How long does it take to get listed on the search engines?

Some engines say they will list you within a couple of days or weeks, but realistically, a site embarking on search engine optimization and submission will start to see results in about 2- 3 months. You can begin tracking a results in a couple weeks after your first submission and then begin resubmitting again to trigger the engines to notice your site. The timeframe also depends on the competitive nature of your industry.

Good Links and Bad Links

Good Links

Directory Links: Directories are viewed as being a very positive source of links by a number of search engines. Obviously, some directory listings carry much more weight than others and some directories are hardly worth the effort. Be careful to drip feed your site with directory links at first because it is possible that too many too quickly will see your site penalized until your link profile becomes more natural.
Start with the major Internet directories and consider getting links from free general topic directories as well as niche directories and also look at paying for inclusion in one or two of the seriously large directories like the Yahoo directory and business.com. As your link profile expands you can add more directories to gain extra weight.

Reciprocal Links: You may have read that reciprocal linking is dead. While it is true that Google and possibly other search engines now place much less weight on a profile that is crammed with nothing but reciprocal links they still have a place. Keep the number of reciprocal links you use down to a minimum and certainly don't base your entire link building efforts on this one tactic alone.
Again, balance is a big part of reciprocal linking but also of importance is relevance. Regardless of whether you offer a separate links or resources page, or you choose to include the links throughout your site you are still essentially endorsing the site. You will also gain much more credence from a link that is placed on a page containing information relevant to your own page.

Unique One-Way Inbound Links: These should pretty much be the staple diet of your link portfolio. An inbound link that is one way does not necessitate the inclusion of a link back to that page on your site. This can help to give your own pages the benefit instead of handing it out to your link partners. The more relevant and the more important that search engines deem the linking site to be the more weight they give that particular link.

Site Wide Links: Again, these should be used sparingly. Gaining a site wide link means that a link to your site or your pages is placed on a number of pages in a site. Search engines are known to give less weight to links that are procured on this basis but it does help to give your portfolio a more rounded appearance.

Press Release Links: Writing and submitting a digital press release can provide good links. Many press releases are used by other sites and industries related to your site and they may also be included on some major news websites. There are free press release distribution services available, but it is common to need t pay to make the link clickable and to use anchor text.

Article Links: Writing and submitting articles to article directories can provide a large number of links. Not only can you submit one article to numerous directories but each directory has the potential of generating a number of interested websites. These websites also publish your article (which includes an author bio section with your link). This can be a good way to get authoritative sites to link to you.

Community Links: Join forums and include your link in your signature. Post useful comments on other people's blogs and include your link as your username. You should, under no circumstances, spam blogs or forums and only include links on the sites that allow it.

Presell Advertising Pages: Some websites will allow you to include an entire page on their site. In most cases you will either need to pay to have the page written or you, or write the page yourself. Generally the website will also include other forms of advertising but as long as you choose sites carefully this can generate some excellent links.

Bad Links

FFA Sites: An FFA, or Free-For-All page, is one that allows anybody to post any link they like on the page. Typically they are not only useless to your cause, because the search engines ignore them, but they will not generate any natural traffic but may attract the spammers to your doors.

Link Farms: A link farm is a page that contains an excessively large number of links. Some say a page with 100 links directed out of that page is a link farm, but in all honesty it is unlikely that a page will yield much benefit for SEO or non-SEO with more than fifty or so links.

Off Topic: Off topic links are something of a bone of contention. They may offer very slight weight with some search engines because it is quite possible that natural links from certain websites would point to any number of pages on any topic. This appears in the bad link section because they offer very little positive benefit and your efforts would be best placed gaining on-topic links.

Unindexable: Purely from an SEO standpoint, links that cannot be indexed by search engines are completely useless. A search engine spider must be able to follow the link to find your page and provide you with any benefit for that link. Avoid any page that offers to display your link in a frame, or includes the noindex or nofollow robots.txt tags. However, bear in mind that a site that is currently not being indexed by search engines may be a new site. It could also grow up to be the next Google.com and take your link with it.

Your link profile should appear as natural as possible so vary the good links as much as possible and avoid the bad links. By following these guidelines you should be able to improve the appearance of your link profile and, therefore, improve your search engine rankings.

Quality Guidelines For Link Building.

Link Building requires very careful analysis of search engine response and relevancy and quality of the links. Listed below are some of the important Quality guidelines, which we should consider for acquiring links from other websites. These would ensure that your link building campaign gives you the maximum possible benefit.

1. Only Incoming (non-reciprocal) links.
2. Links with specified Keywords in the Anchor Text.
Sufficient randomization in the anchor text and associated link description text so as to not have a set pattern of linking.
3. Links from sites that have PR specified links page.
4. Link to your site should not be through a redirect script.
5. No JavaScript links.
6. No framed sites.
7. No flash site links.
8. No robots.txt exclusions.
9. Exclusion in Robots Tag.
10. No paid links.
11. Links from Pre-indexed Pages only.
12. Spread your site link across different domains.
13. No SPAM should be used to solicit links.
14. No links from Link Farms.
15. No FFA networks. (Free For All)
16. Don’t get links from Blogs and that have the Link 17.Attribute, "rel=nofollow".
18. No links from PORN, racially prejudiced sites and other sites containing offensive content.

