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Backlink services were probably one of the fastest growing methods for promoting a web site quickly a year ago. They used underhanded, but not forbidden, methodologies for instantly driving traffic to a new web site without actually doing any work or going through the tried and true search engine optimization practices that are search engine approved.

Essentially a backlink service used one of the strongest attributes the search engines used to determine a sites actual value. The problem is that there were so many of these link farms that search engines like Google got tired of it and decided that they would eliminate this dubious method that was so often abused.

About six months ago, Google edited their codex that determines a sites strength so that a site believed to be using a backlink service would be punished instead of benefited for the use of such a service. This doesn’t seem to have deterred the companies selling these services as they continue to advertise their methods and spam site owners with offers of strong links and support from a network of site owners just like you!

While back linking is a valuable way to gain traffic, it is always best to be careful about how you get those links. Bear in mind that any trick used to subvert the search engines will be discovered and eliminated sooner or later. The easiest and most cost effective manner to gain traffic and ranking for your site is to follow the rules that the search engines use to determine your site strength and relevancy. That way when they eliminate the next big trick or scam, your site will still be on top where it should be.

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Ranking reports often provide us with lists of keywords that our web sites may or may not rank for, but the interesting thing is that they show us that we often rank for things we didn’t necessarily intend to and don’t rank for things we are trying very hard to rank for.

This is a common frustration among many newcomers to the online marketing industry. You’ve just purchased a site from a reputable company who have great recommendations and glowing reviews from previous customers, but your web site just won’t rank for that keyword.

The key thing to understand here is that one of the most important and powerful ways to get your site to rank for something is to write about it, but not just in any way. You need to write about it in the manner that will get it to rank. Your articles title tag is the most important tag you can possible have for any given article. The title tag is the number one phrase that your article will rank for. So whatever keyword you are trying to rank for needs to be at the very beginning of your title tag. The title tag is usually composed of the actual title of your article, but there are some tools out there that will help you change the title tag of an article.

The next thing to be aware of is that your title tag won’t be nearly as powerful as it could be if you don’t repeat it. What I mean by this is that you should have the keyword you are shooting for appear in the first few lines of the body of your article to reinforce the keyword you’ve chosen to push as your title tag. This should be the case regardless of whether or not you have a title tag that is different than your article title.

If you take this into account when writing your articles you will soon see that your ranking reports will show you what you were looking to see before you started using this writing methodology.

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Wordpress writing advice for people who find it difficult to write articles about their business or industry.

Writing articles for your wordpress business blog often seems like an incredibly daunting task. I talk with clients on a regular basis who balk at the idea of actually writing articles that people might want to read. They have the idea that they are not educated writers and so cannot write anything that others would want to know about. Even if they do decide that they are qualified to write something that others may value, they still can’t think of what that information might be, or they flail about trying to determine how to express what they are thinking in a way that others will find educational enough to actually read and appreciate.

The great news is that you do not have to be a writer in order to write, and you need not be the most eloquent person in order to write something others want to know about. On a daily basis professionals like you and me are asked questions by clients, associates, business partners or even just other professionals in our field of expertise. These questions are undoubtedly things that you already know about, otherwise the person asking wouldn’t have directed the question at you. The second thing to note is that they wouldn’t be asking if they didn’t want to know the answer. So now you have a question, and very likely have an answer with little or no extra research needing to be done. You have been doing that research every day you work in your office. Every day you gain more information, more experience and become more of an authority on the topic that is your industry.

So now you have questions, and you know you can answer them. The best thing to do is write those questions down when you hear them. You don’t need to write the answer down right away, just the question. Soon you’ll have ten or twenty questions on a list and can refer to that list when you have a few minutes to write an article. Pick a question you want to answer and just write the article as though you were answering the person who asked the question in the first place. If you think of it as a one sided conversation with the person who asked the question then you will soon find that you are better able to express your knowledge and then thousands of people can benefit from your response instead of just one person.