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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Today twitter has released its own image upload feature. It may not be available to all twitter users but if you got this feature enabled to your twitter account, you should see a screen like this:

Later, by default you will see an image icon and a location icon at the lower left hand side of your tweet box. When you upload your image using the image icon, you will see a thumbnail view like this:

Interesting? You can read more about this new image sharing feature from twitter help centre. Click here for detailed instructions from twitter

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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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First Insight: Facebook Page or Profile(Friends) Page ?

Last weekend I was creating my new facebook page to our brand new services and prices. Everything was done and I had sent invitations to all my facebook friends about the update. In the process I thought of contacting people with whom I mostly interact, to promote this new FBpage. However, as I wanted to see how many people would respond to my invite I had decided to skip my facebook page promotion. Two days later I had encountered a facebook friend who is an expert web designer by profession. We had some general chat for few minutes and then he asked about my business, I gave my facebook business page, asked him to like it.

Now, I think you can easily guess what would he done in response to it? But that did not happen. He either liked my page immediately or asked to like his page before he likes mine. Instead he said, “here’s mine, I encourage my clients to use a friends page instead of a fan page – can get more action’.

I was surprised to hear this word: ‘friends page’ and asked him curiously how can we get a ‘friends page’ when Facebook allows only a Facebook Page? He said, ‘you can’t, you just have to have a regular friends page‘. To ensure what he was saying, I had asked him if he was talking about the facebook profile through which we were then chatting. And yes my assumption was correct he was referring to the general facebook account/profile page as “friends page”!

Well, his whole point was, you can have a facebook page but that is just to tell or represent some of your business/services and not something you can benefit than your general facebook profile aka friends page. I think it makes sense, doesn’t it? Of course it does but that is only one theory about Facebook pages.

Second Insight: Statistical Observation

As I couldn’t totally agree with him I thought a statistical figure would give 100% proof to decide whether to choose facebook page for business or not. So I did some calculations on the worldwide Top 10 Facebook-pages’ updates.

Here are those Top 10 Facebook Pages details:

How did I calculate?

I had collected the ratios between likes and comments from all these 10 pages’ recent week updates and tested the average percentage (by converting ratios to percentage) of active users in each of these top 10 profiles. You know what? The average percentage of Active users in all these world top 10 profiles is less than 20%(Twenty- percent).

An old friend once said, in general, webinars (online live meetings) will bring instant 50% – 75% conversions to a 100% satisfied presentation or a minimum 30% guaranteed conversions.

Actually there is no match between the performances on webinars and the worldwide Top 10 Facebook pages in terms of business volume. But both of these have themed Audience, both audiences have similar kind of interest and likes to attend/listen to their products/updates, irrespective of the fact webinars are fixed to particular time.

So, if the most popular top 10 Facebook pages gets just 20 percent of responses, how much would my/your business facebook page will? So as I mentioned in the first insight, should we just use a normal facebook profile aka “friends page” rather a Facebook page?

Third Insight: Understanding the Purpose

Facebook pages are actually useful to represent a business, an organization, a celebrity or some brand unlike profiles which are just used to create individual accounts. You can share all (whatever) your business updates and programs via pages unlike on profiles where you cannot do that all/most of the times. And more importantly pages are exceptional to understand your prospects/customers’ behavior. Because pages’ offers customers to subscribe to your business page (become a “fan”).

Conclusion:

Whatever may be the theories or insights, when you quantify the percentage of your business you have invested your time/money, that will give you clear idea about your ups and downs. And with that information, you will have to find ways how to reach your customers and expand your business.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator. ~Francis Bacon

P.S: If you would like to know what I could do for your business, visit our facebook page and hit the like button: http://www.facebook.com/SEOBestServices

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While I was in this random situation I got an idea that had enforced me to work out on certain things. I believe that these things will remain as benchmarks to ones’ SUCCESS in Business and Life. And here I would like to share with you those simple, promising and deciding factors.

Well, the first thing is:

Finding Hurdles

In my scenario, I have found that I stopped blogging due to these:

1) Sufficient Income or I was Idle/Lazy or You call whatever you want

In some way or the other, people would stop working innovating in their fields when they feel they are secured or when they are into the motto of living by a customized way of life. Ever since I had entered into the comfort zone of working from home with sufficient earnings per month, I had become lazy sharing and helping my expertises through this blog.

2) Inefficient to Manage Internet/Social Media Addiction and Presence

I need not bet or argue more about today’s Internet or Social media addiction because I think most of you should have already knew about it. However, I think most of you might not realize that you are inefficiently working with your Internet or social media networks just as I was doing.

In general I stay close to 24/7 online doing various things like assisting my clients (though it isn’t a hurdle at all), watching videos, reading news, explore Facebook, Twitter etc..

Even though my knowledge gained through this habit of exploring Internet had been shared to social networks (via updates/tweets), applied to my clients’ works, I realized that it was all merely a part of what I could actually do to progress my business. (Please note, my point is not to communicate that blogging is the only way for you to uplift your business or it will bring 100% recognition but the inefficiency to manage Social media or whatever Online Presence (website, SEO, PPC) you have and the TIME, will impact your Business and Life than what you think.)

Back to the point, How did I find this?

When I monitored all the reports (site analytics, sales, accounts etc…) of my business in this idle period, I had found that my business was in NO Gain or No Loss.

But these are not the stats I am concerned about. It’s all about how far my knowledge is been efficiently utilized and how much recognition my business is getting/winning in the competition?!

So, what did I decide finally?

Take Action!

Being an Internet marketer especially from SEO industry, I knew pretty well that a blog is one of the perfect ways to reach your audience on regular base and it equally helps bring potential traffic to your services. I also knew that once your blog is kept idle for a period, say for several months, just like as I did, you will lose all blogging benefits like: No people or No Search engine traffic and several other cons for not blogging!

Despite knowing these facts I had never taken proper Action until I have realized that we or our businesses are not created to be idle and if we just keep them as it (Business/Life) goes, it is merely the death for your Business as well as your Life because I believe that is not how our Life/Business has to be.

So I have decided to always stay conscious and take action and get myself and my business be unique and outstand the competition !

It’s just that SIMPLE and as simple as a mere TRUTH.

“No action, no change. Limited action, limited change. Lots of action – Change occurs.” ~ Catherine Pulsifer

Conclusion: Idleness and Inefficiency are the two biggest Death Knells for You and for Your Business. Stay conscious and Take Action.

Look forward your thoughts.. yours Pradeep.

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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!

Please share it and give your valuable comments below.

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