Despite the fact that Google has been always changing or updating algorithms, one of its basic approaches to qualify a webpage by evaluating the quality of Links, remain constant. Links can be internal or external but from the search engines point of view, external links are the most important source to measure the relevance and popularity of a webpage/site. According to Google, external links to your website are the links residing on pages that do not belong to your domain.

Building backlinks will get external links to your website. However, not all backlinks are treated equal. You have to choose the right place to develop and gain backlinks to your website that drives both search engines and Users.

Now, let’s see the Four most valuable and Easy back-linking methods.

Btw, why haven’t you heard of these methods before? You have. But you’ve probably not aware of the effective and most effective ways to use them or you would think or been suggested it’s not useful to your business and so have ignored.

But if you use them the way you will find below, you will get free backlinks which are legitimate, permanent, quality and can drive constant targeted Traffic to your website.

Free Target Traffic and Backlink Methods

1)      Google Places:

This is the top most advanced free traffic and backlinking method every local business website/person should adopt. Because Google Places gives you the power to reach thousands of people searching for your business on Google and Google Maps with all your business information like: website link, physical address, phone email etc.

In general most people/companies register their business details to Google places/maps just with their ‘business names’. But here you take the advantage of adding ‘target business keywords’ while listing on Google Maps. Thus you will not only get a legitimate backlink to your website, your website will be reached to maximum customers in your niche.

2)      Youtube:

Once you have created a video for your business/services, you can upload it to the Youtube. It’s just that simple and Free and this is how most businesses approach youtube upload. But you do it in an advanced way to get target backlink and traffic to your website. First create a branded channel to your business. Fill the profile with all your business information with a website link must. Finally, upload the video by Optimizing the title, description and keywords section. Subscribe and participate (min 4comments, twice per week) into all your niche relative and sub-relative videos. You are done!

3)      Linkedin

Why should you go for linkedin when you already have facebook and twitter networks? Well, unlike facebook and twitter, linkedin allows you to create backlinks which are do-follow. In addition, linkedin allows adding 3 websites to your profile. So if you don’t have a profile, create one. And remember to use ‘target keywords text’ and select “Other” when adding websites in your profile form. Finished? Yes, finished with the backlink part but in order to promote these linkedin backlinks you will need to network with other linkedin profiles, groups and apply all possible methods of linkedin marketing.

4)      Yahoo and Bing Local

Similar to Google places the next two big search engines, Yahoo and Bing provides business listing in their maps (yahoo local and bing local) for Free! In order to get target traffic and backlinks, you should tailor your listing with target keywords. Because keywords will help search engines to display relevant sites to Users search.

Simple, aren’t they? Yes. But how are these methods different from what you know?

Well, most people just ignore the way they could easily optimize their listings and profile-setup on Google Places, Linkedin, Youtube, Bing and Yahoo, results a poor online performance. The trick is your common knowledge, how to represent yourself/your business to search engines.

In fact there are several other methods and many possible ways to get quality backlinks for free which can drive target traffic to your website and build your online reputation. You just need to put some efforts to gather such valuable sources. And we have all such useful resources sorted in respective categories to serve you!

Hope you liked the article!

Feel free to contact me via email or Facebook or Google+

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One of the Top news portal sites of UK: The Telegraph had recently published an article on SEO Tips compiling the ideas of Top SEO Consults. All these 10 SEO tips are crucial to a websites’ success. Here in this article I will brief you each of those Top 10 SEO Tips along with my thoughts.

List of Top 10 SEO Tips:

1. Produce unique, dynamic and authoritative content

   Inside Article: Unlike past Content has been playing important role in creating brand authority, get authoritative links, attract users to your website etc…If you have the quality of producing content with passion, power and uniqueness it will be similar to creating an optimized content.

   My thoughts: This is totally agreeable. Whatever may be your business size and category, an optimized content always increases the chances of spreading your business presence on the WEB more widely.

2. Utilise the long tail of keyword demand.

   Inside Article: 70% of all search queries contains ‘long tail’ keyword phrases. So optimizing your content with these ‘long tails’ will bring huge traffic which can also bring high conversions.

