If you’re serious about search engine optimization and prepared to invest some money into keyword analysis, you can open an account with a keyword research Web site like Wordtracker. Simply go to the Wordtracker home page and click the Sign Up link (see below).

Wordtracker offers a wide variety of tools and reports to help you narrow the list of which keywords you should focus on in your blog posts to maximize potential traffic.

Other options similar to Wordtracker include the ones at www.Wordze.com and www.KeywordDiscovery.com. Like Wordtracker, each of these sites requires paying a fee, but free trials are available so you can test drive-them before you pay anything out of your pocket.

Diigo (see below) is a unique social bookmarking site because it lets users save, for later access, a copy of any page online as it appears at that moment. Each member can store as much as 5 gigabytes of data. Users can also search and share saved pages with each other.

Members of Orkut, a social networking site owned by Google, can communicate, connect, and share information, pictures, and videos. Although Orkut isn’t one of the most popular social networking sites, it has a strong Brazilian user base. You can sign in to Orkut by using the Google Account information you set up when you created your Blogger blog (see below), so it’s easy to get started.

Link popularity is the number of relevant quality inbound links pointing to your website. Most major search engines use link popularity as part of their algorithm which helps to determine the relevance of your website. If you don’t have inbound links, you won’t rank well for competitive keywords.

Ways to build link popularity

Link exchange
There are some very important aspects you should consider when exchanging links. The right way to exchange links is by finding quality, relevant sites with which to exchange links. These are the links that search engines care about. Convincing webmasters to exchange links with you isn’t easy, this is a time consuming process.

This is how it works: You search for sites that are in the same general topic area as yours (but not sites that compete directly). After you find a list of suitable link exchange partners, you place a link to their site on your site. Then you email the webmasters of the other sites and ask for a link exchange. Do not send generic copies of the same email to each webmaster however. Write a personalized email to the webmaster explaining what you liked about the site (be specific) and why you think a link exchange would benefit both parties.

Be sure to address the webmaster by name if at all possible. Also, be sure to give him your link exchange information. This should include the title of your site, a short description, and the URL that you want his site to link to (this doesn’t have to be the home page). And be sure to include the URL of the page that already has his reciprocal link on it.

Be prepared for rejection for various reasons, this is normal so don’t be discouraged you will also receive email accepting your proposal. Verify that your reciprocal link is in fact on their sites and then send a “thank you” email.

Here are some keyword phrases (KW) you can type in Google for finding related sites:
“Add a link” + “your keyword” “Add a site” + “your keyword” “Add URL” + “your keyword” “Add an URL” + “your keyword” “Submit a link” + “your keyword” “Submit a site” + “your keyword(s)” “Submit URL” + “your keyword(s)” “Submit an URL” + “your keyword(s)” “Suggest a link” + “your keyword” “Suggest a site” + “your keywords” “Suggest URL” + “your keyword(s)” “Suggest an URL” + “your keyword” “your keywords” + “directory” “your keywords” + “directories” keyword reciprocal + directory keyword exchange + directory keyword add site + directory keyword resources + directory keyword links + directory

Building inbound links through reciprocal link exchanges is very powerful website promotional tool. If done correctly, increasing your linkage will:
- crease your traffic significantly
- improve your visibility in the search engines by raising your link popularity
- provide an added resource to your website
- save you a lot of advertising money

Allow other people to publish your e-zine on their web site.
Include your web site’s ad and link in each issue you publish. This may also help you increase the number of people that subscribe to your e-zine.

Create a directory of web sites on a specific topic.

Give people the option of adding the directory to their web site by linking to it. Put your business ad at the top of the directory’s home page

Offer a free e-book to your web site visitors.
The ebook should be related to your target audience. Allow them to give the e-book to their own web site visitors by linking directly to your web site.

Exchange content with other web sites.
You could trade articles, top ten lists, etc. Both parties could include a resource box at the end of the content.

Join or create a web ring.
A web ring is a group of web sites on a similar subject agreeing to link together. To find a web ring to join type keywords “web rings” into your search engine of choice.

Directory Submission
Directories are different from standard search engines in that a search engine will query a database of indexed websites before it produces results and a directory is a database of websites that have been arranged by subject.
Search engines put weight on the links coming from directories which is why is so important that you know how to submit you site. Remember, that your site must be optimized before submitting and not in different construction phases; otherwise it will be rejected from submission. For a correct submission select the most appropriate category related to the subject matter of the site and then submit, suggesting a title, description and any other information the directory may require. Also make sure you read their submission guidelines.

FFA pages and link exchange programs
DON’T USE THEM – Most search engines, such as Google says that FFA sites are an artificial and illegitimate way to increase link popularity. Google considers “link farms” spam, and will ban your site for participating in an FFA or link exchange program.

6. Keyword Proximity – some engines, such as Google, use the concept of “keyword proximity” as part of their ranking formulas. As suggested by the name, “keyword proximity” means the how close keywords are to each other. Put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear.

Here’s an example:

- We have been selling blogging data products for over 3 years.
- We have been selling products for blogging for over 3 years.

In this case if someone should look for “blogging data products”, the first sentence will rank higher because its keywords are closer to each other.

7. Keyword Frequency – is a measure of the number of times keywords occur within a page’s text. It’s tied to the concept of keyword density. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to make sure it’s not an isolated case. The recommended repetition is 3-7 times.

8. Keyword Density – the final point on visible text is keyword density. Simply stated, keyword density is the number of occurrences of a keyword divided by the total word count. For this, I try to keep my initial density to between 1-7%. However, this number may have to change depending on the level of competition. Also, be warned that the text used in anchors <a href=”page.html”>this is your anchor text </a> affects your density. Don’t worry if your initial density is lower than that of your competitors as you will learn later in this article that there are many ways to affect your keyword density other than placing your keywords in your visible text.

9. Anchors and Links – anchor text is that portion of a hyperlink that is viewed by a user on a webpage (The Clickable text).The keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL.

Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimized anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages.

All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages.

For example, if your keywords phrase is “blogging” and you have a link with anchor text “Read all about blogging here” on a page , pointing to another page about blogging. The tendency is to link “here” to the anchor text content URL whereas the best way is to link “blogging”. You can also locate (or insert) important keyword phrases in your page’s natural text and link it to relevant target pages of your site. The target page’s name should include in it, if possible, your keywords. This is how a hyperlink code looks like:

< a href=”target-page.html”>blogging</a>

10. Frames , Java scripts, Flash – About frames: DON’T USE THEM; they are not spiderable from the search engines. Regarding Java scripts and Flash do not use them excessively. The reason for this is that spiders cannot read JavaScript (or Flash) and thus any link or text created by such JavaScript will not be counted in your indexing and will produce a lost opportunity.

11. Navigation – The navigation structure of your site is important because it is through your navigation that the search engine spiders are able to access all of your web site’s content. For sites with a small number of pages you should have every page of your site linked to every other page of your site. This can be done by having a left/right side menu or by putting a link to every other page on the bottom of your page. For sites with many pages it is advisable to include in directories the pages that are content related.