Video on the internet is far from new, but most internet marketers have problems getting their videos to be noticed. Uploading videos on YouTube can be effective, especially because Google gives YouTube preferential treatment, but you can increase conversions by bypassing YouTube or other video sharing sites and have Google index your video directly. YouTube is designed to have to user stay on the site as long as possible, while you want the user to get on your site as quickly as possible. Just like a sitemap for a webpage,  Google video sitemaps tell Google exactly what and where the file is. Google uses that information to index videos for video search. The sitemap is just a text file that gives Google the information on how to classify and pull up your video in search.

Clicking on the video will take the user directly to your website. This gives the user one less click to have to go through to get to your site compared to going through Google search, to a video sharing website to your site. Creating a video marketing campaign through video sharing sites is still effective, but the point of this article is using Google as the index. Video marketing is a potentially very profitable enterprise because the competition in videos is much smaller than in websites in general.

The sitemap allows you to tell Googlebot the duration, title, and description that goes along with each video. It is much easier for Googlebot to read text and almost impossible for it to figure out what a video contains otherwise. Almost all types of video except live streaming video are supported. You will use text tags tell where your landing page is, post the video’s URL, specify a video player if necessary, give a thumbnail, and set the duration. The sitemap is added through Google Webmaster Tools and is limited to 50,000 videos. Most Denver internet marketing companies are not near the 50,000 limit yet, but having a large number of quality videos is a good idea, because then Google will start trusting you as an internet video producer.

Instead of a sitemap, you can also use an mRSS feed. RSS 2.0 allows for better video support and may be easier to make than a sitemap. mRSS is older so most browsers and software support this coding. Once your sitemap is uploaded, you can log onto Google Analytics and track the exposure of your video. Creating video costs more than other content so you will want to be able to see what works well and understand what your ROI is. A Denver SEO company would track this by setting up 301 redirects from a unique url within your site for the video you submitted to see which visitors came from where. Without the sitemap uploaded, it is impossible to see if searches came from Google organic or video search.

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Blogging is an integral part of your SEO Campaign

By: Cade Lee

It seems that every time the topic of blogging comes up, customers ask us, “Why is a Blog important?” If I were to ask them if they wanted to originate business online, they would undoubtedly answer “Yes”. If I asked any prospective customer if they wanted to be on the first page of Google, I know I would get the same positive response. Everyone would like to attract attention online which is exactly why it makes it that much more difficult for anyone to draw a crowd online. There are several strategies of course to bring in the crowds; some of them are not the most ethical or considerate to say the least.

Many website owners and SEO professionals alike will try all sorts of gimmicks and tricks to obtain a page one ranking. I cannot say that we haven’t attempted everything to obtain a page one ranking as well. I think any good SEO company will need to experiment as much as possible (not with client projects), to understand the algorithms and search engine rankings better. So, with everyone vying for the 1^st page of Google or any one of the other major search engines, what can really differentiate you from the pack?

Over and over again, our blog has been one of the most important resources and reasons that we continue to be on the 1^st page of Google for relevant search terms to our site. We have had many comments on our blog, some positive and other’s negative. Overall it was comments we were looking for to begin with. We wanted to be noticed and we were able to do that most efficiently with our blog.

It was our intent to draw traffic to our site by providing quality, informative and useful content on our blog. I wished that I could say that we started publishing our blog and it brought in a flood of traffic to the site that was simply just not the case. Here were some of the best methods we used to attract attention with our blog:

1. Build useful applications or programs: I already know what you are thinking, “I am not a programmer and I would not know where to begin”. I understand this as we felt much the same way. The thing is that you have access to something in your arsenal, something that someone else would find useful. In our case it was a simple toolbar that we had created to help us keep track of SEO sites, resources and blogs. We distributed this toolbar to as many freeware or shareware sites that we could. We hosted the program on our site, so as we attracted visitors to the software, we were able to bring many new visitors to our site.
   
2. Providing Resources: By providing good and useful information online you are able to prove yourself as a trusted advisor. We have many clients that are in the “services” industry and over time we have had heard the same objection over and over again. “If I provide information for free to the public, what reason would they have to come and see me”. Granted there are a group of “do-it-yourselfers” that will take whatever information you can give them and run with it, these are usually not the customers that a “services” company would be looking for to begin with.
   
