Link Building… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for higher rankings.

Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke’s 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:

What happens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on “links=seo”. When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The pertinent questions:

1. Will link building still be very important for rankings in the medium term?
2. When will link popularity be devalued in favor of other algo elements (that are less tedious, from a webmaster’s point of view)?

The answers:

1. Sorry, but link building is still going to be the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future.
2. I wouldn’t hold your breath for search engine algorithms to place less importance on link popularity until the Semantic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new protocol. Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they’re going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn’t count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don’t fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links in 2006. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that’s all (“Host your own Web Ring”?). Anyway, enjoy the update. It’s guaranteed to be accurate until January 1, 2007.

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a “101 list”. These get Dugg all the time, and often become “authority documents”. People can’t resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an “authority”.)

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It’s an accessibility thing.)

7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

16. Write about, and link to, companies with “in the news” pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Business Links

24. Join the Better Business Bureau.

25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

27. List your site at the local library’s Web site.

28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other’s business cards.

30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional “normal” links.

Easy Free Links

31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

36. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links… unfortunately, some will not).

38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

41. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

50. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

51. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

52. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

53. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned ‘PR’ (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

54. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. We recommend WeBuildPages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

56. In case you didn’t get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like WordPress. Don’t forget the “Designed by example.com” bit in the footer!

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) “celebrities” in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem “real” in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Directories

72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post nothing but “me too” posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

Blog Spam

80. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

81. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

82. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

83. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

84. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

85. Don’t even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.

Garbage Link Exchanges

86. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

87. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

89. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.

Spam People in Person

90. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

91. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

Be Persistant

92. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

93. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

94. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.

Getting Links by Being a Jerk

96. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

97. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

98. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say “excuse you, jerk”.

100. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

101. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more “hilariously dumb” than it is a “bad linking practice”.

STEP ONE : Identify your Biggest Pains

Don’t act desperate and just try everything out there that claims to make your business succeed. You’ll drown. You know your business better than anyone, so decide what key “pains” you have right now and focus on solving them first. Keep an open mind, however. Recognize new opportunities without getting sidetracked.

Action Item: Do a mind map or make a drawing of some sort to help get your ideas on paper. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel after getting everything on paper.

STEP TWO : Know Your Competitor

If the sites you consider as your competitor is getting over 4x the traffic you are, they probably aren’t your competitors. They will be, however, if you dissect valuable information from a competitive analysis and learn more about your market. Focus on data such as, where your competitor is getting traffic from, what keywords your competitor is using, and visitor trending.

Action Item: Compare your site’s traffic to a few of your competitor’s websites by using Alexa, Compete, or Quantcast. Pay particular attention to trends that might tell you something.

STEP THREE : Study Keywords

Keywords will tell you how to best direct your online marketing campaign. Not only can you find where the largest search volume is, but you can also find what most professional SEO professionals would consider “low-hanging fruit,” terms that get decent traffic but have low competition to rank well on search engines. Finally, a keyword study can help identify a niche that you might not have even originally considered.

Action Item: Start out with at least 5 seed keywords. These keywords should be a somewhat vague assumption as what you imagine someone would type to find you or keywords that you would consider to be the most beneficial to be ranked #1. Use keyword discovery tools such as Wordtracker, Trellian, or KeywordSpy to help you find even more relevant keywords and even niche keywords or “low-hanging fruit.”

STEP FOUR : Time to Test and Drive Qualified Traffic

It’s time to put the competitive analysis and keyword study to use. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing is a very quick way to quickly bring traffic to your site and begin collecting valuable data from real live and qualified prospects.

Action Item: Start a Google Adwords campaign and commit to an advertising budget that you feel comfortable with for at least two weeks, preferably one month. Load up your first campaign with the seed keywords you’ve started with and additional keywords you’ve discovered. Follow Google’s instructions carefully. Now may be the time for you to look for professional help in setting up and managing a well run PPC campaign.

STEP FIVE : Optimize your Site for SEO and Conversion

Hopefully you’ve seen some success in your test! Now that you have some data to analyze, you can use it to improve On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO to drive organic search engine traffic to your site. Focus on making your site convert. Is there a call to action? Can the visitor see how to contact you easily? What is the value? What makes you different from any other competitor? Is it being advertised?

