When it comes to the topic of search engine optimization (SEO), there tends to be a lot of confusion. You here all kinds of conversations on varying opinions about how to rank higher in the organic or free listings. Some SEOs even claim to know the Google ranking algorithm inside and out or Matt Cutts personally. The topic of SEO carries a certain mystique about it, even amongst SEOs.

It is true that there are technical details to SEO, but the true magic to SEO is really not that difficult at all. SEO breaks down into 2 basic categories which are on page optimization and off page optimization. On page optimization has to do with how the search engine’s view your site and off page optimization is how other sites link to you. This is commonly known in SEO circles as backlinks.

What the search engines do not want is for you to try to trick them. They do not want you gaming their system or manipulating their search results in anyway. If you try to deceive them, they will penalize you. Their are right and wrong ways to go about optimizing your site for the search engines and in this series on SEO we are going to set the record straight when it comes to all things SEO.

If you play by the search engines rules, all will go well but if you choose to try to game them, you risk losing all that you have worked for. You must know that there is no magic bullet when it comes to SEO, but if you execute solid SEO principles, you can obtain a coveted top ranking in the search engines.

When it comes to generating traffic for your website, there is nothing that can generate web traffic faster than a good pay per click campaign. Most business owners are familiar with the top 5 pay per click sites. They are Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Fox Audience Network. Most people stop there without exploring the other sites that offer good quality leads.

Here are the Top 50 ad networks that you may have never heard of in the past that can generate you more traffic. Of course, since they are used less frequently, the cost per click is lower. Thus, you should be able to increase your R.O.I.

Pay per click (PPC) is the ultimate compliment to SEO (organic rankings). Together they can work wonders for a business.

1. adbrite.com
2. bidvertiser.com
3. burstmedia.com
4. advertising.com
5. admob.com
6. valueclickmedia.com
7. tribalfusion.com
8. chitika.com
9. kontera.com
10. 247realmedia.com
11. fastclick.com
12. clicksor.com
13. vibrantmedia.com
14. clickbooth.com
15. collective.com
16. marchex.com
17. buysellads.com
18. tattomedia.com
19. quattrowireless.com
20. eyeblaster.com
21. azoogleads.com
22. 7search.com
23. yume.com
24. casalemedia.com
25. specificmedia.com
26. zestadz.com
27. undertone.com
28. contextweb.com
29. adknowledge.com
30. adify.com
31. spotxchange.com
32. adready.com
33. cpinteractive.com
34. sportgenic.com
35. traveladnetwork.com
36. mobclix.com
37. centro.net
38. greystripe.com
39. audiencescience.com
40. tremormedia.com
41. brightroll.com
42. targetspot.com
43. millenialmedia.com
44. trafficmarketplace.com
45. bluestreak.com
46. adcomion.com
47. pulse360.com
48. encirclemedia.com
49. jumptap.com
50. premiumnetwork.com

Bing, Microsoft’s Search Engine, has just reached their first birthday. I am not sure if anybody noticed or if ant SEOs actually care. After all, this is pretty much a one horse Google race. Bing was introduced in June of 2009 and has steadily grown it’s market share over the last year.

Research firms have calculated that Bing’s market share is anywhere from 9.43 to 11.8 percent in the United States. Bing and Yahoo! are still in the process of integrating both search engines into a more formidable opponent for the three ton elephant, known as Google.

Bing and Yahoo! better come up with something quite revolutionary in order to compete with Google Caffeine which is providing fresher content in their SERPS, Search Engine Result Pages.

According to Google, caffeine has changed the way that Google is indexing information into their data centers. Not only is Google delivering the results much faster ( by about 50%) they are indexing much more information as well. They are delivering more search results than ever before. As peoples’ expectancies for the best search results increases, so does Google’s desire to deliver the most relevant results. If you are an SEO, it is more important than ever to help your client deliver  quality content to their audience as well as get them quality back links. The game of SEO is ever changing, and the rules are different for each search engine. It is more important now, more than ever, to select an SEO company, that offers a full online marketing plan rather than just a simple SEO strategy.

Google is now pushing site owners to embrace a wider marketing strategy online, rather  than back linking alone. Blogs are more important than ever because they post new fresh content, and with Google showing real time results in their SERPs from social sites like Twitter, which gets well over 19 billion searches each and every month, businesses should jump on board rather than wait and react.

As more people search online and as Google has more data that tracks users’ search habits and queries, Google will only get better and the sites that make it onto that precious first page, will need to get better too!

If you are looking for some easy backlinks for SEO purposes and targeted traffic for your blog, we have a couple of quick tips for you that will turn you into a blogging rock and roll star in no time at all.

Yahoo Answers

Head to Yahoo Answers and look for questions that people have asked that relate to the topic of your blog. People are digging for answers, and who better to provide the solution than you? To get a good feel of how to provide a good answer, take a look at “Best Answers” for your niche market. Best Answers will also give you ideas on what to write about in your blog. Whenever you can solve people’s problems, traffic and customer’s are sure to follow.

Google Trends

Google Trends helps you identify what is a hot topic in your market right now. With Google Trends, you can identify what keywords to write about today. Of course, you can also identify what topics or keywords are losing popularity as well. Once again, by writing about current and relevant topics, readers will come.

Google Wonder Wheel

The Google Wonder Wheel is great for when you are wondering what to write about. (I couldn’t resist saying that). The Google Wonder Wheel is a nice free keyword research tool that is now accessible in the left hand margin of their search results page.  This tool will help you drill down into very small segments of your market which will help you target long tail phrases, and we all know that the money is in the long tail. They don’t call it mining the long tail for nothing. The results that the Google Wonder Wheel shows are based on user searches. So, you will have near perfect insight into what your audience is looking for.

SEO for Firefox

This next tactic is a bit more time consuming but very effective nonetheless. Here are the steps.

1. Install the SEO for Firefox Plugin and enable it
2. Run a search for a keyword in your market -> then, select show options -> finally, select blogs from the categories button.
3. Next, select the “100” option
4. Now, you will need to export the results in a CSV file to you hard drive. To export the CSV file, click the export button that is just under search box.
5. Now the valuable information that we are looking for is in the Y! Page Links column. This is letting you know the number of backlinks. At this point, I would sort the data based on the Y! Page Links in order from largest to the smallest.
6. The final step is deciding what to write about. Take a look at the posts that interest you, get your creative juices flowing and blog to your hearts content.