3. Create Unique and Useful Content: Following a most recent event or providing timely content can be very useful for readers of your blog. Whether you are utilizing creative content or image, even video, make certain that your blog stands out with originality. This is difficult to do. Often times, for us we will come up with an idea or theme for a new post or blog after we have read the thousands of e-mails that we get every day. Giving our opinion on a certain technique or software that we have been solicited for makes for interesting and useful content. At the end of the day you will just want to make certain that you spend time here making your presence different.
   
4. Covering an unpopular topic or controversial opinion: We had completed a blog article, “Do you need a web designer?”, you could imagine that many web developers and designers were very interested in what we had to say. The article title might have been a little misleading as we were not recommending that a company “not work” with a developer or designer, we were simply making the point that most designers do not take search engine optimization into consideration when creating a website. What could you do to make your title more alluring?
   
5. Utilize Anchor Text inside your blog. As you go through your content, make certain to link appropriate text to resources that would be useful for your audience. This is a good time to link to your site as well. So for example, throughout our blog you will notice that we utilize “Denver SEO“, Denver SEO Company“,”SEO Company” or “Denver Internet Marketing”. These obviously are some of the keywords that we would hope to appear on the 1^st page of Google for. You do not want to “keyword stuff” or spam throughout your blog, but using some keywords sparingly can definitely help and boost your rankings. Make certain that you use “alt text” when utilizing anchor text in your blogs as this can add some benefit to your SEO.
   

If your current SEO company is not doing this for you, then you might want to take a more active role in your search engine optimization. Your blog or blogs will have a lot to do with your campaign, so make certain that you invest the time necessary to differentiate your blog and make it useful.

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By: Cade Lee

I have read several articles and discussion on forums about “Keyword-Rich Domains” over the last several months and I though it important to mention a couple of things to be wary of when going out and spending a fortune on domains that seem like they might make sense for your business and major keywords. I should begin with what a “Keyword-Rich” domain is for those that are new to this and have never heard the term before.  A “Keyword-Rich” Domain is simply a domain name containing the major keywords relevant to the site and SEO campaign that you are targeting. So as an example, in our industry many of the SEO professionals in Denver target the keyword “Denver SEO“. When you search for “Denver SEO” you will notice that www.denverseo.net is the 5^th result. Digging deeper this site has a PR of 3 compared to many of it’s competitors who have earned a page rank of 4 or higher. This domain does have some age as it was created on May 03, 2006 so it is around 3 ½ years old. According to Google, there is one backlink from a web design directory, after further research we were able to determine that the domain has around 523 backlinks. When we compare this to some of the other competing websites that are ranked just below this website like www.hyperdogmedia.com, which has a PR 4, 2 backward links according to Google and according to our research this domain has well over 2085 backlinks. So how is it that a site like Hyperdog’s is ranked below DenverSeo.net? According to some SEO professionals it would be due to the “exact match bonus“. There are many other factors that go into the rankings, but this is definitely a factor as it has been discussed by many internet marketing professionals.

According to some very savvy (at least in my opinion) internet marketing pros, an exact match bonus is awarded for just that, an exact match. Having a domain that contains most the keywords plus some stop words would mean less of a bonus or none at all. So utilizing dashes in between keywords, stop words or other characters tends to penalize any kind of exact match bonus you might have received. If we go back to our original search, you will notice that many domains rank higher for the keyword “Denver SEO” than www.denverseo.net, so with hard work and useful content it is definitely possible to outrank keyword rich domains. Another example of this is the keyword “SEO” which is a very competitive keyword with well over 190,000,000 results. You will notice that www.seobook.com outranks www.seo.com by two positions. Once again this comes down to content, and site popularity. While keyword rich domains are absolutely beneficial, it does not seem to be the most important factor in obtaining a solid position on page one of Google in the SERPs for the keywords that you are targeting. As a matter of fact, we have seen clients that have a portfolio of keyword rich domains only to have those domains not even rank. It is a fact that keyword rich domains can be a benefit if used properly.

