The main method of getting sites to link to you is called "reciprocal linking," or in normal words, link exchange, since this way both sites improve their link popularity. This process can be time consuming, and needs attention even after the deal is made. Here’re some examples of possible pitfalls:

1. A site might link back to you, but then get rid of the link, or move it to a different part on their site, that isn’t ranked as highly.

2. A webmaster might place a “rel=nofollow” attribute in his ling to you, which makes a spider ignore the link when crawling the page.

3. Your link might be placed on a link page that exists on the site’s server, but doesn’t have a link from the actual site to it. That way a spider is highly unlikely to reach it. And if it does, due to manual submitting for example, it will not give it a high rank, no matter how popular the main page is.

4. Some webmasters will point the link to a script on their page that will redirect to your site. Since spiders don’t read scripts, this link is useless SEO-wise.

5. When purchasing links, some sites will place the link on every page of their site. Google has recently begun ignoring such schemes.

So unless you remain watchful and monitor your links constantly, you risk increasing the other sites’ ranking, but not your own.

Both your domain name and your pages URLs are important to the search engine spiders, so try to use your keywords there. As a rule, use underscores, or better yet, hyphens to separate your keywords. While certain engines will not care whether the words are separated, some of the major ones, such as Google, do.

Last I heard; Google treats hyphens just like a person treats a space when reading. But it sounds like they pretty much don’t even register underscores - so hyphens are my seperator of choice.

I just got off the phone with a friend who wants to know where he can find the best deal on having an SEO specialist optimize his site. My first thought was Rent A Coder. It’s a place where you place a job request posting and freelancers bid to do the work for you. Each freelancer has a rating (1-10) and feedback you can read about to see if you are hiring the right person.

I’ve used them dozens of times of coding projects, writing assignments and even some marketing campaign work. I’ve even handled a couple SEO projects through them to test the waters.

One of the most amazing things I find is the difference in prices I see with each posting. For one SEO job in particular, I had proposals ranging from $25 to $1,200 – for the same job! I finally settled on a coder that said he could do it for $75 – and he did a fantastic job of tweaking my original SEO work (mine was all raw HTML and he added some ASP functionality and more). The site topped MSN in two weeks!

Don’t use Flash graphics when it can be avoided. Navbars, static slideshows, and logos can usually be converted to SEO friendly images. If its usage is critical, put separate text links for search engine spiders, or make a complete text version of the site.

Don’t allow all your link partners to use the same anchor text. Google considers this similarity too artificial, and reduces its positive effect on your SERP rankings. If you can help it, encourage variety of the anchor text in your inbound links. Sending link exchange invitations, alter the wording of the site name or link text that you suggest.

Know a great seo software product? Share the wealth! Tired of seo software that doesn’t do what it promises? Here’s your chance to rant! Check out the seo software category and brag, rant, rave and blog to your heart’s content.

I’ll make this one short and sweet – but a loaded question nonetheless… What’s the best SEO software on the market today?

I started with Web Position Gold in 1999 and have tried plenty with hit-or-miss results since then. Most recently I started using SEO Studio for tracking results and comparing back-end stuff and SEO Elite 3.2 for my linking campaign.

Please post your thoughts. I’d love to settle on one great product that really works.