Building high quality backlinks to your site is probably the most important factor in order to get high rankings and lots of traffic from the major search engines.

Here are a few simple tips that should help you to build more incoming links:

* Quality of incoming links is more important than quantity. Ask other site owners to link back to your site. Make sure these sites provide quality content, cover a topic that’s related to yours and have a high page rank (PR).

* When writing an article, a forum post, a blog post… , link back to your site and use your primary and secondary keywords in the link text.

* Before you send a link request, link to the other person first and ask to link back with a specific phrase (your keywords in the link text).

* To get more positive responses, always make your link-requests personal. Tell the other person what you liked about his site, why he should consider linking back to you….

* Focus on networking – build relationships with lots of other site owners.

* Always use a bio-box at the end of your articles and a sig file with your forum posts linking back to your site.

* Create a free blog on www.wordpress.com and link back to your site.

* Get some links from quality directories like dmoz.org – consider also buying links from secondary directories, like JoeAnt, Gimpsy, Skaffe, GoGuides…

* Signup with social bookmarking sites (Squidoo.com, digg.com, del.iicio.us … check out http://www.socialize-it.com for more sites) and bookmark (add a favorite) your site or blog.

* If you have a blog, regularly ping sites like technorati.com, pingomatic.com, api.feedster.com/ping, http://api.moreover.com/ping … If you use a WordPress blog, this will be handled automatically for you.

If you want to learn more about search engine optimization and effective link building, I recommend you check out the Blog at SEOBook.com

Technorati Tags: link building, linking strategies, backlinks, incoming links, link requests, blogging, link directories, social bookmarking

First of all, what is a sitemap? A sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the web-pages of your website.

What is it good for? It tells the search engines about all the pages that are available in your domain and it informs them whenever you add new page(s).

The result? More of your pages will be indexed and the search engines will send you more traffic.

The good thing is, creating a sitemap is easy, it doesn’t cost anything and it shouldn’t take more than a minute to create one (there are even scripts that handle the process of creating the sitemap and informing the search engine(s) automatically whenever you add a new page – zero work for you).

On the other hand, don’t expect all of your pages to be indexed immediately after creating a sitemap. Actually, some of your pages might never get indexed – even with a sitemap in place.

But as I already mentioned, it doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t really require any work and it will surely give you some additional visitors and customers – for free!

What’s next?

Here are some resources to get you started with sitemaps:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ – this is a free service that allows you to create sitemaps for Google, Yahoo and other search engines online.

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final – this is a great plugin for WordPress Blogs. It automatically creates and updates your Google sitemap and informs Google for you.

http://www.google.com/webmasters – Google Webmaster Tools to manage your sitemaps

There are also tons of other services and tools, but the ones listed above are a good starting point

Technorati Tags: sitemap, google sitemap, search engine, ranking, seo, page rank