In our experience some misuses of keyword-rich domains are the following:

• Domain Redirecting
  
• Domain Cloaking
  
• Domain Mirroring/Masking
  

Domain Masking or Mirroring: This is really hiding the actual domain name of a website from the URL field of a user’s web browser in favor of another name.” So in the real world this means that the webmaster has placed a mask overlaying the real domain name and usually it’s content as well. So, when someone uses the new keyword-rich domain name in our case, it is really forwarding to another domain without changing the address in the address bar. The user will continue to see the keyword-rich domain regardless of the URL they are visiting.

Domain Cloaking: Usually considered a black hat technique. To put it simply, the content presented to the indexing spiders is different to that which is presented to the end user’s browser. This can be done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. So ultimately if the visitor is identified as a “bot” or “indexing spider”, the server-side script will deliver a different version of the web page being called, usually content which is not present on the visible page. This technique is used to deceive search engines so they will display the page when otherwise the search engine would not display it.

Domain Redirecting: This is often times referred to as URL redirecting as well. Domain redirecting takes all traffic that comes through the new domain and redirects that traffic to the main domain. Redirecting is not necessarily “black hat”, however it needs to be done correctly so as not to confuse the search engines. If domain redirecting is done incorrectly than you could risk raising a red flag for duplicate content which would force the search engines to accept only one domain with that content. The biggest risk one faces with domain redirecting is raising a red flag that you are trying to “manipulate” the search engines to obtain a better rank with just the use of keyword rich domains.

Using any other method than redirecting such as domain mirroring, masking, cloaking or aliases can ultimately confuse the search engines as they will have indexed the same content under a different domain name. The major search engines will then select one of the domain names for that content which leaves your other domains out of the SERPs. So you would actually be leaving it up to the search engines to decide which domain will show in the rankings. This could mean that you would actually lose the page rank given to your original main site.

The other problem with Domain Cloaking, Mirroring and Masking is that the search engines suspect you are using “black hat” tactics to manipulate your rankings and all domains are banned. The safest way to redirect is using a 301 redirect or permanent redirect. All domains should be permanently directed to the main domain name which would be the central location online for all of the company’s products and brands.

In conclusion, before you go out and buy every keyword-rich domain that you can, make sure you do some research as to what makes up a good domain for the exact match bonus. After purchasing the domains, make certain that you redirect correctly so that you do not suffer the wraith of being banned from the major search engines.

Cade Lee is a Denver Internet Marketing Professional with Iniquitous, Inc. Iniquitous, Inc. is a Denver SEO Company specializing in search engine optimization and internet marketing.

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While you are waiting for results, here are some basic SEO tips that you can follow which should help you cut down your time waiting.

Make certain to select a keyword theme for each page of your website.

Many sites that we have evaluated and reviewed do not have enough diversity within the pages or the subordinate pages to obtain the wide range of keywords that they would like to achieve. So identify a group of keywords for every page that you publish, a group of keywords that fit well into your SEO plan.

If the website you are building and promoting does not have enough content to tip the scales of the search engines to your favor as “The Resource” for the keywords you are approaching, or if your site does not contain enough significant or important internal links, how will you possibly be able to surpass your competitors that are using large amounts of content and links?

So, plan each page with plenty of content and key words with internal links throughout your website. Make certain that you do not stuff your site with too many keywords as you will want to make the site readable and interesting for your human visitors as well.

Identify the keyword theme to each page using the Meta tag keywords. Since Google and some of the other major search engines do not utilize the keyword Meta tag, we have made it useful by indentifying the “keyword theme” to each of our pages.

Internal links from pages and to other pages using the keyword that you want the target page to rank for.

This is probably one of the most difficult aspects of search engine optimization to keep track of. For our projects we have literally drawn out a diagram or flow chart of the pages within the site that we are marketing and labeled each with the keyword theme for each page. Once we have identified the pages and the keyword themes for each page, it is much easier to take the keyword phrases throughout your website and link those phrases to the page that matches that theme.

This tactic is very similar to that of Wikipedia. You are simply identifying the “resource page” for the designated keyword by consistently using keyword-rich anchor text throughout your website.  By doing this you will also be able to achieve double indexing in some cases for your website.

