I've spend lots of time doing seo and let me tell you this, the best tactic to seo involves two things: 1. on-page seo 2. off-page seo For on-page seo just make sure you optimize your site to follow the google search rules. The off-page seo is where you'll see even better results. The trick is this: link exchanges. As we all know google is all about backlinks and high quality backlinks at that. Each page on your website has a value, a page rank value from NA to 10. To other webmasters this is an important number because it tells you how google views that page. The higher the value, the better. We all want backlinks for our sites and some of us spend a great deal of time doing it. Blog commenting, forum posting blah blah blah. All of those tactics rarely work. They take up so much time and get little results. First, the links you get from that are low quality. The links you want are the high pr pages. The trick to good rank in google is to get those high pr pages to link to you. How do you do that? There are three ways to do this: the webmaster naturally links to you (this is what google wants to happen), you pay the webmaster to link to you or you trade links with the webmaster. All three methods will work but the last is probably the most realistic method. Simply put, you link your website to a website of other other person and that person links to your site in exchange. Its a win-win situation. Both of you get high quality backlinks to your site QUICKLY. To do this effectively you have to make sure that google can't figure out a pattern between the links. For example, if you link your site to site A and then Site A links back to you then google will discount the value of the link. Obviously, google doesn't like unnatural link building. The best method is to do a 3 way link exchange, like this: Site A (your site) links to site B (other webmaster's site) Site C (another site of the webmaster) then links to site A. Site B DOES NOT link to Site C. The final result is that both webmasters get high quality backlinks to their site. To maximize the results of your link exchanges, you have to do link exchanges for all of your pages. Any page that has a pr of at least 1 is worth doing link exchanges for. As your site moves up in PR, you'll have more and more pages to do link exchanges with. To get more results, you can start blogs and wait until those blogs get pr then do link exchange with those pages as well. Using this method, you can rank high for ANY keyword.
That's a good idea, but you need to diversify! Get web 2.0 backlinks, forum profiles, article links, social bookmarks and all that. Take advantage of it all.
This method does require you or the other webmaster to have another authority website, site C, which is rare if you are trading high PR for high PR. Plus, you can only do so many link exchanges before your pages have too many OBL on them. Granted this number is quite high, but the best bet might be getting one way links that won't take away PR from your footer / nav links.
I think I may have trouble convincing webmasters to link exchange with me when I have a nill page rank. Any advice on how to get started?
Great post and an EXCELLENT resource at the Google Ranking Factors page. Thanks! But I'll have to disagree about the cyclical linking strategy ( A -> B - > C), as this used to be a plausible strategy but the big G has since wised up, and they look for loops like this up to 5 or 6 deep (true depth is unknown, but speculated that it's enough to keep cyclical linking in the 'don't' category for now).
Wow. Google are so dumb, that even though they have a copy of the entire internet in their database, and the second best programmers on earth, they can't do a simple little analysis to figure out a 3 way link mechanism I guess all those people creating 'link wheels' are completely wasting their time then. Maybe someone should let them know.
It's pure 3 way link exchange and it's been happening for ages... nothing new with this technique and it's not the best as eventually if you use site C too often google will crack it.
You need to make sure that all of the sites involved are different class C ips aka not on the same hosting/server
I wouldn't support an entire site on link exchanges. Diversity is key, and link exchanges are a very weak, outdated form of link building.