Google has always given importance to backlinks in their algorithms and quite obvious it is the most important concept in SEO. Below are a few tips to gather enough backlinks in order to rank well in search engines:-

a) Find online community forums which are related to the topic of your website. Use a suitable signature in your posts which links to your site.

b) Add comments in the blogs using anchor text in the title which links to your site

c) Submit articles to article directories and include your link in the author bio.

d) Submit your link to many free or paid online directories.

e) Include your URL and add comments in guestbooks.

f) Contact the webmasters of different sites and ask them if they can trade links.

g) You can also provide content to other sites in return if they can provide a link back.

h) Having an eBay account you can create an “about us” page and include a link to your website.

i) Develop a helpful tool or script for webmasters that they can add to their sites.

j) Create the best or even controversial content on your website so that many users can link to it.

Writing a good, informative and catchy article is very essential for a blog or if it is to be published or submitted elsewhere. Here are some useful points which will help make the article interesting and helpful for the readers.

- To know the audience is very essential so it is imperative to identify what kind of readers are being targeted as they will be from different demographics and it would be important to communicate with them at their level.

- You may start an article with a teaser by applying the inverted pyramid style which will summarize the main idea of the article and will make the reader wonder on the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ aspects of the article.

- Go paragraph-wise and go for shorter paragraphs than the long ones as readers fell lazy when they face up with huge mass of text. Readers do get engaged to shorter paragraphs more but along with being short and to the point the article also has to interesting no matter if it is a little long then.

- It is a good practice to bold the selling points of the page. Bold the points which exactly states what is going to be accomplished from it. Use of bullet point lists is best and is also catchy.

- Talk about the advantages and not the features as it works better. Try being personal and tell them your story as that works for many types of readers. Having a genuine guarantee and backing up of your claims is a great way to gain the trust of the reader.

- Uses of simple and short sentences are always advisable and avoid difficult words for general readers especially if you are targeting an audience from various geographical locations.

- Improve your copy by doing the A/B split (two versions) test and check which works; as there is no other way to know for sure what the customer wants to hear/read.

- Using a bit of humor and engaging the readers with real life examples are good ways to keep them attached to the article.

- The headline or the title should be very well chosen. People read the longest articles and letters if they are attracted to the headline.

- Stick with all facts and figures on proof base only and avoid feathery or over ambitious claims. A reader should never feel a loss of reliability from the article by you being more promotional and less enlightening.

For submitting in free directories a webmaster should just keep in mind that the directories should be SEO friendly. The PR of the directories won’t be a point of concern as you can submit to directories which have no PR also because sooner or later even those directories will gain a decent PR.

If you are hunting around only for directories with high PR you will notice that most of them are paid ones so it won’t be of much use to you.
You may submit to a number of directories in a day say maybe 20, 50, 100 or also 200. The reason it won’t matter to submit to such an amount of directories is because they get crawled by the spiders in a certain number of days and not at once so it’s all fine.

Target different keywords in the title on a daily basis so that all your keywords get upward push in the search rankings which would be beneficial to your web site in an over all perspective.

One possible solution is not to use any sitemap file at all. In that case, scraper bots can still parse your web pages through the normal links on your web pages but that would be more difficult for them than using your sitemap file.

Another solution is to set up a sitemap file and delete as soon as search engines have indexed that file.

Do not use free sitemap generator tools. You don’t know what they will do with your data and they might even use it to create scraper sites with your content.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that you can do to stop spammers from abusing your content. Use a tool such as CopyScape to find sites that have duplicated your content.

The big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) introduced the Sitemaps protocol earlier this year.

In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site, etc.

That information helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site. The Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

Some webmasters reported problems with duplicate content after adding a sitemaps XML file to their web sites.

The content of their websites appeared on dubious websites that had nothing to do with the original sites. The content of the original websites had been duplicated on many other sites. The result was that the original sites might have received ranking penalties due to duplicate content.

Some search engine spammers used the sitemaps XML files to easily find contents for their scraper sites.

A scraper site is a website that pulls all of its information from other websites using automated tools. The scraper software pulls different contents from other websites to create new web pages that are designed around special keywords. The scraped pages usually show AdSense ads with which the spammers hopes to make money.

The new sitemaps XML files make it very easy for scraper tools to find content rich pages. Although the original intention of the sitemaps files was to inform search engines about every single page of your web site, they can also be used to inform spam bots about your pages.

Search engines assign a value to your site based on the links pointing to it. The most popular term for this kind of ranking is PageRank, which Google uses. And hence, it is known as Google PageRank. The PageRank is a value that Google gives to a page, based on the number and type of links into the page. The PageRank varies from 0 to 10. PageRank 0 is the lowest rank while 10 is the highest rank assigned by Google to web pages.

In short, Google PageRank(PR) is Google’s way of deciding the importance of a web page and thus ranking it. It’s important to understand that Web sites don’t have PageRanks, Web pages have PageRanks. It’s possible for a site’s home page to have a high PageRank, while internal pages have very low ranks.

But now its more important that how Google calculates PR for a web page. Initially, meta tags were taken into consideration for calculating PR; then alt attributes were found important; but nowadays the backlinks to that page have been found most important. Also, google crawls the whole web page contents and find out the keywords used in it and accordingly set the PR for the web page.

Google considers a link from one page to another as a vote of support to that page. The page shows link of another page means shows a vote of support for that page. When a page has many incoming links, it shows that the page is supported by number of votes. And thus that page receives high PR from Google. It has been found that the pages linking to your web page must have higher PR which helps in achieving higher PR.

When you type a search term into Google and click Search, Google starts looking through its database for pages with the words you’ve typed. Then it examines each page to decide which pages are most relevant to your search. Google considers many characteristics: what the <TITLE> tag says, how the keywords are treated (are they bold or italic or in bulleted lists?), where the keywords sit on the page, and so on. It also considers PageRank. Usually the web pages with higher PR are displayed first.

Thus, Google PR is considered as the most important element in search engine optimization. Google recalculates PageRank scores each time it crawls the Web and rebuilds its index. Thus, the web pages do not have same PR everytime. As you change the contents of the web page and the spiders find it more informative about the site theme then ultimately that web page receives higher PR.