We believe that this step for onsite optimization is critical to outperforming your online competition. If you are working with a SEO company, than it is imperative that you bring this approach to their attention and that they explain to you their internal linking strategy.

Optimize the page for many variations of the keyword that you are targeting.

If you are going to optimize a page for a certain keyword, you might as well go for as many variations or extrapolations of that keyword that you can. So, using an example here, let’s go with the keyword “SEO Company”. Variations that you might want to use would be, “SEO Company’s”, “SEO Companies”, “Internet Marketing Company”, “Internet Marketing Companies” and “Search Engine Optimization Company”. You can see from the example that I have used, I have pluralized the keyword, misspelled the keyword and even brought in a synonymous keyword phrase.

By following these three steps you should be able to really shore up your website so that as Google or any other indexing robots devour your website, you will obtain an advantage over your online competitors that have not followed these same simple techniques. Any worthwhile SEO campaign takes a great amount of time and dedication, so as you are working on link building strategies and submitting your site to different directories, make certain to work these strategies and you will start to see a major difference in the way your site is ranked in the search engines.

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You might be surprised to learn that Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group at Google has most recently come out with comments about meta tags or more specifically “keyword” meta tags and stated “Google does not use keyword meta tags” in their rankings. For the longest time many SEO professionals pounded the desk suggesting that keyword meta tags were critical for any SEO campaign.

According to most SEO Companies, Google has for many years completely ignored this tag which has made the use of this meta tag completely pointless. I know as a Denver SEO company, we have definitely utilized the keyword meta tag and we will continue to do so. It is not that we believe that this meta tag would help us in the rankings, rather we have used it to define the theme of each page that we publish. So, although Google has stated that they do not utilize the keyword meta tag, we have still found much use for it.

Usually when speaking to anyone with any knowledge of SEO, they will go over a list of important factors to complete when working on a SEO campaign. One of the first things we hear many SEO companies speak about or write about is the importance of keywords in the keyword meta tag. This might be a warning to those that are looking for the experienced professionals who actually know SEO and focus not only on “onsite Optimization” but “offsite optimization” or link building as well. I have included the Matt Cutts Video in this post about Google’s complete lack of interest in the keyword meta tag, you can read more about their disinterest in the keyword meta tag here on their very own Webmaster Tools blog.

So why would Google disregard the keywords meta tag anyway? It started several years ago when the meta tag was actually abused by many website owners. If Google strictly followed the keywords in the meta tags, than it would be easy to mislead or misdirect the search engines. Google has probably one of the most elaborate and complex algorithms for their search results which has made them a market leader in search. So it is going to take much more than meta tag to throw them off course.

Even though Google has stated that they ignore keywords, we will continue to use this meta tag as previously described. It gives us direction for each page that we produce and keeps our entire campaign organized so we find it very useful even if Google does not. However, when you are talking to that next search engine optimization sales representative or SEO Company that goes through their thorough process of search engine optimization, you might ask,”How important is the meta tag keywords for a SEO campaign?” You might just be talking with one of those that is not in the know and this would be a good way to find out!

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Can alt text really help your SEO campaign?

Often times as I read through all of the resources online for internet marketing, I read about the importance of “on-site” optimization. We have discussed it ourselves in the past (onsite optimization). Something I don’t think we had discussed was the importance of keyword use in the alt text or title tags. Granted many have disagreed with the importance of alt text or title text in the SEO community. It is important to understand that there is not a SEO professional that I have met who knows the algorithms intimately. So while there are many opinions that using alt text or title tags does not provide a benefit to your search engine campaign, I would respectfully disagree as I will prove with an example.

We should probably begin with the explanation of “alt text“. The entire purpose of alt text was to give a description of the image if the image could not be loaded properly as well as a resource for the handicapped (especially the blind) so that as their “text reading” program described and read the page, they would be provided with a description of the image. The attribute can be applied to many different forms of media including video, but is primarily used for images.

