This guest post contribution comes from Brandchats.com, specialists in Social Media Tools.

When you run a business, there are a lot of different things that you will have to look after. You will need to make sure that marketing is constantly going, and that more people are informed about your service. You will also need to keep a balanced budget, and make sure that you do not borrow too much money. At the very least, you will want to break even.

When it comes to reputation, however, you are going to have to do your best to ensure that customers are constantly giving you praise. It is important to understand that customers are going to be the life blood of your business. Without them, your enterprise is not going to exist. You will therefore need to take a look at any suggestions that your customers may have to tell you.

Suggestions and comments from customers can come in a number of different forms. You may send out a survey in order to gauge what they think about specific products. There are many review websites that you can also have a look at, where you may be mentioned. On top of this, there will also be comments left on social media outlets that can tell you a lot.

Listening to your customers is important. Some customers may come up with good ideas for new products that will turn out to be a success. If there is considerably demand for a specific product, you may find yourself with a winning concept. Creating it and marketing it may generate a huge response and, in turn, cause you to get better feedback.

Listening to customers’ complaints is also important. Not only will you have to take them on board, but you will also need to make sure that you respond to your customers’ complaints. This is why social media great. You will be able to speak with your customers in real-time. If they have a complaint, then you will be able to respond as soon as possible and ask them about the different ways in which you can improve your service. Doing this is going to ensure that you get a better response, and that all of your customers are aware of the fact that your company listens to them.

You need to get and keep a good reputation with all customers. By doing this, you can ensure that you always get the best response from all.

I’m a regular lurker at internet marketing forums including Digitalpoint, Wickedfire and Netbuilders, and when people started going gaga over this new “blog network” called BuildMyRank, I didn’t bite.

My gut feeling said that a network such as this would be eventually caught by Google, and I was right.

Afterall, that’s what happened with Linkvana and many other blog networks before that.

I – BuildMyRank is Paid Links – Google hates that

It’s evident that Google would eventually kick BMR out of their index or heavily penalize the network simply because it is no different than TextLinkAds or Paid Blog Posts.

II – There’s just a massive footprint

Inadvertently, BuildMyRank shot themselves in the foot by allowing anyone to sign up and focusing on volume instead of quality – it was a short term play and ended badly for everyone involved.

A network with over 1500 blogs that had content coming from thousands of users is bound to have a massive footprint that is just very very easy to locate.

I could find BMRs footprint by running a few random searches, I’m not surprised the Google engineers did when they eventually wanted to shut the network down.

III – Content Quality & Thematic Links

By opening up a large network to a large audience, there is just a lot of opportunity to screw up with content theming.

BMR had a semi-automated algorithm to manage what blog post went where, and complaints of posts going on totally unrelated blogs were rampant.

OK, BuildMyRank is truly dead, what now?

OPTION 1 – Get links from guest blog posts

Guest Blog Posts have always been legit and it’s not “paid links”, so these are great sources of backlinks.

Plus, blogs that accept guest posts are not make to sell links, and hence pass a lot of value.

Don’t know how to get access to a service? Heck, we offer a guest blog posting service ourselves.

OPTION 2 – Build your own private network

This might be a somewhat “expensive” option, but is the best long-term solution out there.

By creating your own blog network, you can curate quality and ensure that there is no footprint that Google can follow back.

The key to a successful blog network is to keep it very very private and curate it effectively.

Watch out for our next blog post about how to create your own private blog network.

1.You need to have a ‘natural’ backlink profile:

Imagine two different sites – one that gets 1000 links overnight and nothing over the next six months. And, another site – it gets 100 links a month for 10 months. Which of these looks natural to you?
Google knows – they’re not going to play pretty when they know you’re trying to build too many links too quick to manipulate rankings.

2.The “link graph” exists:

Search Engines are rumored to use a “link graph” with the x-axis plotting the time and y-axis plotting the quantity of links.
If you have a “hockey stick” link graph, you will get penalized.

