Free SEO Tips
Most SEO companies want to charge you for everything they know. In order to win your trust and, we hope, your business, let us teach you a few tricks of the trade that you can likely do on your own before you hire us.

1. 10 Year URL Renewal – Spend the extra money on a long term renewal. Popular thinking is that while small, the engines like to see that you are serious enough to spend the money to protect your URL.

2. Download Google Tool Bar – For Firefox, download Google’s tool bar so you can track your page rank on your sites and the sites of your competition. The results pop up right in your browser nav bar. You can also track your link backs, which is very useful, as you are getting more serious with SEO. This little application is free and takes no more than about 30 seconds to download. Yahoo's linkback tracking can often be more comprehensive but Google's gives you a good overview.

3. Avoid Reciprocal Links – When people email or call you looking to swap links, it often isn't a great deal. You want relevant, in-category, one-way link backs en route to SEO success. Two way linkbacks from your site to another site is basically an SEO wash. .

4. Outgoing Links Are a Killer – We recently redid a home theater installer site from Florida that originally had a basic, template-based website. Okay, it was awful in just about every way. We fixed it quickly, but the first thing we did was to remove the 20 outgoing links to the brands they sell. While the links to the brands helps those sites, the zero incoming links to the dealer’s site, plus the 20 outgoing links, created for one hell of an SEO problem. We removed those links on Day One and got them over 36 link backs from sites ranging from PR2 to as high as a new PR5 (pretty rare). Even before their page rank has been updated, their traffic is increasing by as much as 10 percent per week. Any webmaster can quickly and easily remove outgoing links. It’s not that outgoing links are horrible once you are established, but until you are, it’s better to keep their numbers down to one or two outgoing per page, with a much greater number of incoming links.

5. Not All Link Backs Are Created Equal – All incoming one-way links are good, but not all are created equal. A PR0 link is helpful, but not nearly as good as one from a PR1. A PR3 link back is exponentially better and a PR5 link back is worth a special favor, if you can get one. Engines want to see that sites they like are linking to you, thus your site becomes a site they also like.

6. Be a Publicity Whore – In the world of PR, being a whore is a good thing, because all PR (even negative PR) is good PR, especially in the eyes of search engines that love to see CNN, LATimes.com and or even smaller news sites linking back to you. For around $400, you can create a press release for something relevant to your business and submit it to the AP newswire. Our recommendation is to either create and then solve a problem, or pontificate on a topic as an expert when creating the content. For example, we used to do releases about the music business or the impact of the HD DVD/Blu-ray format war. These stories would get picked up all over the place, all of them linking back to us. The Christian Science Monitor, The Sacramento Bee – hell, the Farmer’s Almanac even linked back to us. Our Top 100 Bands of All Time list got so many links it became a PR5 very quickly and results in three of the top 10 most-viewed pages on AVRev.com more than a year after it ran.

7. Become a Moderator – Find a forum that is relevant to your topic and start giving them free content (like I am doing for you here on this site), as it builds credibility. After a while, ask if you can become a moderator. With site respect and no "no-follow tags" you will be able to drop deep links for your site that will slowly help build your link portfolio.

8. A Warning About Relevancy - As you build your link portfolio, its easy to get carried away when you see pages that you can get links from that are high value but off topic. One site we know got a linkback from a band website that was a PR5, above the fold powerful linkback. We knew this site was paying for it and so did Google because it simply seemed too good to be true. You don't need to have more linkbacks than CNN.com to be well ranked on your best terms. Build relevant linkbacks from terms that count. Make sure the linkbacks are part of text that include some of your keywords when possible.

Consider yourself armed and dangerous for starting on SEO, but know there is much more involved than what I have described above. If you want 90210SEO to bid on your project – call us at 310.860.9988 or email Jerry@90210SEO.com