Since a very long time, many webmasters and website owners have been wanting to get the major share of the Search engine game. So much so that today, many professional webmasters have been using SEO techniques learned over the years, or improvised and stumbled upon methodologies that work where Search Engines are concerned.

For newbies, SEO is a completely new field with a whole encyclopedia of does and donts for each of the three flavors of SEO; viz., White hat SEO, Black Hat SEO and Gray hat SEO techniques. Many, webmasters find themselves into a pool of these techniques and for them the boundaries of the above mentioned “flavors” of SEO are blurred to the point that they get confused and in turn damage their SERPs or no matter what they do, their SERPs remain unchanged. This article deals with simplifying a major White hat SEO methodology, known as “Back Linking”.

What is Back Linking?

“Back Linking” ,as a term, is used widely in the SEO world. Back Links are nothing but inbound links or links that link back to your website or specific webpages on your website(s). Every time, some one, it may be you, links to your website, a back link is created, pointing to your website(s). For e.g. If you submit articles on article directories and link back to your website where more information about the article or its contents is present, a back link is created.

Why Back Linking?

Well, within a given time interval all search engines “appraise” your website. A major factor for consideration of your websites to be given an higher SERP from what it is currently are back links to your website. For e.g. Google, checks or appraises your websites every three months and assigns PR based on the these back links and content. Does that mean you don’t give a dam about your content? NO! It means that have content that will be linked back by people all around to your website. The content should be THAT good! It should give something back to the reader and so the reader might link back to your website or webpages for others to read what you have written. Pretty simple eh? So back links are the second thing you should base your SEO strategy on, right after good ol’ content.

Hence, as a webmaster, you would want to develop or write content or information that is back link
“worthy”. Many webmasters, use ebooks as a means to lure in back links or bait links! (Next seo article would be on link baiting!)

How Back Linking?

Put up blogs on your website, that has additional information which is maybe a day to day update about the information presented in general on your website. A blog certainly goes a long way. Social bookmarking goes longer here. You can use various social media platforms to generate these back links. You can even exchange links with other “Relevant” websites. Yes! Google and other search engines do keep an eye on where your back links are coming from. It they are coming from websites which have similar information or content as compared to your website, in that case it is an added advantage.

Other ways to generate back links is to write for blogs as a guest writer! This is by far the best way for generating back links, that I have come across and its completely “white hat”. Make sure that whatever you are writing for some one else’s blog, should not be an advertisement article, should be informative and should be able to engross the reader to click on the link and get him to your website!

Yet, another way of generating back links are “link directories” - the legitimate kind. For e.g. Dmoz is the best place to start and Google places a lot of weight if your link backed from dmoz. Make sure you where ever your linking back from are Search engine friendly websites!

Always, remember, people when looking for information, are looking to find a major chunk of it at a single place, and they want to know more about whatever they are looking for, so write for users and link for users not Search engines!

Back Linking No! No!

Do not ever buy links! Thats a very big No No! In the SEO industry. If you are buying links, make sure you know the consequences, may be you will get a boost in your SERPs for now, but later the giants always catch up, take it from personal experience!

With Big G, making it clear that 2009 will see changes where SEO is concerned and would include more SEM and Ad bases Optimizations, it only makes sense to list down some common practices and do’s and don’ts of SEO.

This is just a basic list type article on the do’s and dont’s of SEOs.

SEO Definitely Do’s

Do #1 The <title> tag in your HTML code is a must. This tag fits between the <head> and </head> tags. The <title> tag should contain the title of the page, with the title containing the keywords to be used for the content. It is preferable to have these keywords in the first part of the title itself.

Do #2 Page URL should contain the keywords selected. If content is served up dynamically it helps to have the pages being name as static .html files.  For e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/keyword-title.html is a must do. Use of “-“ helps differentiate words for search engines.

Do #3 Keyword densities should be taken care of. The primary keyword used should have a keyword density of approximate 3-5% and secondary keywords used should have a density of approximately 2-3%.

Do #4 Anchor texts or text links should contain keywords, wherever possible. If you are getting backlinks or one way links from other websites make sure that these use keywords in the link backs.