   My thoughts: 70% Yes. Long tail keywords can bring good traffic & conversions than generic keywords but don’t forget optimizing your site for short phrase keywords because it is highly possible for users to select short phrases when they are on Google Instant. Read Google Instant and its Effects to know more.

3. Optimise Meta Tags.

   Inside Article: Optimise your website meta Titles , Descriptions and Keywords tags to control how your site is described in SERPs. Placing your keywords smartly can help search engines attach relevant to webpage content and push relevant traffic from the results pages.

   My thoughts: True/Unclear/False.
   Optimizing meta title & description is good, Keywords? NO. Google doesn’t use them in their ranking process. And it is unclear where should we include keywords apart from saying, use meta keywords! More info on keyword placement on your site is here: Keyword Ranking Guide

4. Run a blog.

   Inside Article: Blogging is useful to represent and share your skills to the people who are interested in your niche business’s offers. A useful blog can drive great range of high value links to promote quality of a website to the search engines.

   My thoughts: Totally Agree. Blogging has huge benefits if you can invest your time or find someone to write your business blog posts.

5. Optimise for local search results.

   Inside Article: As there are millions of mobile users out there using Smartphones, it is essential to rank well on local listings. Because mobile searches are naturally local.

   My thoughts: Certainly Good. Mobile search(Local search) will continue to grow.

6. Invest in an SEO and user-friendly domain name.

   Inside: Domains with keywords/phrase could be great investment to your SEO campaign. A captivating URL will have good chances of returning visitors and can establish positive impact. Search engines consider this as a strong point to determine the relevance of a website.

   My: Yes and no. Google experts say Keyword inside a domain is one of the 100 factors in their ranking algorithms. However, 2011 SEO ranking factors by SEOMOZ states ‘keyword inside domain’ is one of the important ranking factors. So, rather investing money to such domain names I would suggest you to invest your time in finding best keywords which are memorable and which reflects your business.

7. Conduct Competitor Analysis.

   Inside: Find the keywords your competitors are targeting and analyze the links they are getting from. This is a good way to follow up and benefit from analysis. And adding keyword research to it will benefit your website keyword strategies.

   My: Understanding your competition is truly one of the good steps to find your own ‘plus‘ and ‘minus‘ in your market. But how far you will understand and apply them will makes the difference.

8. Use Content as platform to build links

   Inside Article: One of the crucial aspects of SEO campaigns includes Linkbuilding and Development. Content can be used to attract link prospects and Trust because high quality content will produces links organically.

   My: The first tip of this article conveys similar benefits. And yes high quality content develops link prospects, links that are contextual not self-made like the article submission sites.

9. Set realistic targets.

   Inside Article: It will be an asset for your investments in search engine optimization when you have detailed stats about your site analytics. This data can be useful to measure and set goals for your SEO campaign.

   My:It is absolutely true. When starting an SEO campaign be sure that your expectations are actually True.

10. Invest in Social Media Marketing.

    Inside Article: Social media can bring Brand awareness, traffic, better conversions and ROI, search engines benefits and many more. It is a great opportunity for businesses to invest in social media.

    My: This would certainly deserve top #3 in top ten SEO Tips list becauase its all about relationships that matters! However, social media generally comes under Internet Marketing and not exactly SEO

Final thoughts: These tips are helpful to notify you some best targets you can choose for your website’s SEO . You should find the best strategies that will work for you. My best SEO Tip would be : Relevance and Freshness of your content and links with mixed list of successful internet marketing methods will make your SEO campaign huge successful.

What’s your best SEO Tip?

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We know that January is always the best time to schedule business plans. So, for Webmasters and SEO’s, I would like to share with you some information and solution about 3 most important Google updates/changes and how it impacts your websites in the search results.

Google Caffeine, Local/Place Search and Instant are the three important search algorithmic changes taken by Google in 2010. I think every Webmaster and SEO’s should improve your link-building/SEO strategies to adapt to these updates/changes for better performance on Google.

1) Google Caffeine:

Since many years, Google has been playing fair play in producing relevant, fast and fresh results. Caffeine was the upgraded version of Google to provide 50 percent fresher results for web searches than its earlier version. The release of Caffeine in its search indexing system took place in the month of August 2010.

