EzineArticles.com already has a high PR of 6 or 7 and if you manage to get more links pointing to your articles, they will be ranked quicker and higher. Basic SEO knowledge.

Here’s how you do it:

Go to your expert author page where all your articles are listed. The URL will look like this:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Author_Name

Right next to the header that says your name and your author status, you will find an RSS icon. All you do is copy the url the icon points to.

Now, you can use the RSS url and submit it to the large number of free RSS directories and you can have 100’s of links pointing to your articles in no time.

This trick works with other directories like Goarticles and even Squidoo so you don’t have to limit yourself to only Ezinearticles.

To get you started here’s a list of some RSS feeds:
55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote Your Feeds!

Great thing about it is that every new article you create from now on will already have a large amounts of links pointing to it. This way your articles will get picked up very quickly and rank high in Google.

Hopefully this trick proves to be helpful to you in your bum marketing efforts.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to get that Pagerank 5 website to provide a link back to your new website? Not only could it drive quality traffic to your site, but it would also provide a great backlink for the search engines to find. Unfortunately, unless your website is truly groundbreaking, it is unlikely that a big website will be eager to just give you a link on their main page. Their webspace is too valuable to be giving free links that provide little return benefit for them.

Given this all to common dilemma, a market has been created for the buying and selling of text links. There are many different places online that will allow you to buy links on high-quality websites and they all usually work a little differently. The most common way for these link marketplaces to work is that you pay a set amount and receive a link for a certain period of time, like $5 for a month or something similar. As you would expect, the higher the Pagerank of the website and the higher the traffic, the more expensive the link will be.

I realize that at first glance, this tactic seems to be very appealing for a startup website owner. Buying a prominent link could really put your site on the map! Before you run off and start buying links, however, realize that this method of linkbuilding is considered by many to be in the realm of the “black hat” SEO tactics. Matt Cutt’s of Google has been very clear in his opinion on link buying….he doesn’t like it. Neither does Google apparently. If Google is able to tell that a website is selling links, it will sometimes penalize that website and anyone who has bought links there also. I’m not telling you this to scare you away from this tactic, but it is something that you need to consider and be aware of when buying web links.

Now that I’ve gotten my little disclaimer out of the way, let me say that I do not believe buying links to be a bad thing in most cases. People buy and sell advertising every day, and link buying can be looked at as form of advertising. There are some webmasters that do sell links that are clearly not providing any benefit for their readers, but the majority are shown just as advertisements would be. The major difference is that advertisements generally include a “nofollow” link attribute and do not pass Pagerank to your website.

If you do believe that buying text or other links would be beneficial to your website, here are a few guidelines for you to keep in mind when shopping for links.

Domain Age: Generally speaking, the older a domain is, the more favorably the search engines will view it. When considering websites, use a tool such as archive.org to see how long the website has been in existence. Try to get links from the websites that have been active for the longest period of time.

Relavance of Website: Make sure that the website providing the link is relevant to the page you are linking to. A link from a completely unrelated website will not do much good in terms of your search engine rankings and Pagerank.

Placement: If you are purchasing a link that will be on only one page of a website, make sure that page has the Pagerank and other attributes that you are paying for. If the main page of a website is PR 5, but your link is on a PR 0 page, you won’t get much benefit.

Number of Backlinks: It is also helpful to research the number of backlinks that the website has from other sites. This will be shown to some extent in the Pagerank of the website, but PR is not updated all that often and can be inaccurate. A website with more backlinks pointing to it is a better candidate for purchase than one with fewer backlinks.

There are others things to consider as well, but they are more obvious. I certainly hope that you consider the Pagerank and quality of any website that you are buying a link from. Also be sure that the links are not “nofollow” links, as these will provide your website with very little benefit. It is rare that you will receive much traffic from users clicking on the link itself. Most of the benefit you are buying relates to SEO and improving the Pagerank of your website.

When trying to build backlinks to your website, there are several things you want to consider about the pages that are linking to you. Many people make the mistake of just focusing on PageRank, but there are several other factors that make a backlink better or worse for your page.