Do #5 Use of heading tags is highly recommended. Use <h1>… <h6> tags wherever you can and wherever you can use them to highlight keywords, titles, etc.

Do #6 Use keywords in the beginning of the document content. This helps search engines index your keywords faster.

Do #7 Definitely use alt tags within all image tags. Add keywords within these alt tags.

Do #8 Use Keywords meta tags. Not necessary for google but a definite for Yahoo and MSN.

Do #9 Definitely see to it that within the content the keyword proximity used is as less as possible. This counts especially where keyword phrases as possible.

Do #10 Use Secondary keyword phrases more often and do use them. Optimize your content around both primary AND secondary keywords.

Do #11 The origin of all inbound links to your website again counts and is important where Google PR is concerned. So be careful where you get linked from, and if these links are from websites that relate in any way to the content on your website, this would be added advantage for your website where Google is concerned again. Links from .edu, .gov and .org domains count more.

Do #12 The text of all internal links matters and should be keyword concentric if possible.

Do #13 The content surrounding internal links and all links should be keyword concentric too.

Do #14 The more older incoming links are, the better.

Do #15 Having links from link directories is great, especially if these links are from DMOZ, Yahoo and other such directories. But if you have a lot of links from PR0 Link directories, then it just might be considered as link spamming.

Do #16 Named anchors are another way of boosting your credibility with search engines.

Do #17 Usage of Description, keywords, robots, and author meta tags is definitely a Do.  Whereas caution is advised when using the refresh metatag and is advised to use a delay of over 10 seconds and some indicative text.

Do #18 Content is king and Unique content is definitely a must. This content should be keyword concentric.  Frequently updating you content goes a long way.

Do #19 Page size also matters, normally large pages should be split up into smaller ones.

Do #20 Site should be accessible and should concentrate more on user experience.

Do #21 Submitting a sitemap to Yahoo, Google and MSN goes a long way.

Do #22 Sub domains don’t play nice where SEO is concerned.

SEO Definitely Dont’s

Don’t #1 Don’t optimize for too many keywords. Use keywords more specific to your content and website.

Don’t #2 Don’t stuff your content with keywords. Keyword stuffing is definitely detrimental for your websites SEO.

Don’t #3 Don’t have many outgoing links on one page, if links are too many and are still required, split the pages up.

Don’t #4 Don’t buy links. Don’t use link farms and other suspicious sites.

Don’t #5 Don’t Cross links between sites. What this means is Site X links to Site Y links to Site Z and Site Z links back to Site X.

Don’t #6 Don’t use non visual or hardly visual links. Search Engine spiders can track these and penalize your site.

Don’t #7 Don’t have separate content which is GEO targeted or targeted on user preferences. Instead build separate sites targeting each user group.

Don’t #8 Don’t copy paste content from elsewhere. Plagiarism will get you no where and will only be detrimental to your website.

Don’t #9 Don’t use invisible links or other black hat SEO techniques.

Don’t #10 Don’t use link cloaking.

Don’t #11 Doorway pages are a big No – No where SEO is concerned.

Don’t #12 Don’t have duplicated content on your website. Your website will definitely be penalized.

Don’t #13 Albeit an image conveys a 1000 words, it is always advisable to use text instead of images where SEO is concerned.

Don’t #14 Avoid using Frames to build your websites. Instead use Divs and Ajax.

Don’t #15 Don’t have frequent downtimes. Hosting downtimes are considered to be detrimental to user experience and Search engines are known to be keeping a check and dropping your websites from their indexes due to downtimes.

Don’t #16 Don’t have too many dynamic URLs.

Don’t #17 Don’t have to many bans using the robot.txt, use “noindex” instead.

Don’t #18 Don’t use redirects, when not used properly, their usage would definitely hurt your websites rankings or can even lead to delisting.

SEO Resources

Here are some links that provide some Tools and resources, including tutorials on SEO.
http://seoresources.seoforgoogle.com/
http://freeseo.org/
http://www.myseoblog.net/