The SEO community continues to evolve. Many of the old links building tactics are entirely out of date today, while new opportunities arrive knocking at your door. Google is launching algorithmic updates (last year's Panda and the very recent Page Layout Algorithm), one after another. Though such updates are revolutionizing the face of the SEO industry, link building still remains to be the trump card for high search engine rankings.

Under these circumstances, it's pretty easy to make mistakes while building links for your blog or website. Given below are seven of them that you need to open your eyes to and avoid them at any cost.

#1. Manipulating the Anchor Text
Search engines have now become quite suspicious about the anchor text thing, as it can be easily manipulated. If you were playing the anchor text game to obtain high search rankings till now, you need to stop it right away. Manipulating the anchor text of a link makes the backlink profile look 'unnatural', and that's the reason why search engines have started to devalue the same.

#2. Mass-Submitting to Junk Directories
Bot-powered directory submission is another big mistake that link builders can easily make. Gone are they days when you could rank a website at the top of search results overnight by submitting to thousands of directories at once. Web directories as a means of building links are fast becoming extinct. Many generic directories are already of out of business.

The point is quite simple - no ranking algorithm will provide any weightage to web directories that aren't used by people, and only exist as a means of blind link submission. Eric Ward of Search Engine Land throws more light on the very topic in his article - A Few Link Building Predictions for 2012.

#3. Not Using Guest-Blogging
Guest blogging carries high significance, because it's an excellent strategy to place your links on niche-related websites. Apart from creating 'link juice', you can use guest blogging to generate website traffic, create awareness about your brand and establish your expertise. Guest blogging can bring you a higher rate of success if you target the right kind of blogs.

#4. Limiting Your Social Media Efforts to Only Facebook and Twitter
Therer's absolutely no doubt that social media is a powerful platform to build links the natural way. However, social media is not just about creating a Facebook or Twitter page for your brand, blog or website. There are many other social platforms that you need to use to reach out to new audiences. Any place where your target audience spends time is a best place to be.

#5. Not Asking Niche-related Authority Sites for Links
Keep asking, and you'll get it. If you really want to survive in the race of search rankings, you can never ignore the potential of building high quality links by requesting authoritative websites for a link to your website or blog. Asking will, however, will bear fruit only when you have some top quality content published.

#6. Not Linking Out
Linking out brings huge benefits both in terms of SEO and networking. Outbound linking can immediately help you build the authority of your own blog or website. However, you need to link out to only top quality and authority sites. The attention that you attract by observing this exercise can result in the generation of quality backlinks for your own site. And search engines love this practice as well. So, be generous!

Are you making these mistakes? Please don't hesitate to share your own thoughts and views on this topic.

There is a lot of conflicting information about link building in the Post-Panda climate of Google's ranking algorithms. The fact is, no one truely knows exactly how Google is evaluating inbound links to any one website. This has always been the case as Google has worked hard to protect their algorithm metrics and the specific changes they constantly make to improve search result quality.

But, we have learned that many 'old school' and previous SEO techniques are no longer successful and can possibly bring harm to your websites ranking ability. This can lead to being sandboxed or just getting all your links devalued or even de-indexed. Basically, you wasted a little or a lot of time getting backlinks that are negative or useless toward your ranking results. To make sure you don't make any of these mistakes lets take a look at some of the "negative" SEO tactics currently.

Poor and Detrimental SEO Practices:

• Content duplicating, spinning, stealing
• Link cloaking
• Keyword spam, keyword stuffing
• Canonical tags for redirects, stick with 301's and limited use
• Hidden keywords, img tags, etc
• Non-relevant backlink building

What does Panda want to see?

• Quality, unique content
• Relevant and quality inbound links
• Participation with your community, forums, blogs, and more
• Media incorporation: videos, images, etc
• High PR backlinks from relevant sources

Please make sure to stop and remove any old "black hat" style SEO techniqus that are incorporated on your webpage, these will only harm your potential to rank on the search engines. Especially as the Panda algorithm keeps being pushed through the results, adding, deleting, and altering results for better user quality.

Focus on writing quality content for your site AND for your backlinks. Then you'll be able to distribute this content throughout the web, helping you gain strong contextual linking and anchor text that is integrated with unique content that speaks to your specific market and niche. If you do not have the time to put forth quality efforts, make sure to browse the web and find a quality SEO company.

About the Author:

Mason Stoller has been working in the internet marketing industry for over 8 years, starting with small business consulting and now working with major corporations across the United States with SEO Influence.com. Check out his personal SEO Tips blog at SEOBestTips.com.

As a strictly white hat SEO professional, when the powers that be (i.e. Google and Bing) declare that a particular link building technique is black hat, I stop doing it. Take link exchanges for instance. A few years ago link exchanges were an incredibly useful form of link building. I give you a link, you give me a link and everyone goes home happy. One day Google decided that link exchanges were nothing more than a glorified link scheme and attempt to con the algorithm. They labeled them black hat and I haven't looked back since, even if some other grey hat and black hat SEO practitioners still use link exchanges.

It used to be that I would get a dozen emails a day asking for a link exchange, but in the last few months I';ve noticed a growing trend in the number of e-mails I'm getting from bloggers and site owners asking if they could write a guest blog post on my SEO blog and in exchange I'll be allowed to write a post on their blog. So instead of a link exchange, it's basically a blog exchange. Here's the thing; I don't accept guest posts on my blog, and I never have in the 4 years I've been writing it. I might decide to open it up to guest bloggers one day in the future, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it. And while I am always on the lookout for new places to write guest posts, most of these emails are coming from spammy, low quality blogs that I wouldn't want links from in the first place.

