A blogroll is simply a list to other related blogs often with a short snippet of the latest post.

For SEO its good to be featured on other peoples blogrolls. One way incoming links to your site from related content is one of the most if not the very most important component in Search Engine Optimization. Also, if your blog gets featured on a high traffic site you will get visitors.

The best way to get your blog featured in other peoples blogrolls is to create good content and to do it consistently. If you happen to know the person who writes the blog it does not hurt to ask.

For visitors to your site a blogroll can be good. Make sure you direct them to quality blogs related to your content.

Some webmasters are worried that adding outgoing links from their site will lower their ranking. Google recently wrote in their official blog that outgoing links to relevant sites will in fact NOT harm your ranking but rather improve it. You can read the official statement here. There are also several well known internet marketers that have come to the same conclusion even before the official statement.

Being featured in other people’s blogrolls helps you getting web traffic. The only problem is that it will usually take time for people to notice you and start linking to you. To get several other ideas on how to build your web traffic you can subscribe to me free web traffic newsletter.

Write your own profile at http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me and don’t forget to link to your own sites.

The profiles are actually a nice feature and I like the integration with google maps. I added a link to my proile on the about page of this blog if you want to see how it looks.

To get the page rank (PR) your profile will need to be linked from at least one other place. you can use one of your feeder pages. If you don’t know what I am talking about you should subscribe to my free web traffic newsletter.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/

This Yahoo site is a really nice to keep on top of what is happening now in the world or in your subject.

Another use for buzz is to drive some traffic by signing in with your Yahoo account and submitting your article. The more people buzzing your article the higher it will go and the more people will see it. This works in about the same way as Digg and Stumble.

You can also get a widget with the top stories in a category to use on your site.

One of the new search engine technologies getting talked about lately is LSI. LSI stands for latent semantic indexing and it is a first step toward the semantic web. There are a number of research project trying to manually add semantic data to web pages. But, if this is ever going to work it is a long time away.

A problem with keyword is that it is just that a keyword. With LSI search engines.tries to associate a concept with your web page instead of just a keyword list. The algorithm is based on statistical analysis on terms often used together. For the details you can check out this page : http://lsi.research.telcordia.com/lsi/LSIpapers.html the executive summary gives a bit more information than this post without getting too technical.

But why is this important?

In practice since LSI is a part the secret ranking algorithm used on your web page you should use synonyms when you write. What this in practice mean is that its even more important to focus on the content on your pages and less on the keywords. Keyword research is still important to make sure there is anyone interested in what you are writing about. The basic on-page optimization still applies but after that just write the text good. LSI is bound to be even more important in the future and if you write good content for real persons you are well prepared. LSI is only one step in the way to get rid of search engine spam and to give everyone better search results.

In Google you can try to search for your search term with a ~ char before the keyword and you will get a list with similar terms.

The other big ingredient in getting top ranking in the search engines is called off-page optimization. Off-page optimization is about making other pages help increase your pages ranking. In practice it is about getting links form other pages to your page. The higher rank the page has the better.

You want the anchor text used to link to your page to contain your keywords.

The first thing you should make sure is to fix your internal link structure. You want your internal pages to link to your other relevant internal page. When you link from internal pages you control the anchor text so there should be no problem getting the correct keywords there. And again, the keywords you use in the anchor are the keywords important to the page you link to.

Once you have your page create using the guidelines in the on-page optimization text and your internal link structure setup you are ready for the next step.

If you have other relevant web sites you want to add links from these sites as well to your page. Make the links in one direction from your old pages to the new page you want to rank.

There are so many ways to get internal links to your site that I have a dedicated newsletter to give you a new tip each day. Signup to my web traffic tips newsletter, I give a lot of ideas for how you can get more links to your page, one tip a day.

You want the number of incoming links to your site to grow in a natural way. If you get several hundreds link to your page suddenly search engines will notice and you will be penalized. You can check how many incoming links you have in Google by searching for your domain with the link: prefix

Use the <title> tag

The title tag is displayed in the title of the web browser. You should always have a title tag and it should contain you most important keyword. Make the title relative short, there is no point in stuffing in all keywords. The longer the title the less weight your keyword in the title will have. Make the title readable and relevant but include the keyword

Use <h1> and <h2> tags

The h1 and h2 tags are probably the most important tags after the title tag. Use the tags for headlines. You can change the look of the tags with stylesheets and you can even use the <h> tags if you write in Wordpress. Make sure your first <h1> tag includes your top keyword.

Use <meta> description

The meta description does not directly affect your ranking but when a page has one it will be used in search engines. The meta description is what shows as site description when someone sees your site in the search engine results. Write it as a advert to get people to visit your site.

Bold and italic

Bold and italic fonts words are important and you want a few bold italic terms in your body text. Bold and italic are given more weight than other words so having keywords as bold and italic is a good thing. Don’t overdo it, remember that in the end someone is going to read your text, always have this in mind, create your pages for real persons.

Body text

Don’t include your keywords more than a few times in your article or your text might be penalized. Try to use the keyword once in the beginning of the text and once at the end of the text and that is it. In the early days of the internet the number of keywords was used to determine how relevant a text was. Now the algorithms are a lot more sophisticated and they are changing all the time.
Write your body about the subject and don’t care too much about keywords and you will probably end up with a better text. Again focus on writing for real persons and follow these simple rules.

Now get my traffic tips newsletter to learn how to get more traffic to your site. And get some ideas where you can apply what you just read in this article.

Many people see Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as something bad. As something done to spam search engine, an annoyance.

It can be.

This type of SEO is often called black hat SEO. Black hat ideas have to change constantly to stay one step ahead of Google and the others. Black hat SEO often uses tools to automate creation of web pages, to create networks of spam sites, to automate commenting on bloggs and forums. Black Hat SEO is probably the reason Google CEO recently called the internet a cesspool and suggested brands to be the solution.

I would stay away from these Black hat ideas. Making people mad at you is good for no one, as a general rule, any web traffic generation idea that is done completely automatic is most probably not good. The search engines are constantly working on finding ways to get rid of this type of bad content. If you use any of these ideas and get removed from the indexes it will be hard or impossible to get back in.

The other type of SEO can be labelled as white hat SEO. Here you try to optimize your content to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find and index your content for the relevant terms.

Between the black and white there is a grey zone. If you have good content and don’t use anything shady you should be safe.

All SEO activities can be grouped into on-page optimization or off-page optimization.

With on-page optimization you improve the content on the page you want to rank in the engines. On-page optimization you should do once and be done with it. Though, it is important that you get these basic things right. When you have completed your page following the simple rules you are generally done with on-page optimizations and can focus on off-page optimizations.

Off-page optimization is about making other pages on the internet help your page to rank well. Search engine takes into account the number of incoming links to your site and how and where the links are.

When Google started out they had an idea and a patent known as page rank. Here is a simplified explanation. Each site on the internet is given a score based on the content on the page. To this score is added the weighted score of all pages linking to the page. When someone is searching the internet this score is part of what determines how the search results are ordered.

Tomorrow I will go through a checklist of what you must do on your page. Until then why don’t you subscribe to my daily traffic tip and get more visitors to your site.