• Anchor text of link- This is very important with Google and can make a huge difference in your rankings for certain keywords or phrases. All the anchor text refers to is the actual text that is used in the link to your site. Being able to control the anchor text is what makes services like Linkvana so valuable.
• Frequency of change of anchor text- Google does not like to see your link’s anchor text change often. This isn’t a big problem for most people, but just try not to change your information in web directories and the like too often.
• Age of link- Generally speaking, the older the link to your site, the better. If you are able to get a permanent link on the homepage for a website, it will be much more valueable than a link that Google pick’s up and is gone two weeks later. Common sense right?
• Number of outgoing links on the referring page- The lower the number of outgoing links there are  on the referring page, the more important Google considers your link to be. This is often a downfall of directory links and “links pages” on websites. If you are just one of 30 links on a page, Google won’t consider that anything special.
• On-the-page factors of the referring page- Google looks at the keyword density, title, and other on the page factors of the site that is referring to yours.
• Theme of referring page- You want the website theme of the referring page to be related or similar to your general theme. Having  links on completely unrelated sites won’t do much good.
• Expert sites- Google considers some websites to be “Expert” sites for certain topics. It isn’t known exactly which sites these are or what the criteria is, but getting a link from an expert site is a huge boost!
• Finally, PageRank- The higher the PageRank of the referring site, the better it will make the link. PageRank considers several of the factors listed above already.

So, there you have it. My experience has been that any link from a related and non-spam site will be beneficial to your page, but getting links based on the above factors will really maximize the power of the link. SEOmoz has some really cool tools on their website that can help you to estimate how strong a link from a given website would be and can even provide a list of the best sites to try and get links from.

Last week, we focused on SEO tips and techniques that you could implement into the html code of your website. Today, is is also extremely important to understand the off-the-page factors that contribute to your standings in Google. This week we are going to focus on some of the key off-the-page factors to consider.

• PageRank- Trying to increase PageRank is all the rage these days. The truth is, PageRank is important to your website’s ranking in Google, but is more of an indication of ranking than an actual item you can improve.
• Backlinks- Backlinks are links from other websites that point to yours. Google is by far the pickiest search engine when it comes to backlinks and will display only a small number of your total backlinks at any time. It is believed that Google focuses on showing the higher PageRank links, but in actuality, the backlinks shown seem to be almost randomly selected. The bottom-line is, the more backlinks (excluding spam sites), the better.
• Backlinks from high ranking pages- This is one of the most important off-the-page factors to focus on because it is somewhat possible to control. Google loves to find webpages with high PageRank linking to your site.
• Acceleration of link popularity- This is a hotly argued issue. It is commonly beleived that too many backlinks within a short period of time will be seen by Google as artifical and can result in your site being penalized or sandboxed. Look for a post later this week explaining the Google “sandbox”.

These are some of the off the page SEO factors to consider. Tommorrow, we will go into the key attributes that Google considers when deciding how much weight to give to any particular backlink.

Anyone that has struggled with the difficult task of building strong back-links to your site should check out Linkvana. Unfortunately, it comes with a steep price tag, but the service has a lot of potential value for webmasters.

Read the full Linkvana review here

The number and quality of backlinks to your site has a huge impact on search engines’ view of your site quality. Thus, building quality backlinks should be an integral part of any SEO campaign. The search engines analyze all the links that they find pointing to your site. The quality of the site linking to you is considered, as is the relevancy of the site and the anchor text of the link.

Many webmasters make the mistake of trying to get as many sites as possible to link to their web page. When it comes to backlinks, more is better, but only if the links are from high quality and/or relevant sites. Links from well respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory will increase the status of your site in the eyes of the search engines. If the search engine finds sites with similar content and theme linking to you, that is also a positive. These  links show the search engines that your site is respected enough to be linked to by others in your  industry/field.

In addition to watching which sites are linking back to you, it is also important to pay attention to the anchor text of the links. If you have a site about electronics reviews, a link on a site with the text Find HDTV Reviews Herewill be considered more favorably than a simple Click Here. Often times you have little to no control over the anchor text of links, but when you do (as in many directory submissions), be sure to make the most of it. Try to include your targeted keywords in the anchor text whenever possible.

If you work to build many high quality and relevant backlinks to your site, you will see your placement in the search results increase. Search engines work on algorithms and technology. Analyzing links to your site is one of the primary ways that they can determine what your site is about and for which visitors your content would be useful.

Stay tuned for a three-part series on methods and strategies of building backlinks to your site.