SEOZio is a quick check of on- and off-page factors with a collaborative rating on your site. The tool, created by Eyeflow.com, is a reliable check on your site’s effectiveness. It also explains each item so that you know its importance. Go to http://www.eyeflow.com/seozio/ and get your score.

SpyderMate is an analysis tool that ranks your site based on a 100 point scale. The score factors in page depth, Google page rank, Alexa rank, external back links, domain age, H1 tags, title tags, and alt tags for image names. Each factor has an explanation of its importance and how your site should be producing. Overall, this is a great overview of items you could quickly fix and begin ranking higher. To get your SpyderMate analysis visit http://spydermate.com and enter your site’s URL.

Website Grader generates a report that is broken into Create Content, Optimize, Promote, Convert and Analyze. It provides a very comprehensive analysis on the marketing effectiveness of each URL. A unique feature of this report is that it addresses your company from a social media standpoint as well. With a Blog Grader component that accounts for traffic and back links, a lot of great information is available here. Try http://websitegrader.com/ to see how your site matches up.

Alexa is a very important site today among Website owners. By searching for your site’s URL, you can see who is linking to you, your overall site’s rank, and read reviews about your site. Getting people to write reviews about your site will also help you get a higher rank. According to this site, sites ranking in 100,000 or less are the most visited sites. See where you rank, got to http://www.alexa.com/ and search for your URL.

http://ezinearticles.com

http://goarticles.com

http://e-articles.info

2. Directories – If you are looking to get links with no strings attached then directory submissions should be high on your list. Directories are sites that WANT to list your site as a resource they just don’t know about you yet so you must contact them and apply. The quickest way to find directories is to search your industry like so in Google:

“(Your Industry) Directory”
“(Your Industry) Directory ” Add
“(Your Industry) Directory” Submit
“(Your Industry) Resource List”

3. Utilize Internal Resources – Want the highest quality links possible? The best way is to sit and brain storm your internal workings and think what partners would be willing to link to you. Here are a few examples:

School Example – Contact companies that have hired your graduates in the past and request links from the employers so you can continue to produce highly trained graduates.

Retailers – Get a hold of manufactures that don’t sell directly to your clients and ask for their support by linking to you on a retailer list page. They don’t have one? Ask they make one and be the first!

The list goes on and on but an experience SEO company should be able to work with you on creating a custom link building plan.

4. Press Releases – Many companies shy away from press releases because they think nothing they do is news worthy but the fact is press releases are a great way to get the word out about what’s going on with your company and build back links. Most companies should be writing at least a handful of press releases a year and submitting them to Press Release submission sites just for the back links.

To find some good places to publish press releases for free just Google “Free Press Release Sites” and you will see hundreds of sites to submit too.

5. Social Book Marking – Social Booking marking (not to be confused with Social Networking) is a great way to pull some quick easy one way links to your site with little effort. Here are some of the most widely used social book marking sites you can submit to for FREE.

http://digg.com

http://reddit.com

http://delicious.com

Of course all these link building techniques are entry level link building strategies. In order to rank for very competitive phrases in search engines you must implement more advanced strategies such as manual link acquisition, competitive analysis link techniques, etc. These can only be performed by experienced internet marketing / SEO companies.

Do you want to know how many back links your site has? Use Eyeflow’s free SEO Analysis Tool SEOzio or chat online with one of our SEO Consultants.

While it is still important to use develop a good keyword list, create unique content, and properly optimize meta information there is a much larger focus on building back links. Back links are any site that links to your site from their site.

Why are back links so important?

While this may not seem obvious to the casual search engine user the logic is actually very simple. It’s impossible to quickly build hundreds of quality back links to your site. While anyone can optimize their meta tags, title tags, or even body copy there is no quick way to get links from other sites to yours. Of course there are a lot of spam techniques  (spamming blogs, reciprocal link building, bogus comments on guest books) search engines are constantly developing algorithms to catch these black hat techniques and If caught – you could face heavily penalization or evening being completely banned from search engine results.

How can you build back links without being banned?

This is the  $20,000 question and what separates one SEO company from the next. Building back links is by far the most difficult task for any site to undertake that is attempting to increase traffic and search engine rankings. Below I will touch on the easiest natural way to increase your site’s back links naturally in your spare time.

Directories: The first thing a new site should do to increase back links is find directories it should be listed in and submit their site. I typically find these sites in two stages – Geo-targeted and industry specific.

Types of directories – And how to find them:

Geo-Targeted Directories – These are geo-specific directories that list businesses in a specific area and are very easy to find. You can do a quick in Google for your city and the phrase “business directory” or “business listings” .

Example search queries:

Pittsburgh Business Directory

Pennsylvania Business Listings

Having trouble finding geo-targeted directories? Here is a free Pittsburgh directory you can get listed in at no cost:

http://pittsburghpromotion.com/

Industry Specific Directories – These are directories that are meant to list businesses in a specific industry not by location. Many of these directories are used to give users an idea of all the companies in their industry which can help not only back links but may refer some quality traffic as well. To find these directories all you need to do is search your industry and the words “directory” or resource list.

Example search queries:

Web Design Directory

Software Developer Resource List

Having trouble finding industry specific targeted directories? Here is a free Pittsburgh directory you can get listed in at no cost:

http://www.dmoz.org

Note: Never pay to be listed in ANY directory– if a site is trying to charge to be listed stay far away. Only submit to free directories that want to link to you because they feel it’s a value to their visitors not for profit…

While this is just one way to naturally build back links there are literally dozens of techniques you can use to increase back links ethically. Do you want to find out how many back links your site has? You can use a free SEO analysis tool developed by Eyeflow Internet Marketing that will tell you how many back links your site has coming in as well as 11 other key factors that search engines look at.

If you have any questions please feel free to post in the comments and I will try my best to answer in a timely fashion.

The article was written by Phil Laboon CEO of Eyeflow Internet Marketing. A Pittsburgh based search engine optimization company.