Action Item: Use a reputable free website seo optimizer to show how you can improve On-Page SEO for your site. Follow the instructions carefully or get a trusted seo company to do the work for you. Use other great web analytics tools such as ClickTale, CrazyEgg, or RobotReplay to further analyze your visitors behaviors on your site. Start out by finding where bounce rates are highest and identifying conversion funnels.

This of course isn’t all there is, but these 5 simple steps are a great way to get a solid foundation for a long lasting growth oriented online marketing campaign.  Please comment!

Having used these tools for that past 4 years, I can definitely say that it all starts with these simple tasks to take your online business to the next level.

I realized this when I got into this conversation a colleague and my eyes were opened to how people perceive the internet marketing, when they are no longer involved in it. Below are some questions and detailed answers.

1. Does anyone read those long sales letters?

I wrote a few myself, but does anyone really read that?

The answer is: “No, buyers read them.”

Get the difference? If it’s something that will resolve your problem, you’ll be very interested in what it says. Buying is often a big decision, which requires sufficient information for the buyer to feel comfortable.

I will use this analogy to explain: Say you are looking for a mate, and the only way to selection one are writing letters to you about themselves. Now, you think you prefer a brief letter, or a long one which describe in detail what it would be possible to know about your potential mate?

If you aren’t looking for a mate, a long and detailed letter “Why should you choose me” will seem too long because you aren’t in the market for a mate. Or, if it is clear from the beginning of the letter that the type of mate is not for you, you’ll skip that particular letter without reading and look at the letter from another mate. If the second appears much more a good game for you, are you reading more? Something tells me you are. In fact, not only you’ll read everything, maybe you will reread just to make sure that mate it’s right for you.

However, there is another reason why buyers wouldn’t read a long sales letter: they already trust the marketer and are convinced they’re already sold. These people hit the sales page and head down as fast as they can to buy.

How is that possible? Marketer has spent a lot of time and effort creating relationships with customers and building trust with them. This is why blogs, email marketing and internet marketing e-books are good. This is often called content marketing or relationship marketing.

2. Why do not show our real site?

One of the things you see everywhere is a particular byproduct of marketing to marketers: you can not actually see the site used by marketers to make millions. This type of internet marketing is only a small part of total internet marketing. Most marketers are too busy making money with their sites and don’t even want to join the “guru” of business.

The reason you can’t see marketers actual sites is not because the marketer is a big liar. And not because what they are doing is evil.

The reason is simple and obvious once you understand: they hide their sites because to reveal them would cause to lose its advantage in this market.

It is human nature to follow someone else who do what already works in such a way that will work for you. Now, if you work better than the other guy, don’t you deserve your earnings?

Not only is natural and normal, it’s smart. If you plan to create an eCommerce site now and you do not have to look at Amazon for an example how to do it right, you might be an idiot.

3. Are those references and case studies for real? How do we know that they are not false?

If you’d like to earn a lot of money on long-haul, do you think you can survive and prosper long if you have fake testimonials and case studies? This is the reasons why there are no URLs for those recommendations: on a sales page, the only link that should be there is the buy button. Any other link can distract the reader and then he will leave the page.
In internet marketing the case study is nothing more than conversations with clients who have succeeded with the product being sold.
In these talks, the aim is to demonstrate that it is possible to succeed with this product. Because others succeeded, you can also. But you will not see the domain or web page or the keywords revealed. “Protection of magic words” applies to the case studies.

You can see screenshots of money earned, or in another market, another kind of unverifiable evidence. For example, if I sell SEO ebooks on how to be on the 1st page on Google, I will have screenshots with sites which are #1 in Google in my SEO ebook. Is there any way to prove its certainly real proof? In most cases, no. This means that evidence is false? In most cases, no, it’s real. I would not be in business very long if I pretended images that could be easily found elsewhere.

We are all familiar with “before and after” images used by miracle diet marketers. In some photos, you can say is the same person, but in others look like two different people. Or they look “photoshopped”. It is possible to do the same with screenshots and totally lie about earnings and numbers. But when thousands of people bought a product that does not work, the marketer wouldn’t be in business very long.