So, why bother with alt text on images? As previously stated, alt text will provide screen readers and text readers with a description of the image, this also applies for the spiders that index the content of your website. By labeling images and media with alt text you are giving the search engines a description of media that they could not otherwise relate to your media. Surely by now you know that Google or any other search engine for that matter cannot see or comprehend what your image is without some kind of description from you the webmaster. So, they (the search engines) actually need you to tell them what an image represents. This is an awesome opportunity for you to influence the position in the search engines.

In the case of a project that we managed for a pet related business, we took the opportunity to label all pictures of the dogs with the name and breed of the dog. We resubmitted the sitemap to all the major search engines as well as created links to the pages as usual. Over the next several weeks we started to see a huge increase in the amount of traffic that we were obtaining for this account. The images were actually bringing in traffic themselves as they had been indexed and those searchers that were looking for images of the dogs that we had described were visiting our customer’s site after they had located the images!

Over the next several weeks, we noticed yet another increase in traffic as other sites were linking to our images and the pages containing the images from their sites. This brought in another wave of traffic. This project realized over 100% increase in organic traffic by simply utilizing alt text and title tags throughout the pages of our customer’s website.

I am not suggesting that alt text on all of the images of your site will increase traffic by 100%. At the end of the day, most of us are not in the pet industry or any industry for that matter where customers are looking for pictures of our product or services regularly. For example, if I labeled everyone of the images on our site with the keywords “Denver SEO“, it is very unlikely that I will obtain that many visitors from the images of my site; however, if I could get one of my images to show up in the organic rankings then perhaps my listing would stick out among all of my competitors as I would be one of the only results that had an image next to my title.

In conclusion, there is absolutely no way that completing alt text could hurt your campaign. Sure it is an additional step while completing your onsite optimization, but the time invested seems like it would be worthwhile considering that it is a small investment. I do want to emphasize that I do not believe that alt text will make or break your search engine optimization campaign, but I do believe it is worthwhile to add this element to your site. Making your site more useful to your users is what we all want to accomplish, so make certain that you are not keyword stuffing the tags and using legitimate short descriptions as this could definitely help your rankings for long tail keywords as well. At the end of the day, if nothing else, alt text will at least make your site more accessible to the search engines and those that access your site with screen readers, etc. If you are working with a seo company you would definitely want to check your images and make sure that they have been optimized with alt text or title tags.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entails a maelstrom of techniques and tactics with the end goal being to improve the ranking of a particular website in the search results of major search engines. Denver SEO can be broken down into two main categories, on site SEO and off site SEO.

On site SEO relies upon excellent content first and foremost. Content must be on topic, relevant, and contain a 5% – 8% keyword (words or phrases) density. This means that for every 100 words of content, five to eight keywords should be used. The keywords that will be used must be carefully researched using tools such as the free Google AdWords keyword tool. When choosing keywords, it is important to remember to think like the customer. What will they be searching for? These same keywords should also be embedded into the website source code via Meta, Title and Heading tags. This will help ensure a high page ranking for these search terms.

Also, the website should be organized with a clear hierarchical structure. Creating a site map will significantly enhance site structure and ability to be scanned by search engines. This will allow search engines to more efficiently scan the target website. The most important information on a given website should be placed at or near the top of the page. This will make it easier for search engines to find the content that you want them to find. Use text instead of images; search engines can only scan text, so all important information must be included in text. This should be done even if the message(s) being conveyed are duplicated in images, banners, etc.

Of even greater importance is off site SEO. This includes back linking to highly ranked sites. For example, you can submit articles to free online repositories with links to your target website embedded in the text. The Google search engine will interpret a page with many back links to highly ranked pages as being of greater importance, and will therefore increase its page ranking. Another tactic is to submit entries to a highly ranked online blog, with excellent content, important keywords and back links where possible. Furthermore, you can join appropriate, and highly ranked, online forums and post useful content with a signature containing a back link to the target website. You should submit your website to the major search engines’ web indices. This will speed up and enhance the optimization process greatly.

SEO is a multifaceted endeavor, and requires ongoing maintenance and tuning. There are many competent companies that are dedicated to carrying out SEO campaigns. If page ranking is extremely important to you, consider outsourcing the project to a professional Denver SEO company.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can serve as the linchpin to your overall marketing plan for your business.  Gone are the days when all you needed was an ad in the local phone book.  The most efficient way to drive leads to your business is through Internet marketing.  You need more than just a website, though.