Impact:

This new indexing system shows new updates, content really fast and mostly show fresh content. With this step taken by Google, fresh content on web is being indexed more frequently and get places in its search results if the search term is Relevant.

Solution:

If you would like to get your website more indexed and placed in Google search results, the simple solutions is to add as much fresh and relevant content as possible to your website. Three best methods to add fresh content to your business website are:

1) Write articles and publish them on popular article directories,

2) Publish News on Press release sites and

3) Create a blog for your website and update regularly.

2) Local/Place Search:

With the increase in the use of mobile internet and as more online users are tending towards finding local businesses, local search have gain tremendous popularity in Google search results.

Impact:

From this update, Google is displaying local search results integrated with the organic (general web results) search results. Also, local search results are given more prior by placing them at the top of the search results pushing down the organic search results. According to Google: “More than 20 percent of searches on Google are related to location.”

Solution:

If you have a local store and a website for it, or if you are providing services from various locations, or you want to dominate your local market, Google has special place for local businesses/services know as ‘Google Places’. Get your website listed in Google places to claim your local business. Google Places Help for business owners gives amazing information about local search business.

Now here is the third very important and must read change in Google Search: It is the Instant.

3) Instant:

To give the faster, better and stronger search results, Google had announced Google Instant as one of its important update last year. As the name suggests, results are instantaneously displayed as soon as you start typing in the search field.

The Impact:

This recent update has significant impact on every website’s Impressions and Click-Through-Rate. The reason is: Instant’s results have the ability to divert a user by stopping him from typing middle of a query/keyword.

The Solution:

Based on my personal tests on multiple websites, how Google Instant works, I have made 2 posts on this topic:

1) How to Adapt SEO for Google Instant Search – Part 1 &

2) How to Adapt SEO for Google Instant Search – Part 2

These two posts have detailed descriptions with solutions that fit for this update.

I hope you won’t ignore these 3 Important Google updates and get most out of your SEO efforts from these solutions!

All the Best!

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Your website’s Impressions can increase and Click-Through-Rate can decrease with the new Google Instant search. A Google user/searcher can sometimes get distract from the suggestions listed in Google Instant and hence Impressions and CTR of a website fluctuates. I will try to explain you below in an easy manner how this new system affects these two things and how to adapt from these changes.

Let us first understand how impressions of a site increases. For example if you want to search for ‘Halloween Costumes for children’, Google starts displaying/previewing websites in its search results page right from the beginning of your search phrase letter ‘H’ to the end of your search phrase letter ‘n’.  Here, websites that will get displayed to each letter of your search term: ‘Halloween Costumes for children’ gains impressions.

Confused? Check out the below images:

In the first image, you can see Google Instant displaying results for [Halloween] after typing only the partial search [hallow]. This means the Instant system actually predicts and suggests search results automatically for every letter you type inside the search field even before you completely finish typing the word [Halloween](as shown in the second image). In the above two examples, the first two results [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween & www.halloween.com/] gains impressions because Instant is quickly bringing the results even before you completely type your search term: ‘Halloween Costumes for children’ .

This is the basic criteria for a website to increase its Impressions with the new Google Instant Search

Now, take a look at the below pictures that depicts how Click-Through-Rate(CTR) Decreases.

In the right image,www.justkidcostumes.com ranks no.1 for the keyword ‘halloween costumes for children’. It means this website can only reached by searchers if they completely type the query. But if searchers divert to other websites Google Instant suggests in the drop down list as shown in above pictures, it will decrease this website’s click through rate (CTR).

These are the chances a website can increase or decrease Impressions and CTR.

Simple and Effective ways to Adapt to these Fluctuations:

Impressions:

Google’s Webmaster tool can help your website by tracking the number of impressions and CTR it gets via Google search. So when you list out the keywords that shows your site’s impressions areas/position, you will understand how near or far your website is appearing in Google’s search results.  And when you find your website positioned at certain point to a keyword your website has ever displayed before and that the keyword is also near to your business, you can start optimizing to rank for that keyword.

For CTR:

If you notice your website’s CTR decreased due to above reason, start optimizing your website to rank for the keywords/phrases that majorly affects user’s distraction which can be collected from the suggestions/predictions box. In the above example ‘Halloween costumes for kids’ is the top distracting key phrase for which the CTR decreasing website has to be optimized for.

