Killer Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search engine optimization is a growing industry that allows enterprising webmasters to monetize traffic from their websites through increases in traffic and the sale of advertising or products to that traffic.

One particular search engine optimization strategy that increases the success of websites is the building of quality links. Now, links of all kinds are valuable as long as they don't come from spam or other bad neighborhood areas of the Internet, but there are certain kinds of links that are worth the very most: gov and edu links.

In particular, links from trusted universities are an excellent source of trust and page rank because Google, Yahoo and MSN trust them immensely. If you think about it, you can understand why they're so trusted; university pages publish scholarly articles and make advances in the sciences and literary criticism that need to be syndicated across the web because they have influences on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

As a result of this inherent trust, if you can get links on edu pages, your search engine optimization efforts are likely to yield more fruitful results. The Harvard Weblogs project is an example of a way to achieve edu links.

Harvard Law School hosts blogs online that can be run by students in Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School or Harvard College, so a fair number of people have access to exclusive edu link domains. Harvard is particularly effective for these links because the homepage of Harvard University has a page rank of 9, suggesting Google trusts the root domain to an extraordinary degree.

Weblogs are also great for search engine optimization because you can report on recent news that many people may not have heard of yet. This makes your content fresh and ensures that people will like reading it and thereby be more likely to link back to it on their own websites.

The more people that link back to your original article about breaking news, the more links Google and Yahoo will find for your website and the more they will trust it, instinctively. Really, any added content to your website that you figure out in advance that many people will like should be used to attempt to generate links for your site and increase its search engine optimization as a result.

If you have particularly great articles or information that you know other people would like and link back to, you should attempt to get your article promoted at social media sites like Delicious, Digg or StumpleUpon. You should also consider doing things like posting an amusing viral video on your website and publishing it on YouTube with a link back to your website.

Anything that allows for more and more people to see your content and link back to it, the better. Along these same lines, you should enlist the help of any friends you may have online to back you up when you submit your content to these websites, in the hope that they will help you make it to the front page and thereby gain an unbelievable amount of traffic.

Remember, for more websites, traffic plus a bit of creativity equals money, so have a plan to monetize that traffic you're trying to build before you even build it. It's best not to put adds up before it comes, but be ready to monetize it when you realize it's gained enough traffic to be worth it.