There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

Got questions about how to get traffic from SEO?

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing both are intrinsic part of Internet marketing efforts. But there is some confusion as to which one is better strategy in return on investment (ROI) terms. This article helps clear some of the doubts.

SEO vs. SEM – The ROI Myth Busted

Return on investment (ROI) is one of the deciding factors for any course of action involving investment of resources. For quite sometime now, a debate has been raging on whether search engine optimization (SEO) has better ROI than professional search engine marketing (SEM).

In fact it has become a bit of a myth that it is easier to get good ROI through SEO than it is to get the same ROI through SEM. Two facts have helped evolve this myth – SEM involves click costs while SEO works through free traffic. Let’s see whether this myth holds any water.

Well, a closer look tells us that this myth doesn’t have any truth in it and there are several reasons for that. In this article though, we will deal with just one reason: the ‘landing page difference’.

In SEM, you decide the landing page your visitors will see. In SEO, a search engine spider decides on the landing page visitors will see. There’s a difference in control, and that difference makes all the difference. That’s why serious search engine marketing services providers opt for full blown SEM rather than just SEO.

Searchers, after all, are people with itchy back-button fingers. If they come to a site and don’t think it’s the best site for them, they’ll return to the search engine results page – and click on your competitors’ links – in a matter of seconds.

But if your landing page is optimized for the keywords the searchers choose, and the ad copy the searchers see, then you’re able to tell a new visitor, right away, that he/she’s come to the right place.

And no matter how amazing your site is, that’s a message that visitors need to hear. Because people don’t just want to see a good landing page, they want to see a relevant landing page.

But only a good search engine marketing firm can optimize your landing page. A search spider won’t.

In both SEO and SEM, you only hit ROI if your searchers convert. A search engine marketing services provider might require a higher initial investment than an SEO firm does (because SEM requires the management cost, plus the PPC cost; while SEO only costs the price of management alone) – but you’re also likely to get better conversions through SEM, because you’re likely to get better landing pages through SEM. And it’s only conversions that will get you ROI.

Are we saying that getting the best SEO possible isn’t worthwhile?

Absolutely not!

The more real estate you take up in the search engine results page, the better. It will plant your brand in the psyche of the browsers making your website easier to recall when they would require services/products you offer.

So good SEO is absolutely vital to strong internet marketing! But saying that SEO will get better ROI than SEM – because organic traffic is free – ignores the most important element of SEM: control. And its control that makes all the difference between getting traffic, and getting traffic that converts.

And that makes a huge difference when it comes to ROI.