A Profile or Preference page is occasionally offered to subscribers/customers by some wise marketers. This way they will be able to even more personalize communication with their customers and their customers will be happy and grateful because they will see how much they are important for their email publisher. It is obvious that you should always provide quality and targeted content in order to make them stay. However, beside quality content your visitors have to be sure in several more things in order to be your loyal customers.

They have to know the frequency of your email newsletter and the exact date when they can expect your email newsletter in their inbox. If they subscribed to a monthly newsletter they want to receive it once a month and not once a week or “when I have time I will send it” schedule. Like hard copy magazines, you need to designate a time in the month when your email newsletter gets delivered. It doesn’t mean if it is the 1st, 15th or 30th in the month – just stick to that date. If you prefer to specify days instead of times, you may state: “Our Newsletter will be delivered on the last Thursday of the month”.

By using backlinks in the most popular websites, not only are you able to get more attention from the other members of those websites, but you are also able to make your website more popular in the search engines. The three biggest search engines in the online world, Yahoo, Google and MSN are the most helpful when it comes to reaching out to interested buyers. Since most buyers resort to search engines for their needs, having search engine high rankings would really make your website more profitable. The three major search engines only recognize backlinks from reputable websites so be sure to continue posting content and commenting on the other postings and adding backlinks to convince search engines that your website is worthy of a higher rank due to high web traffic.

If you are still in newbie marketing, you are probably not familiar with the websites that could help you with your rankings. You could solve this problem by simply searching the backlinks of businesses in the same field. To find out where your competitors post their backlinks, use the search engines and then start posting content on the very same websites. You have to remember that since your just starting, no one knows about your existence yet. You can deal with this by making sure that you are serious in advertising. Post loads of articles and videos and regularly make updates. This way, you would not have to wait long for your popularity to rise.

There are thousands of other tips and information on what are backlinks. Take the extra step in finding more about what are backlinks and how to get them and take advantage of them for your website’s benefit. All the information you need to learn about backlinks can be found online, besides, it would not be as complicated as you think.

Tip Number 1: Stop thinking about keywords alone

It’s true that you are going to discover important keyword phrases in the end result, but don’t start by going in exploring for specific keywords that are already pre-programmed into your mind because you *THINK* they are most important or you may just spend your time seeing only what everyone else sees. When you are exploring or when you’re in “exploration mode” you want to discover the big windows of opportunity that most people hardly EVER see. Stop guessing and look at more than the first bit of data that makes the most sense.

Tip Number 2: Stop putting yourself under pressure.

When exploring Wordtracker’s keyword and phrase research data, you need to stop putting your research up against the clock and stop feeling like you need to be extremely logical. Release yourself from stress and treat it more like a mission of exploration. If you remove the pressure it will often make room for you to think much more creatively.

Allowing ourselves to be creative when exploring human behavior can open up huge rifts that might otherwise and often go completely undiscovered. Hang on to your hat, because as you allow yourself the liberty to be creative and reduce all of the usual stresses of a client’s expectation of high performance, there is new liberty to observe things that you might have ordinarily missed.

Tip Number 3: Explore every notion that naturally comes into your mind.

Allow yourself to focus on “how people dialog with you.” Think back to any conversations you’ve had recently with a customer. Can you recall that conversation? What did they say to you and how did they say it?

What did they ask you and how did they ask it. Let these ideas begin to come into your mind through a natural creative progression from one thought to the next.

Think about this next time you are doing keyword and phrase research …

We are often not logical when we are in a creative state. Exploring true keyword data is one action in life where it actually pays not to be so formulated and logical. It takes practice, but once you are on a roll you won’t need me or anyone else to tell you that you’re finding especially and useful results. Before we get too deep in practice, I want you try the following short exercise to demonstrate something to you.

Quick Exercise: Let’s demonstrate how your own creative mind works.
(You won’t get anything out of this, unless you actually try it yourself)

In three minutes see how many objects you can sketch out on a piece of paper, in which “a circle” is the main element within the design. Just use a few lines on the circles on the page to identify your ideas, which might start with maybe a wheel, a tire, a steering wheel, and so on.

Notice how your mind leaps from category to category.
Is it always logical? No.

For example, your exercise might start with a wheel, a tire, and a steering wheel; and then move into another new category, like a speedometer, a watch, and a clock; and then to still other items like a doughnut, a cookie, and a pizza; then make another leap to a plate, a saucer, an orange, a basketball, a pill, and so on.

