/sales from their websites, fact that is totally wrong.

Indeed, there are thousands of very specific niches with only a highly optimised website one can hold the first positions in search engines, thus getting the traffic needed for sales, but most of the times this does not happen. Traffic comes only with hard work and passion, so here are probably the most popular ways webmasters are getting targeted traffic to their websites.

1.      Search engine optimisation

Probably the most popular way for getting traffic to a website. From building a highly optimised website to building backlinks to it, search engine optimisation is a sure way for getting a real successful online business. Depending on the industry you want your website to rank higher, SEO can be extremely difficult without a huge budget but also extremely easy to be implemented with the proper keywords, links and website structure.

2.      Video Marketing

Not many folks are going with this method but as video sharing websites like YouTube are more and more popular, it is a great way for getting the right traffic to your products/services. Furthermore, applying this method along with article marketing can be a sure way for success.

3.      Pay Per Click

The most popular PPC program is without a doubt Google’s Adwords. You do not need SEO expertise, you do not need hundreds of hours of content creation (whether we are talking about videos or articles), but one thing is sure: you need quite a big advertising budget for getting the exposure you need and also a very convincing landing page. PPC can bring massive numbers of new customers that actually buy your product but also can become a huge loss in the budget if not carefully planned.

You might think the answer is quite simple when it comes to testimonials – you place a few testimonials on your website praising your product/service and that increases your credibility, thus making future prospects trust what you sell.

That is 100% right, but is that the only benefit from testimonials? Can those help in any other ways? Here are two great tips for not only publishing testimonials that increase trust but also how your own testimonial can help with your website’s SEO (did not see that coming, right?).

1.      Testimonials’ details

Although there are many folks willing to share a testimonial on your website when they are satisfied about a certain product/service, most of the times they are not using photos representing themselves, position at the company or anything else than can increase the trust. Kindly ask your happy clients to provide as many details about themselves as possible (from photo to company and position), if they do not agree no problem; you probably have more happy clients than you imagine…

2.      Building links from testimonials

Ever used a product/service that you were very satisfied of? Check out whether the vendor/distributor has a testimonials’ page, send them a positive piece of content along with your name/photo etc and add a backlink to your company/website at the bottom of your review, such as: Alex from WebCreationUK. This is a great way for getting a backlink to your own website many people omit to use.

The search engine optimisation community was expecting this bad news: Yahoo Site Explorer, maybe the most popular service for analysing backlinks of certain websites, it is to be closed somewhen this year. Offered for free for so many years, this online SEO tool was considered a great help when trying to create a “links profile picture” for competitors’ websites or when checking our own website’s backlinks.

Lately, many SEOs reported that Yahoo Site Explorer is updating its database way slower than before and this near closing-down seems to be the answer. After almost 6 years of being used by thousands of SEOs, Hemant Minocha (Product Manager for Yahoo Site Explorer) announced that later this year this popular product is to be discontinued.

Furthermore, you can read on Yahoo Search Blog the recommendations for anyone that was using YSE to sign up with Bing Webmaster Tools and use it accordingly. Problem with the Bing’s Tools is that it is almost a certain thing they will not reveal so many linking details on websites; however, only time will tell us how Microsoft’s Bing will improve and IF it will be improved (in terms of linking “exploration”).

You can still benefit from YSE for a couple of months and for now, the most “appropriate” SEO tools for analysing backlinks for a certain website seems to be those provided by Majestic SEO. Of course, this coming with a monthly fee which is quite high when talking about more than average linking data.