Showing posts with label link building. Show all posts
Showing posts with label link building. Show all posts

Link Building in 2015

Links, the lifeblood of websites, without these your website will not not highly on search engines, if you can't be found on search engines then you'll not get the visitors your business desperately needs.

Link building is fraught with difficulty, recent Google updates mean that if you get links from a poor website, then it will negatively effect your ranking.

But how can you get these all important links?

Two recent posts on LinkedIn help show the way:


These articles offer practical advice to help you improve your search engine rankings.

Good Luck



Stop asking ‘How’ Google rank websites and start asking ‘Why’.

Seriously, if you are interested in improving your ranking for your website then you must stop trying to guess what ingredients are in the Google ‘secret sauce’.

What makes up the Google algorithm takes up way too much thinking time, just accept the fact that Google pushes websites through their machinery and out pops the ranking for your site.

A better question to ask is “Why do Google rank sites the way that they do?”

From a users perspective Googles aim of is very simple; it wants to understand what information you want to see when you query its search engine and then it wants to ensure that it shows you the very best results.

Why is understanding this a better way to understand Google? 

For Google to do it's job properly it needs to ensure that:
  1. It understand what your site is all about
  2. When visitors get to it they engage with it (good time on site, low bounce rate etc)
  3. They potentially share your content
This all means that you can stop focussing your precious time on tying to get others to link their sites to you, spamming forums and blogs with your links and stop tweaking META Tags and focus on the important area … your content.

With the right content Google will understand your pages and be able to determine whether you can satisfy a search query well.  So your content needs to be able to answer visitor’s questions, the content needs to be exactly what the visitor is expecting to see when they click on your link in the search results.

This means that you need to ensure that you answer the questions you think that the market has for your products and services – this might actually mean developing a formal FAQ section, but it also means ensuing that they easily understand what your website and pages are all about, and how exactly you can help them.

Seriously, understand what Google is trying to do and help them to help you, and you will start to rank well within Google. Period.

POTS and PANS!

What type of site so you own or manage? Is it a Pretty Ordinary Trash Site (POTS) or a Pretty Amazing Natural Sites (PANS) site?

Obviously you don’t want to own a POTS, these tend to be trashy, thin content, poorly linked to sites, where as the more superior PANS have lots of lovely content that visitors want to read and share, their content also attracts links naturally.

A site needs to have a clear and definite purpose; if this can be portrayed successfully to visitors then half of the battle has been won.

Sleek, modern design is a winner. Visitor needs and design trends change often, sites that don’t follow these will look dated very quickly and will be an instant turn-off.

Content needs to be unique and fresh and needs to speak concisely to your target market – avoid waffle and clutter and keep the messages as simple and as concise as possible.

Ultimately for any website to be successful it needs people to use it; site design and appearance are very important, but they will never replace the need for excellent usability.

A websites navigation affects how usable it is, and when developing or redesigning an existing site then the navigation (how you visitors are doing to find the great content) should be your primary concern.


In Summary

POTS PANS
Site Design Designed in the 80’s/90’s.
Cluttered.
Appealing
Modern – fresh, clean.
Content SEO focused.
Doesn't read well.
User focused.
Clear, well-written content.
Clarity Visitors confused.
Unsure what you site is about.
Purpose clear.
Visitors feel happy on your site.
Usability Confusing leaving visitors impatient.
They will leave.
Simple to use.
Customers stay and look around.
Navigation Visitors can’t find what they need.
No structure to site at all.
Visitors can find what they need quickly.
1-3 clicks and they are there.




Should you undertake Link Exchange with other businesses

In recent years the practice of arranging to create links to sites that link to yours has been frowned upon (especially by Google), but can this practice actually have a good and lasting effect on your website, traffic volume and rankings?

The idea of exchanging links with other websites, typically on some kind of special ‘we recommend’, ‘our partners’, ‘friends of ours’ or something similar, used to be a primary method of building links to sites.

One of the major ways that the Google ranking algorithm works is in making the suggestion that a link to your website from another one is a positive vote from them to you, Google used this vote to basically determine your reputation (in fact it still works this way today).

The problem was that as this method of gaining links if very cheap and very easy to do, suddenly all sites had hundreds (if not thousands) of links pointing to them, and search engines like Google realised that these types of links weren't really an honest vote of recommendation for the websites but rather just a way for businesses to boost their rankings.