This got me wondering; is guest blogging the new link exchange?

Why should site owners look for guest blogging opportunities?

1. Helps build your link portfolio

That's an obvious benefit of guest blogging, but it should not be the only reason you do it! Submitting a guest post to various low quality sites might get you links but they aren't the valuable links you should be striving to attain. The original Panda update was designed to take on content farms and I firmly believe that it wonrsquo;t be too long before Google starts cracking down on sites that blog exchange just to get links.

However, getting a guest post published on a popular industry blog means your post will (hopefully) get a lot of attention from that blog's readers. They can share, Like, Tweet and post your blog all around their social networks. The more times your content is shared, the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. These social signals are becoming an increasingly important ranking factor.

2. Builds relationships with other bloggers and site owners

Once you get a foot in the door and have one post going live on another site, it's up to you to keep the ball rolling and build a relationship with that site owner. Don't let it be a one and done post. See if you can become a regular contributor to their blog or ask them to review a whitepaper or write a promotional post for a new product. There is so much more value to be had than that initial guest post.

3. Allows you to connect with more of your target audience

Obviously you want to write guest posts on related blogs because there is a good chance that's where your target audience is hanging out. By contributing to industry blogs you are positioning your name and brand in front of a wider segment of your target market. Links from your author byline might drive some of these targeted visitors over to your site and you may even land a new customer because of it!

Guest blogging, first and foremost, should be about brand building. It helps establish your credibility as an industry authority and creates unique touch points for you to engage your target audience. You shouldn't be focusing on just getting links from your guest posts! If all you care about is getting a link from one particular industry site, you might as well just become a regular commenter and get your links that way. Guest blogging has a lot more long term, valuable potential for your site.

Don't let guest blogging become the next link exchange! Treat each guest post as a powerful marketing vehicle and leverage it to its full advantage.

We must adjust to the changes and keep up to date with the algorithm Google continues to make to it's search engine,

Likes and Tweets are being calculated as part of the overall link juice value, rather then just obtaining a backlink from any social hub page or content driven page it is also calculated based on how many likes or tweets those pages have before giving the overall value.

It used to be very different few months or even a year or so ago, but latest changes make it even more tight also when it comes to the meta link anchor text.

It is calculated very heavily on mixed up anchor text and even works best when anchor text of a url has the brand of the website or domain mixed in with it.

Important aspects to consider in the algorithm:

- Exact match anchors have been over used and abused for some time now.
- Penalties, as opposed to rewards, are being reaped for too many exact match links.
- Don't be afraid to vary your anchor text. Incorporating branded terms is important.
- The page or post title is calculated very highly. a well optimized title will justify the less defined anchor text of a link;

This is something you can have good success with:

20 % to internal page; john's rubbish removal
20 % to internal page; john's rubbish removal service
20 % to internal page; rubbish removal new york
20 % to internal page; john house removals
10 % to the homepage; johnsrubbishremoval.com
10% would be random

I hope you enjoyed this post, please feel free to leave feedback on this topic.

By researching keywords with low competition you can achieve first page ranking with very little optimization effort

It is known that if you target keywords that have 100,000 competing pages or lower you can rank to the 1st page in literally hours and this can be achieved with the help of very few backlinks if any at all.

Blogging is a good example, because each time you write a headline for a blog post the most important aspect of it is the headline which contains the keywords you want to rank for along with the meta title and the permalink. The content on the site itself is really secondary and is what I like to call the icing on the cake.

See the problem is Internet marketers get too caught up in chasing keywords that have high searches and yes of course to get top ranking for highly searched keywords you need loads of backlinks and maintaining position is even more of a challenge, so the link building aspect becomes not only difficult but time consuming and costly.

Link building is becoming less important as time moves on and even though it is considered to be Google’s main quality score when it comes to weighing up the authority of a site, Keyword competition is still the bread winner because if you research your keywords properly you can rank well without any backlinks at all. I have developed niche sites and seen pages rise to the top very quickly as a result of simply just choosing the right keywords.

This is why I like to use a SEO plugin called Keyword Winner as you can literally find keywords that are non competitive but yet have a promising search trend. One example is taking advantage of products that recently launched and have huge buzz but do not have any search competition at all, because they are being promoted in other forms of marketing such as email marketing, social marketing or viraly. But you can jump on them quickly write a review post about it and rank 1st page in a few hours. I have done numerous case studies on this and it is proven.

Keyword Winner basically gives you up to 10 keyword suggestions as you write a headline for your blog post in your dashboard and color codes the most competitive keywords against least competitive ones. It uses Google Insights to see the percentage of overall searches conducted for the month and Google Trends to see if the keywords are trending over a period of time. The problem is it’s a pain going back and forth to Google Insights, Google Competition and Google Trends for every blog post you do so the tool saves loads of time and headache.

So where does this leave us?

Will backlinks become less important as us internet marketers, bloggers and SEO professionals become smarter in finding ways to place ourselves in between competition in a very discrete manner? Just one keyword can make all the difference and can be a million times easier or harder to rank, so the point of this post is that if you get that winning keyword you will have less reason to need loads of links to enhance the chance of being ranked higher.

Make a new years resolution, for 2011 focus on keywords and put less effort into backlinks!