Also, it is now the time to optimize your keywords for multiple short phrases. It doesn’t mean that long tail keywords have no importance. But that, is another story.

What strategies are you trying to your SEO/link-building Campaigns with this new search enhancement?

Please share your thoughts below.

Happy weekend!!

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Let me first clarify you that Google’s traditional raking system hasn’t changed. Means, their search rankings to retain relevant results remains same. But Google Instant is a typical change in the way a searcher reaches the search results.

As said in my earlier post, location, Impressions and CTR are the main things to consider in adapting SEO for Google Instant. To make it more detailed I have split them into two different parts with “Location” explained in this first part and “Impressions and CTR” in the Second part.

Location:

A user/searcher location is one of the important factors that influence a website’s search rankings because Google Instant Suggestions are Location based:

In fact this isn’t a new algorithm and it applies to Google Instant also. By default Google’s homepage is loaded on your country based domain. When you search on Google, it can identify your location based on your IP address and will display suggestions accordingly. As I am searching from Hyderabad, India, you can see from the above image, Google Instant predicts, identifies my location and suggests keywords, ‘pizza hut Hyderabad’, ‘pizza hut India’, ‘pizza hut madhapur’. Look at these keywords again: ‘pizza hut madhapur’ ‘pizza hut secunderabad’, ‘pizza hut begumpet, ‘pizza hut somajiguda’. It confirms that Instant suggestions are Location based because most of the suggestions in the drop down box: Madhapur, Secunderabad, Begumpet, Somajiguda are local areas in Hyderabad City.

Solution: Google Instant is refining its organic search results to promote the local search and local results. So as the system works on localization of results, it is now the right time to adapt local keywords in your SEO efforts.

The next post is about reasons for the changes in Impressions and CTR of a site and how to adapt to your website optimization.

Please let me know what you think by sharing your comments below.

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We have been seeing various changes happening inside Google Search since last three years. I think their tendency to make Google search more accessible had started their experiments by first introducing Universal Search results  in 2007 followed by Real Time search in Oct 2009(live twitter results), Personalized Search in Dec 2009, Caffeine in June 2010 and recently with Instant. At present the search results are a combination of all the above changes. Now, the more important, debating and effective new search improvement is Google’s new search enhancement Google Instant.

The main objective behind Google Instant is to return search results very fast and to provide you (the user) with new ideas/suggestions within the search space and in a drop-down box even before you press the Enter/Search button. The name clearly defines the key benefit of this new feature – it’s Instant. Yes, it has the power to automatically provide suggestions. It can predict the relative search terms to what you are searching for and will autocomplete the process of displaying them.

Below is the depiction of Google Instant:

Users can sometimes tend to reach a website from Google Instant Suggestions rather than what they actually intend to search for. This is the reason why many SEO’s take this new search feature as a threat. They think it will show negative impact on SEO and PPC because users can get distracted from their original search process. I was a bit depressed when so many SEO’s taking and talking about this as a serious change. Of course it was confusing in the beginning but if you are still in that confusion you will have to adapt to the changes with user’s behavior that Google Instant brings about.

IP/Location and Keywords Search Volume are the two basic criteria Google Instant is following now. A website’s Impressions, CTR and keyword ranking affects with this new enhancement. I am in an effort to give you valuable information about the latest Google Instant’s impact in all these areas.

If you would like to discover these facts, please join/subscribe(right navigation) my blog and adapt the suggestions I will be discussing in my next blog posts.

have a happy weekend!!

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While in the first and second steps of this keyword ranking guide you get the information about finding the right target keywords and how to use them in your website, this final step contains information on backlinks, methods to gain relevance and popularity to rank for your target keywords.

Importance of Backlinks

Backlinks -  are the links pointing to your web page or website from other pages. The number of links pointing a page is often used by search engines to rank in its results page. So backlinks play very important role in organic search results (search engine results). This is the basic reason why webmasters concentrate to build backlinks to their websites. But this process is complicated and more time consuming. If you can afford on that you can move forward building backlinks to your website or hire an SEO expert and save your time.

