Back links help you make money. SEO experts realize this because back links give you higher rankings in search engines, more traffic, and hence more money. Sometimes people and businesses will purchase back links because it gets a significant boost in the search engine rankings. But there are ways to build thousands of back links for free.

Getting free back links is one of the best ways to improve your site’s Google PageRank without spending money. It does cost time, however, but you can get back links from thousands of websites, many of them high ranking sites that can help your site improve its PageRank.

Because of the time involved in this, a lot of big SEO companies won’t take the time to do it. But even though the back links are free, don’t underestimate their effectiveness. If you make a plan to consistenly build back links, you can get your Google Page Rank up to 5 fairly easily.

You have to go about it the right way to maximize the effectiveness of each link you build. It is a time consuming project, and you don’t want to waste time doing things that aren’t going to help. There are three major mistakes a lot of webmasters make when they are building up free back links. Don’t let these mistakes happen on your watch.

Spending Time on Nofollow Links

Some blogs and forums today have tags called the “nofollow” tag. It tells the search engine spiders not to follow the links in the site. So if you get a back link from some site with a nofollow tag, the search engines won’t pick it up, and it won’t count. There is some debate as to whether these count as links, it is unclear enough that you probably shouldn’t waste your time going after links from nofollow sites. There is an SEO add-on from Firefox that will highling nofollow links automatically. You can download it for Firefox for free.

Reciprocal Links

OK, it is entirely possible for there to be reciprocal links that neither you nor the other site plan. That occasional occurrence won’t hurt you, but link farms where you build up reciprocal links (a sort of “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” scenario) are losing their clout because Google is catching on to this practice. It’s easy to get lots of links from a link farm, but they matter less with each passing day. A one-way link from a site to yours carries more weight, and though it’s easy to get back links from link farms, it is probably a waste of time.

Irrelevant Links

The Google PageRank algorithm continues to improve and outsmart the latest attempts to trick it. One thing it does now is determine relevancy of links. Anchor text is the highlighted text on a page that contains the actual link. This allows Google to compare the anchor text to what the link actually goes to. That helps them determine if the back link is relevant by being based on keywords, plus the relevancy of the sites it links to and from. Back links from anchor text are worth more than other back links.

You want to get the maximum benefit from every back link you get. It takes a lot of time to build up a nice cushion of free back links, and it should be an ongoing process. But if you can avoid the three mistakes of avoiding nofollow links, avoiding link farms, and avoiding irrelevant links, you’ll get the most out of the back links you are able to get. Keep on building them, and your PageRank will go up, and so will your site’s income.

It seems that everybody has a WordPress blog these days. Most of them are not optimized for search engine ranking, and not all need to be. But if you want to make your WordPress blog more popular in the search engines, here are a few tips on how to do that.

1. Though your blog’s home page probably gets more traffic than any of the other pages, you can increase your blog’s visibility and traffic even more by doing a little optimizing on the home page. Choose one or two keyword phrases for your home page by using a keyword research tool. Google AdWords has one of the more popular keyword research tools. If you choose really good keywords and phrases, you could get thousands of searches each month on them, and your blog shouldn’t have too much competition for them. Put the keyword phrases in the title tag, the meta description, and sprinkle them throughout your content. Be careful not to make your site look as if it has been “stuffed” with keywords. Search engines are learning to penalize keyword stuffing.

2. Set up your permalinks for SEO. Every time you publish a blog post, it has a permanent URL that is called, not surprisingly, a permalink. You can optimize your permalinks by going to the Settings menu on your dashboard, choosing the Permalinks menu, then using a setting like http://yourdomain/category/post title. When you do this, your blog post category and its title will show up in the URL rather than as a string of numbers.

3. Ideally, you should find a “long tail” keyword phrase that is low on competition. You can come up with one even before you make the blog post. Use a keyword tool like Google’s and search for a low-competition keyword that has a “long tail,” meaning, something that’s not too “of the moment.” If this keyword or key phrase has a few hundred monthly searches, then it is more likely to be a “long tail” keyword. Use a different key phrase for every blog post, then make sure you put the phrase into the title and include it two or three times in the post body.

4. One of the main keys to improving search engine ranking is to build as many legitimate links as possible back to your blog. But don’t use a paid links scheme or “link farms.” The main search engines penalize this practice when they find out you’re using it. Get legitimate links with article marketing, directory submission, commenting on other blogs, and social bookmarking.

5. If you install the Google XML Sitemap plug-in, it will help ensure that the search engines index every post and every page. Using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in is simple. While this won’t do a lot for your immediate search engine ranking, it will help over the long term.

6. The All-in-One SEO pack plugin (or one similar) lets you add custom titles, keyword tags, and meta descriptions for each post and page. Every little bit helps.

7. Bookmark every post with social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon or Digg. A service called Social Marker, and a similar service called OnlyWire will give you the capability to submit your site to a number of social bookmarking service at the same time. This will help build both traffic and back links.
Implementing any of these alone will do some good, but not much. SEO should be a comprehensive effort so you can build your site’s visibility using many methods.