More abstract view over the link-building process

Link building is one of the most important parts of a SEO campaign. Anyone speak how this affects your website’s PR or traffic.
Link building can be split in several parts:

Directory submission

There are many web directories out there. They vary in types – free directories, deep-link directories, paid directories, topical ones. Web directories at any kind are a good way to make the count of links to your website greater. They can be good filling in any search engine optimization campaign. But web directories can’t be the only source of links or you won’t have satisfactory results.
Article directories
I am not a big fan of them. It hardly cost its time for me. There are only few good ones.

Link exchange

Link exchanging with related sites - one good way to get nice rank and a lot of targeted traffic. Offer some good link exchange program on your site and people will contact you with proposals.

Forums

Contribute to some related forums. Share your experience and your URL

Blogs

Links from popular blogs help both with good value and some traffic.


Friends

Ask people around you to help in your campaign.

Social networks/bookmarks/etc

Go for it. Put your titles on the main sites and ask some friends to vote for you. Make good friend networks and share your offer.

So what is the best option?
All. One good campaign must be well balanced, depending on the type of the website, service and target market.

Getting traffic from images

Images are important part of many websites. If you have a blog with fun cat photos or a gamers website with screenshots, you can attract more users with your images.

So how to optimize a website for image search engines?

• Image name
  Use describing names for your images. Name like a453kjh4.jpg won't help you get any traffic. Web crawlers are not people and they can't understand what is on the image but you can help them with precise names. Use short describing names like cat.jpg or clouds.gif.
  
• Alt text
  Don't ever forget to add describing and precise alt text. This is the other important part for getting targeted traffic from image searches.
  
• Page title
  Page titles are something important for any kind of search engine optimization. You must have precise, short and describing titles for your pages and images with similar content.
  
• Paragraph titles
  Paragraph titles are very similar to page titles. One page can contain multiple topics and any topic must have its own describing title.
  

Optimizing for image searches is not so complex part of a SEO campaign. Done together with standard SEO optimization it can bring a lot of well targeted traffic.
Good luck!

Edit: One very useful video about image url - does Google consider the url?

How to optimize a website for a specific country

Why to optimize for specific location?
If you have a website targeting people from exact location, you will be interested in getting traffic mainly from that location. Ranking on the top for other countries won’t help you in your business. For example if you have a website to advertise a fast food restaurant, your target people are only nearby living or working.

So, how to optimize a website for a target location?

On-site optimization

First thing – add your location in the text and add your address with post code in the contact page.
Some SEO experts advice to host a website on a server in the target country although I am not fully confident in this.

Off-site optimization

Web directory and article submission, social media
Submit your website to local web and article directories. Submit also in local digg clones. Mention your services in local forums. In the link name add the geo location.

Google webmaster tools have the option to select target geographical location. Add your business in Google local business center - http://www.google.com/local/add/

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important parts of the search engine optimization. They increase a website value for the search engines and also bring traffic.

SEO and backlinks
Most of the search engines determine site value from group of parameters in order to get the most relevant results for the search queries. The number and the quality of the backlinks to a website are some of these parameters.
It is natural to consider that if more people link to one site than it has something useful. Also if websites with high authority link to other website – it must be trustful and important. Backlinks from websites in the same topic also bring points in ranking for that niche.

Backlinks and traffic

People follow the link and visit a website so backlinks bring traffic. Backlinks from popular blogs or websites like digg can increase website traffic a lot.

How to get backlinks
It is easy. Backlinks can be obtained through forums, blog comments, link exchange, social bookmarking sites or just by asking friends.
Offering something cheap or free of charge can make others to link to a website.

Basic resources for SEO beginners, resume

What are the basic resources for anyone who wants to be a SEO expert? It is a rather complex question. There are a lot of SEO books, tools, blogs and so on. So what is the essential from all this.

First of all don’t forget that the search engine optimization exists only because the existence of the search engines. The main reading must be centered on the SE documentation and blogs.

I made a short list of basic resources for SEO beginners.



http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Google Webmaster Central. Every SEO enthusiast must start from here.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webpublishers/ - Yahoo Search Help, if you want good ranking in Yahoo, this step is important.

Blogs

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ - Official Google Blog

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ - Google news for webmasters

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Anyway if you are interested in ranking good in other search engine the fist place to stop and ask questions is its documentation, online help or blog.