Inbound links or incoming links play a major role in making your blog search engine friendly and giving top search results to your blog. Let’s assume, if a PR 6 blog linked one of your posts, then the chances of getting exposure will be really high. It will increase your organic traffic, better search results and gives quality backlinks to your blog. Moreover it increases your PR too. One shot, two birds. Why you need to make your URL structure short? If you use the worst URL which is lengthy (in general) then the search engine crawlers find it difficult to find them. 1 page search results will be less. Interlinking your new blog posts with the old blog posts is an effective way to reduce the bounce rate. 1 place in search results. Don’t use irrelevant links to your blog. Make them relevant and use them effectively. Outbound linking means “giving links to other blog(s) from your blog posts”. This can actually help your blog’s performance in the search engines! Whenever you provide a link to authority blogs or other blogs, you will get a trackback and in some cases, your search engine ranking and visibility may increase due to that particular post. But, you should consider few things while doing outbound linking. Don’t over link to the external sites/blogs. Even if you want to link, simple include their link without giving the “link address”. Benefits of doing outbound linking is, you can have a healthy relationship with whom you are linking to and there may be a chance of getting links from them in return (if they are from authority blogs, then your blog ranking, visibility will be up in the sky but the chances are less though). But, you should have some respect on the authority blogs and be generous to linking them when ever it’s needed. It will surely help your business in long run. The more quality backlinks you have the more authority it is. Backlinks are just like ‘votes’. Most bloggers believe that, backlinks from low rated PR blogs is not good - it’s a myth actually. It’s like ‘voting system’. No matter from where you are getting, but they worth. How you can get quality backlinks to your blog then? Blog commenting: Comment on top blogs in your niche. Try to make useful and insightful comments. Guest blogging: Guest blog on other blogs in your niche. Try to start from contextual backlinks like PR1 or PR2 and slowly increase the pace. I would suggest you to guest blog at least on 3 or more blogs in a month. Participating in forums: This is another way to build quality backlinks. Try to find out the forums which are related to your blog’s topic and participate there actively and submit your blog posts regularly. Try to use search engine friendly design. A Better search engine optimized blog design always makes the search results better and effective. The major point here is, you can get better search results if you have search engine friendly design even if you don’t know much about SEO! That’s the key-point here. Keywords should be used in a smart way. No over usage or less usage! Title tags are really important. Use Keyword tool to analyze the competitive keywords in your blogging niche. If you find it bit tough to use, then use “Google insights tool”. Here is a screen shot for the keyword “seo tips”.. At the end of the above image, you will see “top searches” which will be useful for your blog article keywords, quite easy isn’t it? What if your blog is perfectly optimized and has everything except the quality content? So, try to create quality content. Here are few tips on creating it.. Valuable: Your content must be valuable, it should add value to your blog. Unique: Your content should not be copied from any other source and it should have compelling content writing skills. Fresh content: Most of the times, search engines prefer fresh content rather than the old or repeated content. Try to update your blog often if you can. If not, update it ‘regularly’ (not daily) with engaging content.. Do you know Google considers blog’s loading time to give higher rankings for specific keywords? It will help to boost organic traffic from search engines for specific keywords which you use for your blog posts. So, try to make your blog loading time faster using the following methods. Optimize your images before you use: Many expert bloggers have suggested to optimize the images to make your blog loads faster. What I say is to optimize them before you use them. Use image compressors to do this. Instead of uploading your images and compressing them using post editors, this is the best way to go. Cut the clutter: Don’t make your blog an ad agency and never use useless widgets and plugins. Use the best plugins, try to clear the clutter in your blog as much as possible. Use better hosting: Instead of using free or nonsense hosting providers. Use the top class hosting providers like HostGator. Better hosting ultimately makes your blog’s loading time better. W3 Cache: This is the best WP plugin to clear the cache in your blog. Submit your sitemap: Submit your blog sitemap to search engines. Use the ALT tag always: Search engines like Google, Yahoo! But these bots don’t crawl as often they crawl your content. What you need to keep in mind is, they will crawl even the images. So, it’s really a bad idea if you use weird names for your images like “0000155.jpg” or “asdaegljadfg.png” etc. Instead of this, name your images corresponding to your blog posts. SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images improving traffic from search engines. Search engines are blind and deaf - So, use them “smart”: Search engines can’t see your videos as we see, they can’t listen to the podcasts as we do. What they only do is - they perform their crawling in text format.