A website that has not been optimized for search engine results pages (SERPs) will only serve as a digital business card.  Nobody will find it unless they know about it and where to look.  Your competition will quickly surpass such an outmoded approach.  You need to hire a Denver SEO consultant to help get your website seen by those searching for the products and/or services that your business offers.

A competent SEO company will offer a full-service approach to Internet marketing, in order to ensure that your SEO campaign is in fact successful.  You will need to start out by looking for a Denver SEO company on the Internet.  Here’s a good tip: if you search for SEO company, SEO consultant, SEO, Internet marketing, etc. the company you end up choosing should appear near the top of the SERPs.  The reason:  if a particular Denver Internet marketing company can’t get their own site near the top of the SERPs, they probably can’t do it for you, either.

Once you have chosen a particular SEO company, carefully examine the SEO consultant with whom you are to be partnered.  Do they act in a professional manner?  How much experience with Internet marketing do they have?  Can they provide examples and references to demonstrate that they have a track record of success?  Do they have as many questions for you as you do for them?  A good SEO consultant will begin by trying to understand your business and the goals you have for it.  This will aid them in one of the early steps in SEO, keyword research.

Do not settle for a mediocre SEO company.  Don’t shop by price alone.  Remember, you get what you pay for.  The success of your business depends on you choosing the best Internet marketing company possible.

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denver internet marketing,denver SEO,denver web development

Denver Web Development is absolutely key in helping to produce awareness, traffic, and sales for your company or product.  Just like traditional marketing campaigns, there are many specific skills required to be effective in your Denver Internet Marketing plan.  These skills include but are not limited to link building, web design, Denver search-engine-optimization, HTML writing, blogging, and social networking.  Techniques and trends are constantly changing as well, and it is important to utilize the experience and knowledge of a Denver SEO Firm or Internet Marketing Company.

It is important to set goals, and plan a complete strategy for building a valuable website and increasing the traffic to that website.  In addition to a clear website with substantial, valid content, you need to drive the site to towards the top of search engine results for targeted keywords.  This intricate, time-consuming process is called search-engine-optimization, or SEO.  A good internet marketing company will also handle Denver SEO for your business.  It is best to let experts execute SEO for you, because the ranking algorithms and industry trends are constantly evolving and changing.  A Denver SEO Company will keep up with the pulse of the industry, staying on top of all the new tips and tricks.

Denver Internet Marketing is paramount to staying on the cutting edge of any industry.  Create a strong, reliable Internet presence while at the same time being highly visible on local and global search engines.  Customize your plan to cater to your target audience, increasing your chances for sales, leads, and referrals.  The days of Yellow Pages are over, and you need to keep your business ahead of the curve by working with a Denver Internet Marketing Firm.  No matter what your industry, help yourself and take the right step towards a successful future.

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denver seo,denver internet marketing,denver web development

Basically, the more quality Web sites that link to your site, the better you will do in Google’s organic results.  On the other hand, if you obtain only a few links, you will most certainly need to improve your presence in the eyes of Google.  In order to optimize your site, you must learn how to effectively build links to your Web site so that the search engines will determine your site as an authority and rank it accordingly.

The very first step in effectively building links is to evaluate your existing competition.  Whatever is working for your strongest competitors, can definitely work for you as well.  In the beginning stages of link-building, your sights should be set on building a foundation for an effective Denver search engine optimization business plan.  Seriously take a look at your competition and evaluate them so you know how to best spend the time necessary to rank higher and build up a strong Internet presence in your market.

Remember that not all links are created equally, so you should evaluate the quality of each potential link partner.  By analyzing several link-quality factors, you can more effectively decide which links to focus on.  The analyzation of llink quality will most certainly help give you direction in you Denver Internet marketing plans.  By directing your attention to more quality links, you are more likely to be recognized by major search engines as a contributor of quality subject matter and content.  You can save yourself a lot of time if you pursue the process of building quality links as opposed to a large quantity of links.  You do not need thousands of links all over the Web to rank well with search engines.  For optimal success, you should approach link building from the standpoint of quality over quantity.

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