Bad links are easy to come by, and outgoing as well as inbound links should
be considered carefully to determine whether they are to or from bad neighbourhoods.
Obviously, you have considerably less input over inbound links than outgoing
and search engines do realise that you can’t always help getting a link from
a bad neighbourhood.

Outgoing Links

Your main concentration should be when considering linking out to another
site. If you link to a web page that is considered to be spamming or a bad
neighbourhood then you may be damaging your own SEO efforts. There is no legitimate
reason why you would want to promote a spammy site, with very few notable exceptions,
so search engines view this as a sign that you partake in similar activities.

Controlling Inbound Links

Inbound links are difficult to control, and the only time you really need
to consider it is when directly attempting to garner your pages with inbound
links. FFA, or Free For All, link farms offer no benefit to your link profile
and while a link from one of these sites might be easy to achieve, it’s also
pointless.

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links are usually embodied by emails that read something long the
lines of “linking to one another’s site provides both of our sites with a search
engine boost”. The reality, though, is that reciprocal links have become greatly
devalued because search engines recognise that they offer no true measure of
the value of a site, only the ability of a person to negotiate a link back.

Link Worthiness

Links are an important part of SEO, and good links can help to drive traffic
directly to your site too. Never link out to a bad site, and remember that
while reciprocal links were once a heavy weapon to help assist in rankings,
changes to the algorithms have greatly devalued their worth.

As part of their evolutionary process and their bid to improve result pages, search engines are beginning to offer a greater range of media in their results. This stage of universal search provides web surfers not only with text based results but other media such as video, images, blog entries, news stories, and even audio results.

Where Universal Search Started

Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, was the forerunner of the idea providing different results in different areas of their search pages and regular Google users will have noticed similar changes in their own search results. Universal search now means that search engine optimisation techniques need to be applied to all manner of content and media to gain the best results.

The Impact Of Universal Search

Perhaps the biggest impact of universal search on SEO is the fact that non text based websites have the ability to feature more prominently in search engine results. By using effective search engine optimization, Flash based pages can feature equally as highly as pure HTML pages. Search engines have moved in this direction because, generally speaking, surfers are beginning to look for more dynamic and interactive content that text filled pages.

SEO For All Media

Universal search also enables all websites to rank images and other media highly. Again, appropriate search engine optimisation needs to be employed in order to get the best results. HTML tags such as Alt and Title tags can be added to images and unique or interesting images often gain links from other sites meaning that they will usually fare better in gaining search traffic. Once the traffic arrives on a page it isn’t just the image that they are viewing either so it gives benefit to the whole page.

Using Media To Generate A Viral Buzz

Video has become the media of choice for many users. Putting SEO aside for one second, a relevant and imaginative video clip can truly go viral and generate a huge amount of traffic in a relatively short space of time. It will also generate a lot of links from other pages, sites, and blogs further enhancing traffic and even improving search engine optimisation efforts.

Social Media

Another way to use video clips and media is to submit to media sharing websites and communities. As an integral part of the web 2.0 evolution, these sites pull in a lot of visitors and now represent some of the most widely visited sites in the world. Sharing evocative, emotional, or entertaining media can drive traffic to that media and then subsequently promote your own site, products, or services.

SEO And Universal Search

Web 2.0, the latest evolution of the Internet has led the search engines towards a more universal search that includes the ability to search other forms of media besides text. While the different search engines approach the technique differently, the media clips or elements on your website can prove as beneficial a part of an SEO campaign as any other section of your site.