Whilst website owners can still do this, this approach to link building is nowhere near as beneficial as it was in the past.

As a result, less weight was ‘reputation’ weight was given to what were labelled ‘reciprocal links’ – a term which covers the scenario I have just referred to.

As it became common knowledge that reciprocal links had been devalued, many businesses simply gave up on them. Some even went to the length of deleting all of the reciprocal links they had in case they incurred a penalty against their site.

It’s actually a myth that reciprocal links result in a penalty. These types of links have just become devalued, which is very different to them attracting a penalty.

Reciprocal links still provide value to the sites involved, however, the level of that value is less than it was before; but if you are struggling for links then some value is better than no value at all – so it would be a huge mistake to ignore reciprocal links altogether. You just shouldn't make this your only linking strategy, providing good quality content to attract natural and real links is always be best approach.

Two sides to every coin!


Whilst we are talking here about using reciprocal links to gain improved search engine rankings, there is also the other side of the equation and benefit to consider, that is, traffic referral.

Each link you have on another site is a chance that one of their visitors make click the link and come to your site; the way reciprocal links are tend to be set up (on special ‘links’ pages) then you probably won’t get much referral traffic from them, but again, some traffic is better than none.

Reciprocal links are not created equally!


Some reciprocal links are always going to be better than others and you do need to be very careful about who you exchange links with. For example if you sell soft furnishings and you have a link from a website that sells car parts, I don’t imagine you get any visitors at all!

Link partners should be in some way related to your own. In our example above, your soft furnishings site would be much better served if you had a link from a home improvement site!

Always think before exchanging links – “Would someone else consider this link to be logical? Or would they be confused as to why my site has a link from this one!”

A few links from irrelevant sites isn't a big deal, but the more you have the more confusing your site’s back link profile becomes, which makes it more difficult for search engines to clearly establish the topic of your website and which keywords to rank it well for.

Also, too many irrelevant links can look very spammy and would start to lead you to a penalty by the major search engines.

Quality wins!


Also consider the quality of the site you want a link from (Google will!), ensure that their content is of excellent quality and unique to that site.

If search engines see that you are linking to low quality sites, again this is a red flag to them and you may get a penalty (or just reduced ranking).

So, if you’re unsure about the quality or trustworthiness of a website then play it safe and don’t link to it.

Approaching other sites


Once you have a list of sites that look relevant and have great content, then it’s time to contact them, the best way is to use email or call them; explain that you have found their site, you love the quality of it and you think that a link between the two sites would be useful to both businesses.

You’ll find that the success rate for link exchange isn't great, and it takes some time and effort, but it does work. The key is to do a bit of research on them first. You shouldn't just send out hundreds of emails using the same set template. That might seem like the easiest way but your emails will mostly get ignored.

Finally!


As already mentioned, done well and carefully this can be a good way to get links to your site that WILL help ranking and gain real visitors to your site.

But this approach should be a low level tactic and not the main way to gain links, like I said earlier, great content will always attract natural links from other sites.

What the future of SEO?

When Google entered the search engine market back in the 90’s they changed the game.

Before Google all you needed to do was stuff your web site full of keywords and as long as you had more keywords stuffed than anyone else you appeared at the top of the rankings for that particular ‘stuffed’ term.

Since Google started spreading their magic on the search landscape things have changed, suddenly keyword stuff got you absolutely nowhere and links to site became the most important factor (as links suggested that the page was liked by someone).

Then Google started to look more at the quality of the links that link to you – if a high quality, relevant and trusted site linked to you then Google rightly took more notice of this link and trusted it more than lower quality sites that linked to you.

Things are changing again with Google Panda (rolled out in 2011) and further more with Hummingbird (rolled out in 2013) – now the quality AND meaning of your content is looking more important.

So with these algorithm changes and other developments, what does the future hold?

As SEO practitioners we are still providing good quality content that answers visitor’s questions whilst chasing those important linkbacks, but will all this activity be beneficial in the next few years!

Backlines are still important and will continue to be until something else comes along which can help Google understand the reputation and trustworthiness of a site; but as links can be easily gained AND the value of link erodes over time then a new way of working out Reputation needs to be brought into play.

