Welcome to the second article in our series on what you can do to increase your SEO rankings. The first in the series we looking at what you can do on your website to make the search engines happy. Now that you have optimized your site with text, landing pages, alt and title tags, what's next?

In fact your SEO journey has just begun! Your site is built and functional, but so are a lot of sites out there. What is going to make your priority according to search engines, better than the other guys?

There are quite a few things we can do for good SEO. The first we are going to look at is the domain name. If you have a domain name such as IWB for selling a butter product, called I Want Butter, you're not going to get very far. It's not to say you will fail completely at SEO, but to optimize your chances, you should have a domain name that contains your keywords.

The domain ILoveButter or IWantButter would be optimal. You might have to get a bit creative depending on what domain names are available. These days you can register a domain for as little as seven dollars a year, it is a great investment that will insure great SEO rankings.

Some people will tell you that you're site will take months to be crawled by the search engines if you register a new domain. Not True! Last week I built a brand new site on Tuesday. It was finished at 3PM. By Wednesday at noon, search engine bots were all over it.

How did I achieve that? Well, I had optimized my keywords, homepage text, and landing pages. But I also did the below steps. If you do these too, you can ensure great SEO rankings.

Get Others to Link to Your Site

I'm sure you remember as recent as a few years ago, webrings were all the rage and directories that were just link after link. These were done to drive audience traffic and SEO rankings. Now, search engines aren't as keen on link farms, but the good ones will still work.

Link exchanges where you put a link on your site because the other site did it for you, also have lower importance with SEO than they used to. These days what is all the rage is a one way link. Search Engines consider this as a vote of confidence. Such as, hey this guy has a great and popular site! He links to other site I never heard of, but it must be good if he says so!

Boom. Your importance improves in the search engines eyes. This is a great lesson and key to learn for SEO. The more high quality sites link to you, the more important the search engines will think you are.

But how can you get high priority sites link to you? There are a few ways:

First, make sure they have a high Google Page Ranking. Anything over a 1 or 2 would be optimal, but if they don't have a page ranking at all, I would skip them all together. Why waste your time on SEO that isn't going to work?

· Issue a company press release with links back to your site. Many free sites with good rankings let you do this. It's great for SEO rankings.

· Submit your business to directories such as Yahoo, or any directory or search engine related to your field.

· Create a blog and write information of interest. Remember to include your back links. Also make sure to use your keywords 2-3% of the time.

· Respond to other blogs with useful information. Include your URL in your signature.

· Get active in a forum community that is in your field of interest. Include your URL in your signature.

• Write articles, like this one, and focus on your keywords. Post them on article sites and groups with a high page rank.
• Book Mark your website on places such as stumble, furl, delicious, dogpile and more.