SEO Basics - The Good the Bad and the Worthwhile - Links

SEO Basics - Good Link, Bad Link

Your link profile is potentially the most powerful aspect of your SEO efforts, especially in the eyes of Google. Quality counts over quantity, but it is important to get a good list of well-balanced links pointing to your site. Diversification really is the key. Try not to concentrate all of your efforts on gaining links from one source, and similarly try not to gain them using a single method. A number of tactics should be avoided wherever possible because they either offer you no benefit whatsoever or your page may be penalized.

This article looks at the acquisition of links purely from an SEO standpoint and, aside from the really bad linking methods, if a link will provide good-quality, direct traffic then it is definitely still a good link and well worth considering. You will have to use your judgment on this, to a certain extent.

Good Links

Directory Links: Directories are viewed as being a very positive source of links by a number of search engines. Obviously, some directory listings carry much more weight than others and some directories are hardly worth the effort. Be careful to drip feed your site with directory links at first because it is possible that too many too quickly will see your site penalized until your link profile becomes more natural.

Start with the major Internet directories and consider getting links from free general topic directories as well as niche directories and also look at paying for inclusion in one or two of the seriously large directories like the Yahoo directory and business.com. As your link profile expands you can add more directories to gain extra weight.

Reciprocal Links: You may have read that reciprocal linking is dead. While it is true that Google and possibly other search engines now place much less weight on a profile that is crammed with nothing but reciprocal links they still have a place. Keep the number of reciprocal links you use down to a minimum and certainly don't base your entire link building efforts on this one tactic alone.

Again, balance is a big part of reciprocal linking but also of importance is relevance. Regardless of whether you offer a separate links or resources page, or you choose to include the links throughout your site you are still essentially endorsing the site. You will also gain much more credence from a link that is placed on a page containing information relevant to your own page.
Unique One-Way Inbound Links: These should pretty much be the staple diet of your link portfolio. An inbound link that is one way does not necessitate the inclusion of a link back to that page on your site. This can help to give your own pages the benefit instead of handing it out to your link partners. The more relevant and the more important that search engines deem the linking site to be the more weight they give that particular link.
Site Wide Links: Again, these should be used sparingly. Gaining a site wide link means that a link to your site or your pages is placed on a number of pages in a site. Search engines are known to give less weight to links that are procured on this basis but it does help to give your portfolio a more rounded appearance.

Press Release Links: Writing and submitting a digital press release can provide good links. Many press releases are used by other sites and industries related to your site and they may also be included on some major news websites. There are free press release distribution services available, but it is common to need t pay to make the link clickable and to use anchor text.
Article Links: Writing and submitting articles to article directories can provide a large number of links. Not only can you submit one article to numerous directories but each directory has the potential of generating a number of interested websites. These websites also publish your article (which includes an author bio section with your link). This can be a good way to get authoritative sites to link to you.

Community Links: Join forums and include your link in your signature. Post useful comments on other people's blogs and include your link as your username. You should, under no circumstances, spam blogs or forums and only include links on the sites that allow it.
Presell Advertising Pages: Some websites will allow you to include an entire page on their site. In most cases you will either need to pay to have the page written or you, or write the page yourself. Generally the website will also include other forms of advertising but as long as you choose sites carefully this can generate some excellent links.

Bad Links

FFA Sites: An FFA, or Free-For-All page, is one that allows anybody to post any link they like on the page. Typically they are not only useless to your cause, because the search engines ignore them, but they will not generate any natural traffic but may attract the spammers to your doors.

Link Farms: A link farm is a page that contains an excessively large number of links. Some say a page with 100 links directed out of that page is a link farm, but in all honesty it is unlikely that a page will yield much benefit for SEO or non-SEO with more than fifty or so links.
Off Topic: Off topic links are something of a bone of contention. They may offer very slight weight with some search engines because it is quite possible that natural links from certain websites would point to any number of pages on any topic. This appears in the bad link section because they offer very little positive benefit and your efforts would be best placed gaining on-topic links.

Unindexable: Purely from an SEO standpoint, links that cannot be indexed by search engines are completely useless. A search engine spider must be able to follow the link to find your page and provide you with any benefit for that link. Avoid any page that offers to display your link in a frame, or includes the noindex or nofollow robots.txt tags. However, bear in mind that a site that is currently not being indexed by search engines may be a new site. It could also grow up to be the next Google.com and take your link with it.

