Search Engine Optimisation - SEO

The weight of which the SE’s put on incoming links is changing all the time. What hasn’t changed and essentially will not, is that they are an essential part of any sites SEO campaign.

The composition of a ‘good link’.

• Anchor Text - Always ensure that the link text contains the keyword(s) you are trying to rank for. This passes relevance to your page for those keywords.
• Indexed - Ensure that the page that is linking to you is indexed in the SE’s. If it’s not, it’s useless - if the SE’s can’t follow the link, it can’t associate the link text with your page - unless it’s a high traffic website which will bring you visitors direct.
• Crawlable - Some webmasters request reciprocal links and then place “nofollow” tags on the link to your site. Again, the SE’s will not pass any relevance, trust or LJ to you via one of these links.
• Relevance - Make sure that the sites you are requesting link to you are of the same niche or similar. This improves the impact of the link.

Do Your Homework

A crucial factor, often overlooked when beginning a reciprocal links campaign, is that it does matter where the other site links to. The below example;

Your Site -> Site B -> Spammy Bad Neighbourhood.

This can get you into trouble. With ‘Site B’ linking to a bad neighbourhood, it could well mean Site B becomes part of that, which in turn can hurt you. Ensure that whoever you are linking to has a similar linking strategy to yourself. Two minutes of research via Yahoo Site Explorer will enable you to get a better idea about your target site.

One-Way, Reciprocal and 3-Way Links

The best links to obtain are undoubtedly one-way.

This as the SE’s see them, is the most natural way of linking and as such, receives the most importance. So, how do we get them? The buzz word here is ‘Link-Bait’. Attracting webmasters to link to your site due to a unique, interesting topic / approach /  feature. Free stuff always works too!.

Second best is 3-way. These are Site A -> Site B -> Site C -> Site A, creating an effective circle of links. These used to and still can be seen as one-way links by many SE’s, though the front runners are of course, getting smart to the idea of 3-way linking and devaluing them to the same ranks of reciprocals.

Reciprocals are seen as the least value, although they do still hold some weight and so are worth pursuing, but not at the expense of time working on good link bait. The SE’s do not see these as natural and you are passing out of your site as much LJ as is incoming. Just ensure the anchor text is good!

A Sites Link Profile

SE’s know what type of sites it crawls are. It knows a directory from an information site - and so they should. This recognition of a sites theme and purpose allows SE’s to build a ‘link profile’ for your site. That is, it knows if you have just submitted to directories and 999 of your 1000 links are from spammy links - same goes for blogs and forums etc.

So it’s important to get a good mix in their, include directories, blogs, forums, similar sites and whatever else you can get - just ensure you don’t overload of low grade spammy links - it won’t work.

The best sites to receive links from still remain .gov and .edu links. All others are treated equal, although some still believe .org hold slightly more weight.

So get thinking, get that link-bait up and get emailing those .edu and .gov sites!

Your internal links and their structure play an important role in determining how the search engines view and index your site.

This is mainly viewed in the terms of ‘link juice’. With each site that links to you, you receive some ‘link juice’. Search Engines such as Google have quantified this in the past with gauges such as the infamous PageRank. Google counts Site ‘A’ linking to you, at Site ‘B’ as a vote. These votes increase your’link juice’ (LJ) or trust that Google then places on your site. How you then deal and distribute this LJ is what this article is aimed at.

OK, this is great, you’ve attained through many hours of hard work many backlinks to your site, either reciprocal or one way. How do we now make the most of this lovely LJ we have received?.

The page with most LJ will normally be the homepage of the site, so this is where we will start. The number of links that you have going from your homepage effectively divides the amount of LJ you are passing to each page. So, having hundreds of links on your homepage may not be the best idea, instead, it may be better to prioritise the most important pages of your site.

Linking to these from the homepage is a must, as the SE’s will place most importance on these. You can still have links to other less important pages on your homepage - but implementing the handy “nofollow” tag is a good way to keep the LJ flowing in the right direction. Google does not follow links that have the “nofollow” tag and as such will not pass any LJ to these pages. Following is a quote from Google;

We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

This does not interfere with the usability of the site - something to always bear in mind.

If you have a large site, correctly setting up the structure of the site will help with both linking and enabling the SE’s to determine the correct priority of your pages. If you have many site levels, it may be difficult to get all your pages indexed.

Homepage (100LJ) -> Level 2 (10LJ) -> Level 3 (1LJ) -> Level 4 (0.1LJ) (Assuming 10 links per page and no inter-linking)

Above, simplified, is why this may become an issue. With less LJ, comes less importance to the SE’s. Good inter-linking will improve this slightly, though the most important thing to do in this instance is to gain more links, directly to Level 2, 3 and 4.

With each new page added, you should introduce a temporary link on your homepage, i.e. “new products”  to your Level 4 page. This will let the SE’s know it’s there. Second is to gain a few links to this from external sources and introduce it to your internal linking structure. These measures should ensure it gets and remains indexed.

With all the above, it’s always important to consider anchor text. Using your keywords in your links is an essential piece of the jigsaw when trying to set the relevancy of the page and inform the SE’s of this. Using “product/service name” instead of “here” will help the SE’s know what your pages are about, which in turn helps you gain rankings in the SERPS.

Using ‘breadcrumb’ links,  is a good way to inter-link on your site, whilst improving usability and  with appropriate anchor text, improve your SERPS.

Linking

There are 3 main area’s when it comes to links. These are:

• Internal link structure of your site
• Links going to external websites
• External sources linking to you

Links are in essence, the only way in which the search engines will be able to find and index your websites. They also play an important part in the priority the search engines give each page in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).