What Major Search Engines Suggests

Building backlinks or link-building process is important because major search engines like Bing and Google suggests them as an important ranking and marketing factors. Check out below what they suggest:

Google :  If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it.

Bing : Successful link-building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution. You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time. Good things come to those who wait and work smartly!

Summary: Links form relevant blogs, forums and other sources that are available online are useful to your website marketing methods and link-building efforts and results are not instant.

How to Gain Relevance and Popularity

It is really simple if you understand the core factors of ranking algorithms. Every website/page should meet these two factors to rank in search engines results pages: Relevance and Popularity.

Relevance is based on the content of your pages as well as the links pointing your pages/site. Popularity is based on total number of links pointing your page/site.

A webpage/site with keywords optimized content will be given more relevance in search engine’s assessment. And a website/page with more keyword based anchor text links pointing/referring it, will gain popularity.

So when your website is optimized with keywords inside the content as described in the second step of this guide: How and Where to use right keywords on your site, you can gain relevance, and popularity is achieved when your site/page reaches maximum links pointing it. This can be done by effective link-building (back-links) methods.

Conclusion of the Topic

Keyword ranking is the ultimate goal in search engine optimization. You can achieve it when you apply things that are explained in all these 3 steps of keyword ranking guide. On a whole your webpage or website can rank for a keyword if you have the most relevant content and links pointing your site. Links with target keywords in the anchor text can benefit more in ranking.  So while link-building try to have your keywords inside your anchor text.

All the Best!

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If you have read my before post: the First Step of Keyword Ranking Guide, this is the second part in it. In this step I will give you details on ‘where and how’ to use the right keywords on your site.

I have made this into four sub topics:

• The Role of Content
• Priority of Keyword Optimized Content
• Where and How to Use Right Keywords
• Benefits of Right Keywords at Right Place

The Role of Content

Whatever the stuff you have on your website is referred to as ‘Content’. But I am talking about the text information of a website. The text, the information, the Content of your website defines what your website is all about.

You would have already heard that ‘Content is King’. It says that, content of a page/site plays major role for a website regardless of other aspects (design) it contains. And it also means that the content should be appealing to readers as well as to search engines. So content is basic to any website. Web pages with limited content cannot produce desired results on search engines and also not useful for marketing.

Priority of Keyword Optimized Content

As search engines always try to rank pages based on the relevancy factors that follows text matching analysis between the search term used(by user) and the content it found on a page(in their indices), a ‘keyword optimized content’ will have more chances to rank in search engine results page. Hence, you need to optimize your content with keywords in it.

Where and How to Use Right Keywords

Now, as you understand that keyword optimized content will have more chances on search results, you will need to know how and where you should use your right target keywords in your content and on a webpage.

Where:

‘Keyword locations‘ on your site will have major effect on your search engine rankings because search bots parses document/page information by calculating them. Your webpage’s Title, meta description, anchor text, body content and text that is bold/italic are the prominent areas of keyword locations.

Include your right keywords in the above areas to get SEO and User benefits.

How:

Readers dislike and simply quit the content that has keywords repeated. Don’t use your keywords unless you find them necessary. Your content should be interesting and useful to your reader as well as to you; means it should hold useful information about your keyword/topic. Focus on your audience/customers needs. A good content will, of course, flow naturally from the topic. It will also show your personality and your standards on that topic. So ensure you use them appropriately.

Benefits of Right Keywords at Right Place

You get significant SEO benefits with right keywords at right place. One of the SEO rule is that you should use only unique Titles, meta description for each document/page of a website. This will help search engines understand that your site is ‘fresh‘ and ‘unique‘. It will also helps them identify and understand that information given inside these tags is the main objective of that document and will place it into the most relevant category to further ranking processes.

When it comes to body content, using semantic words and right-keywords inside the text of every page of your website will have faster document indexing process. It is a process that engages search engine bots to index millions of documents available on the World Wide Web.

Google normally uses content inside the title and meta description tags to display in its search results. If your webpage is found on its search results page, the right keywords that are found in the displayed results will entice the user to reach your link and thus can increase the number of visitors to your page.

What do you think? Feel anything debating?  Please share your comments below.

