Pssst… wanna whole bunch more links for your website?

I don’t know about you but when someone told me years ago that the best way to increase your search engine prominence was inbound links I became more than slightly obsessed. Seriously, some days I would be the online equivalent of a junkie trying to make a score… “hey man, come on I’ll do anything, just gimme the link man, give it to me!”

Luckily I’m at the point where my link addiction is under control, but I still get sucked into reading pretty much any blog post offering the promise of more links. Unfortunately, 9 times out of 10 I’m disappointed with the tactics proposed. Most link-building advice involves way too much time investment for far too little quality links.

But today I found a gem on Matt Cutts blog about a new webmaster tool being offered by Google - this is serious juice for the link addict.

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5 Easy Ways to Create a Personal Sweet Looking Twitter Profile

I’ve been getting a few questions lately about my Twitter account and how I gave it a personalized and professional touch. I would like to say that I toiled away for hours coming up with the perfect profile, but honestly it took me about half and hour or so to dramatically improve the look of my Twitter profile by downloading a free template and then making it my own with a bit of work in Photoshop.

Here’s 5 great Twitter templates you can use personalize and professionalize (is that a word?) your Twitter profile.: (for those of you who don’t have Photoshop, I’ve included a couple solutions for you as well)

1. For a clean and professional look, go to Frabrice Epelboin’s blog and check out his Photoshop template for Twitter that he makes a available as a free download. This is the one I tweaked and changed up the colors etc. and use for my Twitter profile.

2. For a bit more of a cool kid look, check out the Twitter profile template free for download at Dra Studios.

3. For those of you that don’t have Photoshop here’s a great collection of 25 Twitter templates where instead of uploading an entire template you can upload a single image, alter the color settings and give your profile a somewhat unique identity. The downside is that you can’t add in your personal information, but for a lot of people who use Twitter for fun instead of a marketing tool this is a really easy way to a add a little somethin-somethin to your profile.

4. Check this one out for a fun, yet kind of professional Twitter profile. You can download this Twitter profile template from this page - there’s also a few others you might like. For this one you’ll also need to use Photoshop.

This guy even made a video about his “TwitterBacks” website.

5. For another non-Photoshop solution for creating a personalized Twitter background, here’s a few more generic, yet way better than nothing Twitter profile options. You’ll notice that some of the ones on this page are simple image files that work well proportionately with the Twitter profile page. To do this yourself, just find an image you like, maybe grandma with her ten cats, and upload it as your profile.

I uploaded a few images to my Twitter profile and found that a good image size if you want to go this route is around 8.5 inches width (1279 pixels) by 4.7 inches height (710 pixels) and a resolution of 120 pixels/inch.

If you don’t have any good grandma/cat images laying around you can always check out Flickr for some cool creative commons images (make sure you add artist attribution to the image) or go to an image site like iStockphoto and search the millions of royalty-free high-end images for sale for around a dollar or so.