One way to help boost your results in the search engines for a specific keyword is to build a link wheel around the webpage you want to give a boost. You do this by writing six articles that you can position on social media and other websites and link back to your page and one of the other six articles inside of each of them.

When you think of a link wheel, try to picture an old-fashioned wooden wheel with spokes. At the center of the wheel is the article or webpage that you want to move up in the search engine results. At the outside end of each spoke is another article or page that you control. Each of these outside articles links to the center article or page. They also link to the next article on the outside of the circle. In this way, you will connect the dots with links to draw a wheel around your main page.

To help you understand better, you can try drawing a picture of the wheel. Write the name of your target article or page in the center. Now draw six lines reaching out from the center article. Make these into arrows pointing back toward the center to represent the links. Now you need to complete the wheel by making lines in between each article on the outer edge. Make these lines into arrows as well. All of the arrows should go in one direction, either clockwise or counterclockwise. This shows which articles will link to each other.

Next, you need to know what pages to put the links on. You can use pages on a number of different sites to make your wheel. Any service that allows you to publish a webpage or article containing at least two links will work. Some examples include Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger and Ezine Articles. Just pick six of these types of sites to use to build your link wheel.

You don’t need unique content for each of these pages. Only the main page at the center of the link wheel needs to be unique. The other articles can all be rewrites of the same article. You are not going to be promoting the outside articles to human visitors. Their only purpose is to provide backlinks for your main page.

However, the way you set up your links is important. When you create your links to the center page, make sure you use your targeted keyword as the text for your links. For example, if you want your webpage to rank well for “best way to make money online, ” you need to use “best way to make money online” as the text for your links.

Building a link wheel around a webpage or article can give you a huge boost in the search engine rankings, but the six-page wheel described in this article is just the beginning. If you really want to boost your rankings, you can build multiple wheels around a single article. You can also build secondary wheels around each of the pages in the original wheel. Just make sure you build your backlinks slowly and steadily so that your webpage doesn’t get sandboxed.

Social media is a concept that bubbled up through the masses starting, roughly speaking, around 2005. While social media sites like MySpace and Facebook began as ways for primarily young people to find each other and keep in touch, corporations soon saw how these sites could be used to improve customer relations. By 2009 social media begun to revolutionize the way corporations managed customer relations.

According to IT research and advisory company Gartner, by 2010 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using social media in some form as a way to improve customer relations. That’s the good news. Gartner also posits that over half of the companies using social media for this function will do it wrong and actually harm customer relations. Gartner suggests that companies focus their analysis on customer online buying in order to offer a direct calculation of return on investment in terms of sales and customer loyalty coming through social media sites.

Gartner says that there are four steps businesses need to pursue to successfully use social media to manage customer relations. The first step is clearly defining the purpose of the social media initiative. Second, they must be willing to give up some degree of control over the medium, because the public wants some degree of ownership of the relationship as a reward for participating.

Companies then have to reward those customers that participate socially. This may mean allowing them to vote on, or otherwise rate contributions and information on the site. Finally, companies must appoint someone in-house who has the skills to head up a social media customer relations initiative. Using social media for customer relations should never be an afterthought. In fact, it should probably have someone specifically devoted to it full time, with their own staff if necessary.

There is no question that social networking has changed the behavior of a critical mass of individuals as customers and prospects. According to Gartner, they can no longer be described adequately based on demographic information, which is the usual target for corporate customer relations efforts.

When it comes to your company, you’re not going to want to invest a lot of time or effort in such an undertaking without knowing if it will pay off in terms of driving quality traffic to your company’s website.

Non-linear Creations did a one-year study of the effects of five social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Stumbleupon) on their own home page. After a year, it was determined that social media sites drove about 18% of their site’s visitors from the referring sites in aggregate.

In the Case of Non-linear Creations, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the other social media sites. That’s important, but it isn’t the whole story. What about conversion rates? Non-linear Creations measured conversion rates by whether visitors downloaded one of their white papers, subscribed to their blog or newsletter, or contacted them by phone or email. In this case – driving real prospects – Linkedin outperformed the other sites. Traffic from Linkedin was much more likely to convert than the average site visitor. Other social media sites actually underperformed the average.

There’s no guarantee that Linkedin will give your company the tangible results that Non-linear Creations got. It probably depends on what type of business you have. It is not quite understood what the less tangible benefits are of reaching customers online in a way that makes them feel as if the brand is listening and cares enough to interact in the way they desire. One of the things people dislike about customer support call centers is their anonymous feel. It keeps them from feeling a sense of relationship to the brand. So far no obvious downsides of using social media for customer service, so it would seem to be in any company’s best interests to use this form of outreach.

It certainly isn’t hard to create accounts on social media sites. The hard part is in actually interacting with customers on them, listening to them, and analyzing your online visitor numbers to see which social media sites give you the most return on investment in terms of online sales or some other metric. At that point you’ll have to determine how much effort to put into making under-performing social media referrers more effective.

5,419 uploads in the last minute, 71,248 things tagged with jump, 3.0 million things geotagged this month. Do you still need a reason to get yourself a Flickr account?

Flickr is quickly becoming a popular online marketing tool for it allows creative agencies to market their products through a visually appealing medium. It can help you generate traffic to your website and ensure that your website ranks higher on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing too. Consider this, according to Nielsen or NetRatings, Flickr is the fastest-growing photo sharing site on the web. It is the 7th most trafficked social media site overall.