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If you are newly building a website you need to focus on selecting the right keywords for your web content because they will play key role for search engine benefits. As explained in the introduction part of this keyword ranking guide, I have made this first step into four subtopics.

Wrong Targets Webmasters Focusing

Most webmasters’ focus on the home keywords (ex: Furniture, Jewelry, Stock Market, SEO) which are normally higher in users’ search volume. This means competition for such keywords is normally very high. So targeting home words cannot reach your targeted customers. However, using these home keywords in the content of your webpage can help users get basic information about your business.

Webmasters tendency on Keyword Tools

Website owners sometimes depend up on tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, Word- tracker, to get information about keywords search-volume and web-ranking data etc. They believe that these tools can help them find the right keywords for their business. I would say that these tools can just give you general or popular keyword suggestions and information any person (including your competitors) can get! These are all robotic generated and not insightful to your business needs. I am not saying that they are not at all useful but as they are offered for free they don’t provide you any right keyword suggestions based on your customer’s experiences.

Solution to Find Right Keywords

The actual solution to find out the right keywords is to collect information about the keywords that are browsed by your ‘Customers’. Yes, it’s true and actually simple if you really start business with a passion to reach your customers’ needs. Also note that it is not the same work as how you do in a traditional market. When doing business online you will need to plan on various internet marketing strategies but as I said in the introduction part the priority of search engine ranking as the most beneficial area to get business to your website, let me explain you how to find the right keywords.

For example: if your website is about ‘furniture’ that provides services to offices and homes, a buyer looking to purchase your product (office furniture) might search for: ‘best price office furniture for sale’ or ‘best and lowest price office furniture’ or something highly related with a combination of such keywords only. The intent of these searches clearly suggests that he/she is actually looking to purchase your product and not to get any basic information about your website. So, you need to select the keywords that are intended to reach your products/services and make a list of such words which will form into some good set of right keywords. Not satisfied? Doesn’t worry, below I have some important tips to get them.

Direct Tips to get Right Keywords:

Any online user who needs a product/service will have these words in their searches: buy, cheap, best, price, find, testimonials, top, reviews, sell, certified, trusted, affordable, reliable, discount, coupon, new, compare, low cost etc. So prepare a list of keywords with a combination of your product/service name along with the above suggestions. Note that I said ‘combination’ because combining them will actually results in low competition and right keywords list. Another example for a right business keyword would be like this: ‘find best discounts on office furniture’.

In case you want to target local audience, you can just add your area/city/region name along with the above suggestions in your keywords list. More information on local targeting will be discussed in my future blog posts. So, as now you have got an idea on how to find the right keywords for your website,  the next step of this Keyword Ranking Guide will be on how and where to use these right keywords on your website. Meanwhile get ready with the list of the right keywords.

Please share it and give your valuable comments below.

All the Best! Happy Weekend!

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Many web surveys have proved that most online activities on the World Wide Web starts from ‘search’. This means majority of online users use search engines for their online activities. So, if a website is ranked for a keyword on search engines results page, it can reach this vast audience and thus can generate huge traffic, leads and leads into Conversions. Hence if your business requires a website, then keyword ranking will play major role in generating all these benefits!

As this is a lengthy subject, I have divided it into three comprehensive steps with definitive points in it.

They are:

1). Selecting the right keywords for your business.

2). How and Where to use these keywords on your site.

3). How to Rank for Right Business Keywords.

#1 Step Consists:

• Wrong targets webmasters focusing
• Webmasters tendency on Keyword Tools
• Solution to find Right Keywords
• Direct Tips to get Right Keywords

#2 Step Consists:

• The Role of Content
• Priority of Keyword Optimized Content
• How and Where to Use Right Keywords
• Benefits of Right Keywords at Right Place

#3 Step Consists:

• Importance of Backlinks
• What Major Search Engines Suggests
• How to Gain Relevance and Popularity
• Conclusion of the Topic

Now I think you can understand the importance of dividing this topic into three specific steps.  So I will schedule to post these three steps consequently.  However, I won’t make any late moving forward. Within next 24hrs, I will publish the Keyword Ranking Guide – ‘Step 1’.

Please share it and give your valuable comments below.

Have a Great Day!

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