Now this is a most natural response when we are being creative.

If our minds worked logically, we would exhaust every category and list hundreds of types of wheels before we moved on to clocks, and then list dozens of clocks. But instead, notice that our minds bound forward. In some small way this illustrates the leaps which have measured our progress. But recognizing that this is naturally the way the mind works, I encourage you to give yourself permission to explore Wordtracker in the same fashion.

Let your mind be free to observe landmarks along the way and then dig into those landmarks to reveal several levels of search behavior beyond what others are seeing.

You might ask yourself, but why are others not seeing what you will see? The answer is very simple. Their minds are pre-loaded, pre-programmed, and totally fixed on a “keyword hunt” for the keywords they are convinced are important. They do not understand the value of exploring what an audience of searchers truly want. I call this limitation the “keyword hunt” mindset.

Don’t go into doing Wordtracker keyword and phrase research with a pre-established list of keywords that are subconsciously stored in your mind, but instead, go into Wordtracker with a clean slate. Learn how to let the tool sort all of the best data and then reveal the best windows of opportunity based on searches within the last 90 days.

Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and investments have successfully translated themselves to the Internet.

Unique services such as Online driving schools have been prospering. Some states in the US have set up online payment sites for Government services. Residents of a state can log on to a common site to pay all bills and other expenses, such as parking tickets to the local/County courts.

However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give lots of preliminary information that’s useful in setting the scene for the closing. But the actual closing takes place offline – i.e., not on the Internet.

Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best on the Internet are those that take advantage of the convenience of the Net. Remember that convenience is the primary reason why consumers flock to the Internet in the first place. People can shop any hour of the day at any site. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales clerks, and even avoid pickpockets.

Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract online attention and sell strongly. You would generally not try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus, few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even diamonds, can and do sell on the Net.

Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products that could be shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping costs diminish the price competitiveness of online products and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages people from buying online more than any other single reason. An Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with credit cards being stolen.

As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages as well as disadvantages of selling either products or services. However, in the recent past, online services have known to flourish. Nevertheless, if you chose to sell products you need to rethink your product offering if the total costs of the product and the shipping are higher than what is offered elsewhere.

There are many views and opinions that revolve around the value of pagerank. While a lot of people rely on their pagerank to track the performance of their business, some experts meanwhile say that PR is just one of those SEO myths that only help boost competition among different websites. But how exactly important is your site’s page ranking? Yahoo Answers has some points which you have to consider:

Traditionally, it is the pagerank that plays a big part in establishing the overall value of a website. All websites start from PR 0, and eventually rise to the top, i.e. PR 10. The increase of your page rank depends on how well you market your site in your chosen niche, and be gaining more incoming traffic to your site. You can get more traffic by following the different SEO techniques such as link building, keyword optimization and the like. If you have an ecommerce website, then tracking your stats and pageranks greatly important since you need more clients to serve and support your business.

However, the internet business has grown and ceased to be a popularity contest, and these days you no longer need to have a popular site just to incur profit. You can find some insights in Yahoo Answers that stress the value of a site’s functionality and target, organic traffic, as they are the ones that bring in more money to your site. In this light, you don’t actually need big traffic, as long as your visitors sign up and subscribe to your site’s goods and services.

There are also some sites that don’t do well with high PR. Rather than helping them succeed in the business, they only get lower profits due to the random traffic they receive. Unless they cater to general masses and are supported by sponsors (and can afford to be free sites), these sites would only lose more income, since users would only visit their page and not do anything of monetary value. This can be an SEO myth for some people, but there are actually isolated cases that prove true to this kind of occurrence in the internet business.

In ecommerce meanwhile, page ranking is always included in one’s site statistics. This kind of site needs high page rankings in order to be known in the business, as it not only needs subscribers as well as partnerships with other business sites. If you want to put up an ecommerce site then you should be able to understand the technicalities of page ranking, as people still rely on this factor with regards to tracking the performance of their sites.

The value of page ranking can be an SEO myth for some experts in the online business, but still a lot rely on PR in evaluating their sites. Yahoo Answers has a lot more differing opinions about this subject, so why not go and check them out to gain a better understanding of the value of PR.