Probably one of the best ways to get links quickly that has a visible effect on your SERPs. What you do is write an article that is about the thing you are trying to promote. Imagine you are promoting an estate agent. Write an article on say, moving house which is around 350 – 400 words. Once you have your article, write a little paragraph that sums up the article and the website you are trying to promote, and place around 2 – 3 links in the paragraph which contain the keywords you are trying to target. Some article directories will alow this in this in the bio - others will only allow links in the bottom paragraph. Here is a list of article directories to submit your articles to:

http://www.article-submission.net/
http://www.article-submission.us
http://www.articlesup.com/
http://www.articleset.com/
http://www.articlenetworks.com/
http://www.articlenic.com/
http://www.articlemaniac.com/
http://www.articleclick.com/
http://www.articleblotter.com/
http://www.myfamilyliving.com
http://expertsarticles.com/
http://article99.com
http://articles.directorygold.com/
http://article-spot.com

Normally when starting a SEO campaign the client will require a preliminary research phase so the SEO can assess how hard or difficult the campaign is going to be. This will normally be comprised of:

Keyword Analysis
A thorough analysis of the keywords which are typed into the search engines to find the client website. Keywords will be carefully selected in order to attract relevant traffic through all of the major UK search engines.

Reports and analysis of these keywords should be communicated and selected before any site op-timisation work is carried out.

• Identifying keyword phrases specific to the target market.
• Analysis of each keyword against major SEO factors and competitiveness.
• Niche areas, levels of traffic and convertible phrases will be identified.

Then comes:

Competition Analysis
An analysis of competing websites for the keyword search terms selected during the keyword analysis will be conducted. This will provide us with a good guideline for phrases to target. For example some phrases might have steep competition, high proportion of links, high page rank, high number of websites with keyword and competing title tags. Once this has been assessed against the competition you can determine which keyword phrases to target.

• Identify the amount of keywords, titles, links and PageRank of competing websites.
• Provide a conversion sheet for keyword research to proportion ROI.

And finally Ranking Benchmark

• Provide a rundown of your website’s position in all major Search Engines, Google.com, Google.co.uk Yahoo & Bing.

The difference between a redirect and rewrite is:

• Rewrite is a Server-Side operation
• Redirect sends an immediate response to the Client

When creating a new page you should always either 301 redirect or rewrite from the old page. A 301 redirect tells a Search Engine that a page has been permananetly moved, so all the “link juice” or pagrank from the old page is eventually redirected from the old page. Imagine if you got lots of links from different websites to an old page, you then rename and delete the old page, all those links you got would be wasted. Consequently when your rewrite engine is on you should follow this protocal and let the Search Engine pass on all that link juice to the new page:

So in the .htaccess at the root of your website save:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.website.com$
RewriteRule ^olddirectory\/file\.html$ “http\:\/\/www\.website\.com\/newdirectory\/ fileinnewdirectory\-remember\-to\-escape\-hyphens\-and\-fullstops\.html” [R=301,L]

This is a quick way to control all your rewrites. If you want to do static ones on a php page:
<?php

// Permanent redirection

header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);

header(”Location: http://www.website.com/”);

exit();

?>

For more information check out this video here:

Looks like html5 may signal the death knell for flash..

When starting to analyse your site, the best place to start with is the meta tags. All title tags should be unique for every page and should accurately describe the page’s content. They should be no longer than 11 words long and they should should not repeat your key keyword anymore than twice. A great title and description tag scanner and aggregator is xenu link sleuth, where you download your title and description tags for every page and there rewrite each title and description tag from there.

The next stage when analysing your site would be to have a look at the amount of backlinks your website has. You can do this with backlinkwatch or back link analyser from seobook. You should then compare the amount of links your website has with your competitors website.  If they have a higher number of of that keyword rich backlink you are trying to get to number one for, you should try and match that, to your competitor.

The next stage would be to look at the number of pages your website has. You can do this by going to yahoo site explorer and typing site:http://www.mydomain.com This will give you the amount of pages your site or any competing site has. You should try and match your competitor’s number of pages. Note - Yahoo Site Explorer is now dead, I would recommend using a paid for services such as: link research tools.

Pagerank is the way of counting the links that every website has pointing at it from another website. Every link is a vote and the more votes you get, the higher up in the Search Engines you will be. Using a rel=”nofollow” is handy way of keeping your pagerank on site.As every link transfers pagerank to another a website, sometimes you want to link to other websites without loosing any of your pagerank. Rel=”nofollow” is a handy way of keeping your pagerank onsite. Using a rel=”nofollow” used to work for demoting pages on your website, you did not want to appear high up in Google. Say you had an offer page which is out of date, you could link to it with a rel=”nofollow”, which would contain the pagrank within linking to page. However it looks like Google has changed its algorithm, so that Google disregards whether a link has a rel=”nofollow” on internal links. Read Rand Fishkin’s blog post here at SEOmoz.