Difference between Reciprocal and Inbound link building.

Reciprocal link building

Reciprocal link building is popularly known as link exchange. Webmasters would exchange links with each other in a hope to attract traffic. When Google introduced the concept of PageRank, which treated links as a vote or endorsement which in turn affected a website’s ranking in natural search engine results, link exchange became even more popular.
With time, many webmasters started exchanging links purely to influence website rankings in search engines. Search engines are said to be observing reciprocal link building as artificial inflation of links. It has been observed that link exchange has lost its weight–age as far as enhancing website rankings in SERPs is concerned.
None of the research has shown that websites that carry out reciprocal link building are penalized in any way. It has become a process that is much easier than building one–way links (links that are not reciprocated) but one that today has minimal value as far as natural search engine rankings are concerned.

Inbound Link Building

While reciprocal link building involves exchange of links, inbound link building is a process that doesn’t involve exchange of links between two websites. Inbound links are also called one–way links. As the name suggests, one–way linking is building links for the website without reciprocating it.
If Website A receives a link from any webpage of website B without having to give a link back to website B, then this link is an inbound link for website A.

Change in the display of Google results - Google Pluto update?

We’ve been noticing that Google does not return the usual domain information, when we search for just the domain name. The buzz about Back Link Update is getting public attention, as reported. A Webmaster world thread reports that back links are being updated at some of Google's data centers. This has been happening since the reported Google Pluto update of 24th August 06 - a back link update, with no significant changes in the SERPs.

Benefits of Link Building

Anchor text
Anchor text is the text that falls within a hyperlink leading to another page. The Anchor Text of Incoming Links plays a major role in your website's ranking in the search engine result pages. Anchor text is very important from ranking point of view as your most important keywords are used in the links pointing to your website which help in gaining rankings in Search Engine Result Pages . For wider keyword coverage, you can work with different link text options. It is important to have a number of combinations of anchor texts and associated link texts, so that the linking does not have a fixed pattern that the search engines can detect. This has become even more significant due to recent Algorithm updates of major Search Engines. If you have more number of quality links pointing to your website, the keywords within your anchor text would benefit your website's ranking greatly for those particular keywords. The web page of your site that the link is pointing to should also be optimized for that keyword(s) in order to properly influence rankings.

PageRank
PageRank is Google's measure of importance assigned to a web page on a scale of 1 to 10. By undertaking a long-term link building campaign, you can boost your website's PageRank and improve your website's ranking significantly. Most other major search engines have adopted this logic in their own algorithms in some form or the other, varying the importance they assign to this value in ranking websites in their search engine result pages. Search Engines consider your website more important if more links point to your website.

Deep Indexing
Another important benefit of Link Building is that a webpage embedded deep in your website too stands good chance of being indexed by the search engines. An external link leading to a page embedded deep in your site would help that webpage get indexed by the search engines, which would have otherwise taken a very long time (upto 3 to 4 months)

While indexing a page, search engines would also index the links leading from that page even if they are embedded very deep in your site structure. Search engines while indexing that particular page would also learn about the other links within your website and move on to index other pages too..

Indexing Dynamic Pages
Many of the Search Engines used to find it difficult to index the dynamic pages. With links pointing to dynamic pages the search engines would index those dynamic pages too. Optimizing dynamic pages is little tricky, but you can have your dynamic pages rank well for various keywords with the help of Link Building techniques. A perfect match of Only Incoming Links and keywords in the Anchor Text can do wonders to boost the organic ranking of the dynamic pages in your site.

Direct Traffic
Link Building also benefits you by way of getting direct traffic to your website. Incoming links from other websites would surely pay high dividends, as users are likely to click on that link and visit your website, thus bringing you direct traffic. The links placed on relevant pages would enhance the amount of relevant traffic to your website. A well planned Linking Popularity Building Campaign can also help you target your potential customer market and thus increasing the amount of valuable traffic to your site and thus even help improve your sales to some extent.

What is Link Building?

A link or a hyperlink is a one way clickable text string or a graphic that on clicking takes the user to a different page or a section on a same page.

The process of creating hyperlinks for a website from other web properties is called link building.

Link building is an important aspect of any SEO strategy. It is a vital activity since search engines sometimes judge the popularity of your website from the number of links that point to it. Simply stated, your websites are reckoned as good ones by the search engines if more and more websites offer a link to your website. Link popularity gels well with the search engine algorithms and spiders give due consideration to it while assigning your website a Page Rank (PR). As a matter of fact, search engines consider Link Popularity as a kind of validation of the fact that your website is good.

However, search engines give due consideration to the popularity and quality of the website that carries your links. Remember, no matter how clever you are, the search engines are smart enough to detect any link spamming attempted by you. The bottom line is that it's not just the number of links, but the qualitative worth of the links, the search engines are concerned with.