All the techniques for search engine optimization (SEO) we’ve looked at so far are designed to improve your SEO ranking in two ways: making your site relevant, and making it authoritative.

For your site to be highly ranked, it’s not just what you know (your site content), but who you know (what other resources are linked to you). Creating “rank-increasing” mutual links involves both approaches, and there are several ways you can do it:

Manual Link-Building. This is the easiest way to create mutual links and consequently; it’s also the least effective. It consists of placing your information on other reputable sites by writing comments, linking to social networking profiles, and submitting your site to online directories. Remember to include a link to your site every time you do this.

Editorial Link-Building – At the other end of the spectrum are editorial links, which are based primarily on the quality of your content. Sites with exceptional content or unique resources are more likely to generate mutual links without you having to extend an invitation. These have the most credibility, provided the source site is reliable and authoritative itself.

Mutual Link-Building – The most effective way to increase your relevance and authority is the “combo” approach, where you actively build relationships with sites,  their owners, and others you’d like to have link to you. This requires having exceptional site content, reaching out to others who might be interested, and inviting them to link to your site while you link to theirs. Hence the term “mutual.”

5 Ways to Establish Mutual Links and Boost Your Search Rating

1. Be sure your site has great content. Update it regularly to keep it fresh and interesting.
2. Make it easy for readers to comment on your site.
3. Identify other sites that will increase your relevance and authority, then develop relationships with them.
4. Avoid sites with an overabundance of advertising. Just as you want to provide relevant, authoritative content, the sites to which you link should do the same.
5. Offer other sites the freedom to share your content provided they link back to you.

People love pictures and videos, but search engines ignore them when it comes to ranking your site. But there is a way to provide delightful photos and videos for your readers and please the search engines while you’re at it. And, it’s easy to do.

When you add photographs and other media to your website, give them titles. Viewers won’t see the titles–but search engines, which scan for words and phrases, will. That is how you get around the search engines’ blind spot for images.

While you’re at it, go to the trouble of crafting good titles. That is, think about your key word choices and how you can work them in. Include a description of the photo, a list of who’s in it and, if there’s room, where it was taken.

Another advantage of placing titles on all media: some programming allows for a little pop-up window showing the title of the photo when a reader moves the mouse over it. And people who load web pages without images will at least be able to read the informative title.

Depending on the software used to create your website, you may also be able to add descriptions and alternate text for your media. That’s another opportunity to include key words that move you up the search engine ranks.

Finally, be sure to include descriptive captions for all media on the page itself. People often read captions before they read anything else. And, of course, the search engines will read them, too.

As you would with key words and phrases in the rest of your content, make captions, titles and descriptions you read as naturally as possible. People–and search engines–like that, too.

You’ve selected key words and phrases to boost your web traffic and SEO (search engine optimization). So now what?

In the “old days,” that is, before 2003, SEO specialists simply stuffed as many key words into a web page as possible. This often created pages unintelligible to humans, but search engines liked them just fine.

But then Google changed its search parameters to focus on natural word use patterns. Today, sites that are “key word dense” are filtered out in favor of more readable sites.

That’s great news for marketers who actually want to communicate with readers. It means that the right readers can more readily find relevant sites, find the information they seek, and, hopefully, become customers.

So where do you place key words to attract the right customers?

Page content – Looking for the big secret as to where to place key words to attract the largest volume of qualified readers? Write your content to appeal to your readers’ interests. Yep, that’s the secret. Use the AIDA formula: get Attention, create Interest, build Desire, and call your reader to Action.  After you have written your content, go back through it and look for places where you can add more key words and phrases without comprising readability.

Page titles – You probably know that each of your web pages has a title. Search engines “know” that too, so they search those titles. So each page title on your site is a great opportunity to draw people right where you want them which, hopefully, also happens to be right where they want to be. You can also embed key words in your page title’s HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Speaking of which…

Meta tags – Meta tags are key words in the HTML code of your website. They are seen only by search engines. Due to Google’s efforts back in 2003, search engines no longer treat meta tags as natural word usage, but they still see them. So use them.

With your written content and meta tags ready to go, what about photos and video? Good question. Search engines do not “see” these when they rank your site. But there’s a way around that. Stay tuned.