Search Engine Optimisation - Top 10 tips

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6) Getting backlinks to your website:

Getting decent backlinks can be a lengthy but highly rewarding task, in fact I rate this as possibly the most effective single contributary factor to whether your site is up there at the top or not.
So what is a decent backlink? - Firstly I must point out that a backlink to your site from another site is better than no backlink at all, but the best results are to be had from sites that are based on similar content to your actual website and the keywords you are optimising for. One of the best ways to get content relevant backlinks is to type in the word you want to be top on Google for as a search and then the top 50 sites that come up in the results are going to be your best bet - getting these sites to link to you is sometimes difficult but not impossible as most webmasters realise that if you link to them and they link to you (this is called a reciprocal link by the way) there is a potential benefit to be had by both parties, however you must also bear in mind that if you have a relatively new site with no visitors or page rank the chances of someone with a pagerank 7 linking back to you are slim to none unless you know them personally - try to go for sites that are of a similar age, page rank, profile and status to that of your own site. Remember to keep your backlinks as relevant as you can, 50 relevant backlinks are far batter than 100 links from random site - Oh, and avoid linkfarms and anyone or website that claims to get you thousand of links overnight - Google isn't stupid and only likes sites that are seen to be linked to for a reason, getting thousands of links in one go can sometimes do a lot more harm than good - so unfortunately the slowburn process is order of the day here.
There is also three way linking in which you link to a site of someone else's and they link back to you but from a third site - if Google were working on a points system (which I think it kinda' does) it would allocate you more points towards your ranking as the third site is seen to link to you for no benefit for itself apart from that pointing to your site would benefit it's users - therefore deeming your site a worthy one. (I assume Google sees reciprocal linking as a 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' sort of thing, however for the time being it is still fairly effective but three way linking is looking like the way forward)

7) Adding descriptions to text and images:

Or 'Alt Tagging' as I call it. This is the effect you get when you hover over an image and some text pops up to describe what you are looking at or where it will take you or what it does, this is a useful way to add some nice keywords to your site whilst keeping your visitors well informed, you do this by using the alt="" or title="" tags but remember this is not an opportunity to stuff your site with an abundance of keywords - this is called keyword spamming and at it's worst can get you banned from the search engines
A good example is the link below (hover over it):
Business web design
This effect can also be achieved using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
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