Reputation networks like Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are examples of other networks trying to understand the reputation of a site, business or individual by trying to understand the context of any engagement; predominately in a social media context.

But it’s this social context that holds the key for reputation in real-time; with the erosion of link value over time then Google admit that once a link to a piece of content is provided it almost immediately starts to become out of date (hence the erosion of value over time), so real-time analysis MUST be the way forward.

The reality of the future of SEO and the question of reputation probably lies in a mixture of the types of work; i.e. the analysis that Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are working on and the latest Google Hummingbird platform changes.

A merger of these two sides would mean that Google would have a idea (in real-time) of how a brand, business or individual is being talked about, and from this it could be determined whether that discussion or engagement looks to provide positive or negative reputable (lots of links/mentions from could mean that it’s a valued resource for example).

Also with the Hummingbird update Google is showing that it’s starting to understand natural language and the semantics on how question and answers can be phrased.

I imagine within the next ten years Google (or AN Other) will be able to determine the basic reputation of a site or author (by links and real-time reputation analysis) and understand the real meaning of the content on a site; with these two pieces of information a search engine provider will be able to provide search engine results that provide the very best answer to a question with a higher degree of certainty.

But as we do not live in this world right now then links and great quality content are the way to go.

Old skool SEO still works

Matt Cutts and the team at Google have had a lot of press lately about how SEO should be done; a lot of people took some of Matts comments the wrong way and seemed to suddenly stop wanting to do any old school SEO in fear that Google would find out and deindex their website or pages.

Matt was only really repeating what he has basically said from day one, and that is that you can do pretty much anything that is ethical to help promote your website, but just don’t be spammy about it. Rule number one always has been and always will be – think about your market first and ranking second.

So what “old school” SEO still works?

The truth is that pretty much everything!

Guest blogging

Ok, this was the recent big topic that started to get webmasters a bit jittery, you can still be a guest blogger for someone else, there are just some very simple ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ that you need to follow.

Do guess blogging as it can drive targeted visitors to your own site. Always add value to the blog that you are writing for – consider their audience AND yours. Consider creating a separate landing page for this guest blog post that adds value to the post.

Don’t use the same article that you have used elsewhere, this simply doesn't work. If you like the theme of a previous article you have written then consider a heavy rewrite of it. Don’t write a heavily weighted keyword article. Neither should you expect a link to your website, if this is your only motivation then don’t guest blog.

Forum backlinks

Do try to get links back from forums – there still is SEO value in doing this, but ensure that the forum is highly relevant to the pages that you want to link to. As with guest blogging consider creating a landing page that provides additional value to the forum comment you post – give the readers a real reason to click on your link.

Don’t create lots of spammy low value comments on Forums with a link back to your site, and don’t put your keywords in the Name field, and NEVER use automatic blogging software – that is so 1990’s and it will get you a Google penalty.

Directories

Do continue to use directory sites, but ensure that you are listing your website in a high quality directory that is likely to delivery good quality traffic to your site. Look for Directories that have strict submission guidelines. If you are a local business then local business directories can work well.

Don’t bulk submit your details to every directory that you can find, and NEVER use automated listing software.

Your own link pages

Do have quality outbound links to relevant websites, use pages that are highly themed and only consider links that are relevant to your audience.

Don’t have pages full of random outbound links, Google know that this type of activity is usually from link exchange programs and it could get you a penalty.

SEO benefits of Social Media

Most businesses now recognise the fact that social media doesn't necessarily directly lead to a sale, but I know for a fact that it can help that sales process; instead most big businesses now look at social media as having SEO benefits and allowing their website and webpages to gain better rankings than their competitions, but how!

Let’s take a quick look at the benefits that social media could bring your to your SEO.

Social Media in general:

There are a couple of linked reasons why we would want to use social networks in the first place.
  1. It allows people to share your information and links with their Friends and Followers 
  2. It allows a greater chance for more people to see your brand and your products 
  3. You get a spread of profiles and individuals that link back to your site 

Google+:

Specifically Google+ looks good because of the obvious tight integration with Google Search; this benefits you because Google has a good chance of knowing a little about everyone that use its services.

It knows for example if individuals are interested in or an expert in ‘home decor’ or ‘flooring’ because of their Google+ profiles and/or their search patterns and/or their Gmail topics etc – now if you sell flooring and one of these individuals shares or +1’s some of your content (image/URL etc) then Google will naturally believe that your site or specific page is more important than a competitors that hasn't been shared by these interested parties.


