As a matter of fact, folks used to even run extraneous blog commenting campaigns, doing up to 100+ comments on a daily basis to quickly gather valuable back-links, drive more traffic and rank higher in the Google search results.

But, pretty soon the content king – Google realized the irony of the situation, and started penalizing websites that sold or gave away non nofollow links. As a result, even the default comments in all the newer versions of blogging engines like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and the likes of them, had nofollow links by default.

Ever since then it has become a trend, and currently everybody has started using “nofollow” link tag – and even from social networking sites like FaceBook or Orkut, all that you can get is only nofollow links. But, social media is now becoming a great way to drive massive traffic and expose your business identity to the public.

Blog commenting has become a dying art and it is only a good way to build good rapport with fellow bloggers and improve the daily traffic to your website/blog. Something similar goes with the social networking and social media platforms, as one can only improve the traffic not Page Rank and search rankings with these links!

When it comes to link-building with so many constraints, a word of caution would be to remember the sheer fact that links to too many directories can make your site look like a link-farm – so beware Google is watching you!

Article directories are definitely the best bets to generate good backlinks. You may try running an article marketing campaign at reputed sites like EzineArticles.com GoArticles.com, Constant-Content.com, ArticlesBase.com and generate some targeted traffic as well as quality links.

Then the social bookmarking services like Digg Buzz.Yahoo, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, can come in handy in exposing your website to a wider range of audience and getting more traffic!

But, the bottom-line is that quality content, on-page organic SEO, and seamless user experience are the most effective ways to improve the overall SEO and search rankings of your website.

Last, but definitely not the least, you may want to add a robots.txt file on your root directory to exercise control over the pages that you DON’T want to be indexed by Google Crawler, Adsense Crawler and other bots. For instance, in a Wordpress blog, you don’t want Google to crawl the /wp-admin folder, so you can add following line in robots.txt file –

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-admin

Note: Adding a sitemap to your site is a must!

Simply put, it’s the expectation of almost instantaneous results and massive domination of the top listings under a particular targeted keyword or search term. A good SEO campaign will deliver relatively quick results, but not instantly and sometimes not for a few weeks. With the speed of the Web and how fast information can fly across the Web, especially with a negative story, those who don’t live and breathe SEO have a perception of such programs showing immediate results and effect. When an organic and technical SEO program is combined with a Pay-Per-Click, and Social Media campaign, SEO results can occur much faster. If your SEO work is just organic and technical in nature, then results can take upwards of 2-3 weeks or longer.

Much also depends on the nature of your business. Sometimes, your efforts are better spent targeting your niche in social media areas such as blogs and forums, where they can be more effectively reached. Either way, top rankings may not occur for a few days, since it may take time to displace competitors and other sites who have been enjoying good placement. If your space is highly competitive, it is also likely your competitor is hard at work with their SEO efforts trying to knock you down. There are enough good SEO firms and practitioners that your competitors may also hire. Your competitor may also be outspending you on Pay-Per-Click campaigns (you can find this out in the keyword and term auctions.)

So your senior management may find you ranking high one week, yet falling the next. This is when SEO Anxiety kicks in and this often when we get a call to conduct an audit or evaluate a PPC project as an independent firm. Our initial strategy is to speak directly with the C-Level executive that is looking to retain us, and the manager responsible for the SEO project to determine when it was implemented. Sadly we more often than not talk ourselves out of a project. We recommend setting expectations clearly and in simple terms with senior managers on what the anticipated results are and project objectives and timelines for results.

This will enable smoother projects and mitigate the risk of SEO Anxiety and enable a closer working relationship between senior marketing, finance and operational executives.

As a final note, in any SEO project it is not a one off effort. Competitors, search engine changes, content etc … Can all affect the way you appear on a search engine. SEO is an ongoing process in most cases, especially if your operating in a competitive market.

Quite a few web developers, business owners lose their focus, and start worrying about search engine optimization, they lose track and while SEO is important your content needs to sell the business, service and get the message across.  Write good content that is effective for SEO and also gets the message out accurately and effectivly . That’s enough to let the search engines know what your site, and it pages are about. There are a thousand other criteria that search engines take into account that go far beyond what is written on the page.

Content plays an important role in SEO and one factor among many is how long a person stays on your site after they have clicked on it from the search engine results page. If it takes someone ten minutes to go back to the search engine to look for another site the search engine will know about it. This is one area where your content plays a role over a site built purely to please a search engine with it’s optimised pages (sometimes optimized pages are quite confusing and in the end no good to the reader). When someone clicks on a site that is search engine optimised to the point that it doesn’t make any sense then that visitor is going to click the back button instantly to look for another site. It will be a site like yours that will offer them the content that they were looking for.

Search engine optimisers spend hours, and sometimes days perfecting a page for the search engine’s algorithms for that month only to see it drop again when the algorithm changes the next month. The pages with content that web surfers like to read are the ones that are continually at the top of the search engine results pages. Your pages can get found for hundreds of different word combinations. Why bother optimising them for one phrase? People that do this are on a never ending chase, and losing out on thousands of potential visitors to their site every month.

Not only will your content rich web site keep your visitors attention but it will also lead them to the goal of your web site. This could be a lead, or it could be a sale. Your content will draw them in. When they see you’re an expert they will see your advice or recommendations with a more open mind to make the purchase or leave their contact details.

Building a web site goes far beyond that number one place in the search engine results. It has a far better purpose, and that’s to get visitors interested, and keep them interested.

Remember, Content needs to be accurate and effective to get the readers attention and to close the deal. If it doesn’t make sense then you will lose. All the SEO in the world can’t help you if the content on your website is terrible.