For a long time the general consensus in the SEO world is that more links were better. In some respects that’s true, but the tables have turned a bit. It’s now more important to have higher quality, industry-specific inbound and outbound links.

There are many services on the net that will help you find link partners, and some of them are good, but some are bad. Since link building takes time and effort, you might as well do it right. Good quality links from good quality websites that have something to do with your website will serve you much better in the end.

I encourage all of my clients to be picky, very picky. In a very real way, your online reputation is at stake! You don’t want links coming in or going out to link farms, or useless directories. Search engines want to see that the links coming into your site are from reputable sites, with fresh and relevant content. I would much prefer one link from an association or other industry site, than 10 links from random websites, regardless of their Page Rank.

You want to win the war, not just the battle, so take the extra time and slow down your linking efforts just a bit. Seek out those high quality links, not just the easy-to-get ones, and you will be well rewarded down the road.

Microsoft stunned the business world this week when it announced an offer to buy Yahoo, Inc in a multi-billion dollar deal. Much of the commentary I have heard or read is negative; after all, we have antitrust laws for a reason. 

The move worries the Google folks for obvious reasons. With MSN Live and Yahoo working together, the second and third largest in the search market, it brought up talk about an eventual Google takeover. Let me assure you now, it’s not going to happen. Yes, these guys might get together and become a force to be reckoned with, but they will never topple Google. The folks at Google are smart, really smart. Somehow, with almost no advertising, they have turned Google into a “Band Aid” brand. Basically, it’s a brand that becomes the word for the product itself. What Band Aid did to bandages, Google has done to search. You don’t search anymore, you Google.

I don’t love the idea of these guys joining forces but I don’t think it will have the enormous effect that the talking heads at CNBC think. I am sure Google and every other search service will continue to develop new technologies, and encourage small merchants with reasonably priced advertising opportunities. Luckily, Yahoo, MSN, and Google aren’t the only kids in town. They’re so many online marketing opportunities, that you could survive with out them… I’ll admit, it would be tough though.

For merchants, I love the shopping comparison sites, I always seem to see a better ROI. Allowing folks to see your product before clicking on your site really does make sense. For others, I would look at private websites, like industry blogs and forums. Those folks have your audience, and nothing but. If you can’t convert such highly targeted traffic, then you advertising is not the real issue. Most of these highly popular blogs and forums have reasonable advertising opportunities.

Every month or so (no one really knows for sure) all of the major search engines re-index the cyber world. They send out “spiders” to scan all of the websites in their index and hunt for new content. This is your opportunity as a website publisher to feed the spiders something new. It’s very important for search engine rankings that the spiders find updated pages when they get to your site. That doesn’t mean you have to go nuts redesigning the site every month, but you should be in the habit of changing a bit of copy on your various pages. An easy way to do this is to have content that would normally change frequently, such as news items, or a “feature of the week” sort of thing.

Stale content on your site will eventually bring the whole thing down. The search engines will give your site less and less relevance because it doesn’t see the site being updated or maintained. Don’t let this happen to you! Of, course when refreshing your content every so often, don’t forget those all important keywords!

Many folks believe that adding your website to major search engines is a time consuming process. It’s not! In fact, many entrepreneurs play off this assumption and offer services to submit your site to thousands of search engines for a low fee. First of all, there is no need to submit your site to thousands of search engines. The overwhelming majority of searches done online are on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It’s that simple. Why pay to submit your site to thousands of other sites no one else is using? Secondly, there is no need to pay at all. It’s easy enough that a well trained monkey could do it. In fact, I just took five minutes to submit my site to all the major engines.

Here’s what you want to do. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “Google Suggest A Site”, then do the same for Yahoo and MSN. You’ll get a very simple form that will allow you to submit your URL. It’s also a good idea to go to DMOZ.org and submit your site there.

Furthermore, against popular belief, there is no benefit to submitting your site every month to the search engines, in fact, it may hurt you. They may interpret the act as spam. Once your site is listed, be happy, and spend your time working on improving your rankings. More articles on how to do that can be found on this site.

When browsing the various sources of online help for search engine optimization, you will find many people that devalue the use of meta data in your header. Of course, the title tag is important because that’s what appears in most browsers. However, you should always treat meta tags as an important part of your SEO strategy. Here are some tips for using meta tags well.

- Make sure the title and description tags are unique and well written for each page
- Try to include a few important keywords for the page, but do NOT stuff them in
- Your title tag and description should speak specifically to what is on the page
- When possible, make sure each page has unique meta tags

The last bit of advice about meta tags is to be sure NOT to make your website name the first part of each page’s tags. Many, many sites use their site name and then the rest of the title tag. This can be viewed as duplicate content. Pick one page (probably your index) and have the website name in the title tag, then be sure all other pages are unique.