Conclusion
Your link profile should appear as natural as possible so vary the good links as much as possible and avoid the bad links. Collect links from as many sources using as many tactics as possible and use keyword variants in your anchor text. By following these guidelines you should be able to improve the appearance of your link profile and, therefore, improve your search engine rankings.

Hope this helps you get your site noticed!

Dan

Professional Website Design SEO Tips: Part 1 of 20 - Keywords

Welcome to Part 1 of 20 Professional Website Design SEO Tips.

Part one: Keywords

Keyword Selection
Creating a list of keywords is easy, but you need to make sure what you think are relevant keywords will be what your potential clients will be searching for. Put yourself in your client’s shoes; How would you find a business like your own, what would you search for?
There are a few simple guidelines to follow when selecting your keywords;

• Choose as many as you can find.
• Have a look at your competitors
• Only choose keywords that are relevant to your site

Once you have your list, start testing. Search for each keyword on Google to check out the competition, and then start grouping them to create phrases and do the same.

Keyword Ranking
Once you have established a good list of keywords, start ranking them by relevance to the pages content. Robots are less likely to rank your for keywords that are not relevant to the rest of the page. Your homepage’s first paragraph is the ideal place to start.

Keyword Placement
The placement of keywords along with the density is where some websites slip up. The first paragraph of the page along with the page title is what will show up in search engines, ensuring your highest ranked keywords are present here is an excellent place to start. Proper use of <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and <p> tags will help search engines prioritise your content by finding out headings of content and sub titles.

Keyword Density
The volume of relevant keywords on your site is paramount to your placement. Using the right phrases within context on your site you will encourage valuable visitors as well as pleasing search engine robots

Over doing it
The main cause of being dropped by search engines or losing your page rank is over doing the keywords. Yes density is good, but for your customers the text has to be readable, with increased robot technology, search bots can now penalise you for over doing the keywords placement.
Use statistics tracking to find out when you’ve been visited by search robots, and check to see if the changes you have made have affected your ranking for the keywords you have optimised.

End of Part One
Part 2 will be Tips on: Backlinking

Bye for now!
Dan

Are website directory links important?

We have all seen adverts on the Internet and arriving in our inbox advertising top ranking in the search engines for X amount of your hard earned cash. But can you encourage similar rankings without forking out? Over 80% of your web traffic will come from search engines, which begs the question where does the other 20% come from. Either directly typing in the URL or Directory links will make up the other 20%

Getting a listing in a directory provides visitors to the directory with a single page outline to your business. Getting the text right on this page can mean the difference between a click through to your website, or a competitor getting your business.

Business directories and Link directories are very important for increasing your traffic. With over 3'500 directories available, you can get a link to your website for free. We have found over 200 directories with a Google PageRank of 4 or above. Links to your website from high PageRank website are substantially more valuable.

Top tips for directory listings:

1. If you are on a limited budget opt for the Free listing. It may not get you click through but it will provide a valuable link to your website in the search engines.
2. Directories often use your "title" as a link to your website, to maximise your keywords saturation use a few keywords in your link text. e.g. "ClearInsite.co.uk" becomes "ClearInsite - Website Analysis, Design and Hosting".
3. Accurately choosing a category for your website to be listed in is valuable in ensuring you get quality traffic. There is no point in getting 1'000 visitors a day if only 2% of them are actually interested in what you are selling!

I hope these tips are useful, and help to get you into the search engines. ClearInsite offer a website directory submission service which will insert an ad into over 200 PageRank 4 website directories.

Till next time!

Dan

Welcome to Usability, Accesibility and Your Website

Welcome to the ClearInsite SEO and Accessibility Blog.

I'm Daniel Gallacher, IT Manager and Web Designer at ClearInsite, a company specialising in website usability, accessibility and search engine marketing.

Over the coming months I will regularly post tips and links to sites, that will help you make the most of your website. Also with new UK regulations regarding website accessibility, I will help you stick to the standards without compromising your design and layout!

But for now I shall leave a link, on the site you'll find a few valuable articles on SEO.
http://www.clearinsite.co.uk

If you require Website Analysis, Design or Hosting please click here.