If you’re just starting a link building program or if you need to give your current program a shot in the arm, then Link Building is for you.

Co-authored by Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney, the full title of the ebook is Link Building: How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response. The book, according to the authors, is “aimed at people at all levels of ability and involvement in web design, publishing and marketing.”

McGaffin and Nunney have succeeded in this goal. If you’re brand new to building links, then you’ll appreciate how the authors have, in one ebook, tied together the:

• importance of quality content
• principles behind successful link building techniques
• need to investigate and understand – and network with –
  your online community
• role that targeted keywords play in this process
• specific tips that will strengthen your link building program

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Getting online sales leads can be tough. Sprucing up your website can help with generating sales leads – and increasing your bottom line! The Search Guru offers these organic SEO strategies:

Organic SEO tip #1: Examine on-page elements

On-page elements are the elements that affect organic search engine optimization that can be controlled by the designer or developer. Use the following checklist to help increase online sales leads to your website.

Title tags (the single most important on-page element). The title tag is like the headline of your advertisement in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The title tag should:

• Be unique and relevant to the page topic
• Contain keywords, a benefit statement and a call to action

Header tags (the second most important on-page element). Header tags (also called H tags) highlight important text for the search engines. H tags should:

• Be used on every page
• Highlight the main idea or headline (H1)
• Highlight secondary ideas or sub-headlines (H2)

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Wondering which industries received the largest number of Better Business Bureau complaints in 2009?

In 2009, the Better Business Bureau received almost one million complaints, which is an increase of about 10 percent over 2008.

The largest number of Better Business Bureau complaints, according to the Wall Street Journal excerpt from Real Time Economics, was against wireless carriers; there were an astonishing 34,477 complaints against these companies in 2009 alone. This industry was also ranked first in the number of complaints in 2008.

The industry that received the second most complaints was the cable and satellite television industry; banks were number three, with the bureau receiving 42 percent more complaints about the financial industry when compared to 2008.

Here’s how to lodge your own Better Business Bureau complaints – and otherwise state complaints – to get results.

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Let The Search Guru show you how to use the canonical element to fix duplicate content and search engine index issues.

Here at The Search Guru blog we’ve posted previous entries discussing canonical issues and how they can cause duplicate content in the search engine index. To refresh your memory, canonicalization is the process of the search engines having to choose the best URL to index when there are several choices. To a search engine, http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com look like two different sites that have exactly the same content, which can trigger the Google duplicate content filter.

One way to address this is by implementing a 301 redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred version of a URL. We show you how to do this on a Unix/Apache server and a Windows server.

Use the canonical element as well to fix Google duplicate content.

The canonical element was introduced by Google about a year ago, but you may not yet realize its power. The canonical element (also referred to as the canonical tag, although it is technically not a tag) shows Google which version of a URL to include in the search engine index.

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Spring is coming – so it’s time to freshen up your website by once again choosing keywords for your site and updating your web page content.

When was the last time that you conducted keyword research on your site? If the answer is a year – or more – then it’s definitely time to repeat the process. First, rerun all the keyphrases that you’ve been using. (The Search Guru provides links to terrific free keyword research tool options.)

What changes do you notice in your keyword research results? Why do you think those changes are occurring? What do they mean to your business?

For example, perhaps you’ve been featuring the luxury version of your product, because keyword research had previously indicated that there was significant interest in that product line. Perhaps, in today’s more uncertain economy, fewer people are searching for the luxury version of your product – but there is much stronger search traffic now on another product line of yours. How will this change your business – and search – strategies?

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