Social sites as information hubs:

We also look at social media sites now as information hubs (a bit like mini websites).

If we take the above example about a flooring business and they focus on posting good content about flooring then Google will understand that their Blog, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest account is about ‘flooring’; and as such any links from it back to that site will generate a little more link juice.


The future of SEO and Social Media:

We (the SEO community) also don’t yet fully understand how Google looks at social engagement (individuals sharing social content), but whether it happens now or in the future, if individuals engage with your social content and brand then it can only benefit ranking.

SEO techniques you should NEVER try

We all make mistakes, but if you end up making a mistake of your SEO then it could really start to ruin your business.
Many businesses, including some top international companies, have fallen foul of Google Webmaster Guidelines and have been penalised by being removed from Google index.

Google has developed sophisticated algorithms to look out for websites and website owners that look like they are attempting game or beat Google at their own game. You can’t win.

Here are a couple of tips to ensure that it doesn't happen to you.

Keyword stuffing

OK, so you have worked out what keywords will bring visitors to your website; once you have this knowledge the temptation is to stuff these keywords all over your pages!

This is a definite violation of Google Guidelines and will result in getting you delisted from their index. Write your pages as if you were talking to someone about that product or service, use your keyword, but use then sparingly.


Automated comments

It doesn't take long searching the internet to find companies that are willing to sell you software that will enable you to leave comments automatically on blogs and forums – this can’t go wrong can it as we all know that Google loves to see links to your website.

Actually Google employs some very clever software that detects instances of when you attempt to leave lots of comments on blogs and forums, leaving lots of comments simply isn't natural behaviour. It’s fine to find forums and blogs that are related to your business and leave comments on them (in moderation), but do so with the understanding that your comments need to help a wider community, you need to add value to these sites, not just expect a link back to your site.


Paid links

Lots of high profile websites offer to sell links to other sites to help their ranking, and it can be very tempting to use these services as a quick win for ranking.

Google knows the sites that sell links and will penalise sites that they link to, also many of these site will again be unrelated to yours and so Google will see these links as unnatural (i.e. these sites wouldn't naturally link to yours).


Generic Directories

There are lots of internet directories that offer (either paid or free) to provide a link back to your website. As many of these directories are just pages of links to websites then Google again sees these as unnatural linkage and if you are found to have listings in lots of these directories then they are likely to take actions against your site.

Linking from directories that are dedicated to your market or location are better, as are using well known household name directories. These can be a useful way to gain traffic, but don’t reply on this tactic for ranking purposes.


Cloaking or Hidden Content

This is a technique that attempts to hide content from website visitors but is instead made available only for to search engines to see; again Google is now really clever at spotting these techniques.

All content should be available to your visitors, it should be informative; it should make sense and read well.


Doorway Pages

This isn't a technique that is used much today, but Doorway pages are pages that are again just written just for search engines and typically have content on them that is not able to be seen by website visitors. They are used to try to build a large amount of authority into a single page; these pages then automatically take visitors off to a completely different website.

Again, they tend to be stuffed with keywords, but once again it’s a technique that Google are very good at sniffing out.


In Summary

There isn't any way that you can beat Google and fool it into giving you better search engines rankings that your site deserve – always write pages with your visitor in mind.

Good quality, well written site will always (in time) rank better than poorly written, low quality ones.

SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

Link Building is NOT Dead!

I recently read a short blog post about how Link Build is supposed to be dead (in fact illegal!), but that Google's Eric Enge it's been suggested that "webmasters to change their thinking about how they build links", in fact it was suggested that "[webmasters] need to reverse their process and should really think first about compelling content."

Hang on!  This is exactly what real link building has been about since day one, any webmaster or SEO bod worth their salt will first ensure that the target website is fit for purpose, it stands to reason.

Whilst I recognise that this is a really simplistic explanation of the process, but lets imagine that you have a really poor website design with poor content but my sheer dumb look or black hat techniques you manage to get more links that everyone else for your chose keywords/keyphrases; get to the top of Google SERPs anyone that clicks through to your page is going to be mightily disappointed and push that back button! 

So stop thinking first about getting those links, and instead build a great site with fab content that will make people want to visit you in the first place!