When it comes to seo, there are so many different tactics that you can use that it’s often difficult to know where to start.  People say that search engine optimization is such hard work.  I don’t really think that is such hard work, but I do believe that it is busy and time consuming work.

When it comes to the most dreaded part of seo, link building, I tend to do it in front of the television at night.  It’s mostly busy work to obtain links in my opinion so I can multi-task when building links.  That is, if you call watching a football game and working in between plays multi-tasking.

Here are four of my top seo tips when it comes to link building through various tactics.

1.  Blogging — Blogging is one of those things that you need to do consistently.  It’s a great way to build content for your site.  And, quality content can bring inbound links and help your search rankings simply by having the keywords utilized more on your site.

There are two kinds of blogs that you can create.  Most experts agree that putting a blog on your main URL itself is the most important as this will help you build content there.  Moreover, Google likes sites that have updated information and blogging allows what is normally a pretty static type of site (your corporate site) to have continually new content.

The second type of blog site is an industry specific site.  With this type of site, you can report on your own company on a separate URL and it doesn’t seem self-serving.  Often, savvy readers can see through this tactic, but it really doesn’t matter that much.  Getting links from a site outside of your primary domain can be helpful.  Just be sure to include stories about your competitors as well.

2.  Guest Blogging — Writing copy every day is tough work.  It’s hard to come up with new ideas all of the time.  That’s why offering to provide unique and new copy to another blog site in your niche is a great way to get coverage.  Any blogger would welcome a day off from writing so if you give him good copy that is new and never used before on the web, he’ll likely print it even if it means giving you a link back.  It’s the least they can do.

3.  Article Marketing — Some people think that article marketing is valuable for the links that you get on the article marketing site itself.  I don’t hold much value for those types of links.  What I do hold value for, however, is that some of the top article marketing sites do show up in searches.  Your hope is that some lazy blogger is going to go there and grab your content and reprint it on his blog.  That may result in a link that you wouldn’t otherwise have.  Stick with the more popular free article sites like eZine Articles.  Some of the lower ranked ones won’t be worth your time.

4.  Giveaways — We try to do a lot of contests.  People love winning free things and they will link to it.  On a fantasy baseball site that we are involved with, they actually give away free DVD’s of old World Series highlights.  We also provide a text message entry for the sweepstakes.  These have been helpful to us in gaining exposure and getting backlinks.