3.Your competition is also building links:

Your competitors want to rank as badly as you want to, in most cases they are also building links. Building regular links helps you become more of an authority.

4.Old links become redundant:

As time goes on, links that are old lose value, domains expire, sites change etc.,
The internet is just like the real world, buildings ( sites ) are constantly demolished and re-created and the landscape keeps changing.

5.Remember Panda?:

If you were been hit by Google’s Panda Update, you would know that it was not because many of the ‘biggies’ were creating content mills, but also because they were linking out to their pages unevenly over distribution and time.

Google is certified as one of the world’s most successful search engine and also been the sole criteria based on how search engines are ranked on. When Google was newly incorporated, they built it on the concept of PageRank, a concept that mainly depended on the “popularity” of the page.

This PageRank uses an advanced version of hyperlinks to know the popularity and the relevance of a page for its keywords. There is a reason why links are analyzed and it is quite obvious: Links are usually an off-site element which may be difficult for the webmaster to play around. Before there was link analysis concept, there was only ever “on-line” material that was used to score websites for the keywords asked by the users. Earlier tags such as “Meta Description” and “Meta Keywords” were very useful in filtering the keywords entered on a search engine field. However, today, these words have seldom any value.

As the public is well aware, the PageRank usually is on a scale from 1-10. 1 represent the lowest rank whereas 10 is the most preferred site by the web users. This PageRank is calculated on the basis of per-page and does not depend on the website. So although the website may be at a respectable rank, the ranks of the pages within the website may vary. In basic terms, the more number of links a particular web page receives, the higher it ranks in Google and the other search engines. Every time a website links your page, it can add more weight to your site. The more number of votes you get, the higher will you rankings be and your site will be hailed as a relevant site.

However one must know, it is more than just getting links. It is about getting dependable links. If a website of high ranking links itself to your website, it has the possibility of enhancing your website’s ranking on search engines. The biggest advantage behind the concept of PageRank is it is extremely hard to oil your way into the Search engine optimization. This is mostly because the links provided are by the third party and it is tough to get them by unfair means.

These days even the process of calculating PageRank has become tougher. This means the method of accepting your website has become tougher as Google is becoming more and more thorough with its accepting standards. So, the moral of the story is you need to be more careful and diligent with your website if you want to make it a hit with Google!

These days, getting a good page ranking is lot harder than it used to. Google keeps changing the algorithm and it is relying on more than just content to make an impression on the web users. On page optimization is one of the basic steps of SEO that web masters need to look into. The best part about it, it will not take the beginner much time to learn about SEO and page optimization. Most people will wonder about the importance of page optimization. Well, here is the whole “point” of knowing about page optimization is it will help you get a head start when it comes to Page Ranks.

1) All in One SEO:

All in One SEO is a free plug in for WordPress that helps to optimize your personal wordpress blog for search engines like Yahoo, Google and Bing. It is one of the most essential and required plug-ins for every blog. It is also very easy to use; however there are a few people who do not know how to use it. Once it has been optimized, it will appear when you are creating the new article right beneath the “add new post” section. You are required to fill in the entire All in One SEO section when posting new articles or else the article will not be optimized.

2) Google XML sitemap:

This plug-in helps to generate a customized XML sitemap that helps the search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo to index your blog post. With such a sitemap it is easier for people to see the complete structure of your site and gather it more efficiently. This plug-in also supports every kind of URL or WordPress generated pages. However, there is one downside to it. This plug-in is not completely compatible with WordPress 3.0

3) Seo Presser:

SEO Pressor is one of the newly installed plug-in that has been built to make your wordpress blog SEO better. It is also one of the most widely used blogging platform and it is extremely friendly to search engines. So, this plug-in helps you to get your blog ranked at a favorable position on Google.

4) SEO SearchTerms Tagging:

This plug-in is primarily used to increase the blog traffic in a systematic way. The keywords are added to each article and at times they are extracted from the vistior’s entries through Google search.

These are some of the famous plug-ins that have been installed in the WordPress to help the users gain a decent foothold in the pages of Google!