Flickr is primarily a photo-sharing community, owned by Yahoo!. You can use your Yahoo! Login ID and password to log onto Flickr and use your account to tag your photographs, share them and participate in the community discussions as well. The photographs, which you post on Flickr, might leave a lasting impression in the minds of the millions of Flickr users and some of them might end up being your potential customers as well. By networking actively on the community forums, you can build your contacts and build greater awareness about your business and services as well. You could use the links from Flickr to further your link popularity too!

Video is for everyone too! As a member of Flickr, you can upload and share videos (business videos and presentations too!) just like you do with photos.

To avail the benefits of SEO through Flickr, you need inbound links, which you could obtain in the form of links from other blogs and websites. Ensure that the photo title matches the title tag or element. You are assured higher rankings for the phrase. Most importantly, you should only try to sell unique and noteworthy product or services-related photographs through Flickr.

Quick tips for marketing your business on Flickr:

* Use your business/website name as your Flickr display name.

* Use the best, relevant photographs to advertise your business.

* Actively participate in the Flickr community. Find groups relevant to your business and join them.

* Tag your photographs with terms that are relevant to your business or service. Provide a link to your Flickr account on your website.

However, don’t post advertising messages on the discussion forums or stuff keywords in your tags. You could end up turning “off” the community and users, and not being able to generate any interest in your photostream too. To top that, Flickr added “nofollow” tags to links placed within its website last year. Flickr implemented these tags for the same reason as a number of other social-media sites – to prevent misuse and spamming.

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If you’re the owner of a small business or you have launched a new website, achieving better Google rankings through SEO has to be at the forefront of your mind. Many people however don’t actually know how to actually go about this, and what kinds of SEO tactics will produce real, tangible results. The truth is that there are actually several different kinds of SEO work that you’ll have to become familiar with.

The first is what most people already know, and that’s on-page SEO tactics. These include things like keyword inclusion and internal linking. The other half of SEO however may actually be even more important for your Google rankings. This is off-page SEO, and it incorporates all of the work that you do to help improve your search engine standings on other websites and through other sources and mediums throughout the web.

Below are 10 of the most important factors when it comes to off-page SEO and your Google rankings. By following this advice and incorporating these strategies into your SEO game plan you will be able to soar up the rankings.

1. Quantity of Incoming Links: One of the first off-page SEO factors for Google rankings is the quantity of incoming links that you have leading to your website. The quick story is that the more links you have leading to your website the better.

2. Quality of Incoming Links: However another important rule is that the quality of your incoming links is also important. That’s because every incoming link is like a vote towards your credibility. Therefore when that vote comes from a highly credible source, you get more credit. The best links are natural, one-way links from related sites that are themselves already highly credible.

3. Diversity of Incoming Links: Having incoming links from a variety of different sources will also help your SEO and Google rankings. For example if all of your links are from blog comments you may set off alarms, or fail to see true benefits from those links. But if you have links from forums, blogs, directories, related websites, articles, videos and more you are establishing a far reaching and legitimate presence.

4. Anchor Text of Incoming Links: The anchor text use in your incoming links is also extremely important. That’s because the anchor text is what actually tells the Google rankings what your page is about. Therefore the right anchor text can help you directly target certain topics or key phrases, enabling you to immediately boost your SEO.

5. Domain Name Age: Some people may consider this on-page SEO, but since it is largely out of your control and you can’t change anything on your page to affect this, it should be considered off-page SEO. The older your domain is, the more credible your website is viewed and the more potential you have for high Google rankings.

6. Community Building: Community building entails a presence on social networks, blogs and forums. These are important SEO tactics for Google rankings because they help to expand your overall reach and scope. You will add more incoming links to your site, build more direct traffic and grow more support. You’ll also get noticed by more blogs and other sites, which will add even more links and traffic to your growing numbers.

7. Visitor Trends: The way that visitors behave with your site is also extremely important for your Google rankings. For example if you apply some solid SEO tactics and gain more traffic, but all of your visits result in bounces, then clearly people aren’t finding what they are looking for from your website and you can end up being penalized. You are looking to achieve as low a bounce rate as possible, showing that you are a valued and related website.

8. Traffic Sources: The sources of your traffic can also end up affecting your Google rankings. There are “good” and “bad” sources of traffic on the Internet, and if you participate in linking schemes or traffic buying you can actually end up being penalized to some degrees. You want your traffic to come from credible referral sites that are related to your own website, natural searching and any legitimate PPC campaigns you may be running.

9. Previous History: The previous history of your website and the trends of popularity will factor into your long term Google rankings. What this means is that if your site suddenly spikes in traffic for some reason, or suddenly quadruples its content or shows up with 2,000 more incoming links, it will be looked at as suspicious at first. More successful is the gradual increase of content, and incoming links.

10. Directory Inclusion: One of the most important SEO tactics for your off-page SEO success is getting included in some of the major directories. Directories have been devalued by and large in the Google rankings, but some still carry a great deal of weight. For example, getting listed in Dmoz can provide a huge boost to your rankings that lasts for a very long time.

These are just a summation of some of the important off-page SEO tactics that you can use to help improve your Google rankings. These days you need far more than just optimized content in order to gain a foothold in the search engines. Many people view off-page SEO as the equal to on-page SEO, and many other people view link building and other off-page SEO tactics as even more important.

Therefore take the time it takes to familiarize yourself with the best practices of these SEO tactics. Build up a diverse collection of high quality links, provide content that people find relevant, gradually build your website and do everything you can off of your website to help increase your Google rankings.