Although it maybe prudent to mention a few to start with, some will be obvious and some will be not so obvious. Natural search engine rankings, advertising, articles, blogs, newsletters, rss feeds, videos, joint ventures, press releases, social bookmarking, social networking and the most important ingredient that should run through the whole of these is quality.
One of the areas, blogs, has always been a grey area for me personally, until I discovered a few important facts. Perhaps I knew them, but when put into a certain context they meant more.
Allow me to explain further...
We all have been told that within our strategy we must link a blog to our website; in fact as many blogs as we can muster the energy to do. So yes I'm sure we've all gone out and made ten blogs. As a consequence of such effort we have seen very little traffic. So as a natural result we've returned our attention back to our websites, made them bigger and better and sat back and waited, checking our adsense revenue a few times a day.
Despondency sets in and we can't see the wood for the trees. So what's going on?
First we must remember that blogs get regarded has having more value than a 'normal' website. We know this to be true as we see them ranked above most websites. Yet our own blogs on typical blogging sites never seem to get anywhere in the rankings. There is an important distinction here to. A blog on a 'blogging site' will also rank higher than a blog on a normal - mywebsite.com website
Should you wish to test this theory out, put the same content on your website with a Page Rank of 4 and then put the same content on a blog with a zero page rank. The result sadly is that the blog could well rank above your own website.
That said... It would appear we are working 'upside down' on our efforts. If we put 2 hours of work on our blog, rather than our website per day, we may get the blog to a page rank of 5 quicker? In doing that, we achieve backlinks to our own site from a better page ranked site. Plus if we have adsense on the blog we are killing two birds with one stone.
I am only half way through fully testing this theory and it may require a further six months, but all the evidence suggests that this will work. If we have a website that sits nicely in a niche, then to have a blog or two back-linking, will only increase our websites inner page ranks and they will appear higher in the search engines.
As we add content to our website, tweak a little and add it to our blogs. The end result will be a page rank of 4 for our website and a page rank of 5 or 6 for our blog. When this happens, funnel the links back to your own site and it should nudge the page rank up one notch. The blog of course should be 'subject' relevant to your own site.
