Keyword Research

Spending time researching which keywords to target for SEO purposes is imperative to the long-term success of any search marketing campaign, and yet it never fails to amaze me:

1. How few online businesses actually allocate time and resources to doing it
   
2. How misguided the research and subsequent results can be
   
3. How companies often ignore the ‘goldmine’ of existing data at their fingertips.

I would like to concentrate on (3).

We find that many of the companies who come to us for SEO advice and services have already embarked on some kind of Pay Per Click campaign, whether it be through Google Adwords or some of the other click providers. Adwords in particular gives the advertiser a wealth of information at keyword-level, including search volume, click through rates, the value of clicks and the earnings per click for individual keywords. So why not use this data and integrate it with your keyword research?

Essentially, keyword research should be used to identify viable target keywords based on:

• Search volume
  
• Relative competition
  
• Relevancy
  
• Commercial viability

Well a successful Adwords campaign can tell you the EXACT number of page views on the Google listings a search term will receive, and it enables you to spot and nurture the ‘golden’ keywords – those that convert and give you the greatest return.

So, use this data! Remember that keyword research and Pay Per Click data are not mutually-exclusive concepts and delve into those PPC stats to find the clues. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes!

I read a lot of SEO blogs and forums and it never fails to amaze me how the same, fundamental basic SEO questions crop up time and time again, and the same old advice is wheeled out, rinsed, and then wheeled out again. And then when that is finished, it is wheeled out again for good measure.

So, I thought I would compile the 10 most common SEO questions, and issues we come up against when assessing client’s websites.

• 1. URL’s and Duplicate Content: Do you have both a www version of your web pages AND a non-www version of your web pages? If so, Google sees these as 2 separate pages (the www version is effectively a sub-domain) and may determine either version as duplicate content. Also, natural incoming links may pass juice to either version of your page rather than a single one, diluting your incoming ‘link juice’.

• 2. Internal Links and Duplicate Content: Does any part of your internal page navigation link to a duplicate version of another page? The most common scenario here would be that your home page URL is ‘www.monkeyheadfood.com’ but your internal navigation points to ‘www.monkeyheadfood.com/index.html’ (or similar) which serves the same content. This also leads to duplicate content issues and the potential for incoming links to be split between the different versions.

• 3. Poor Keyword Selection: I think it was Darth Vader who said ‘the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the power of keyword research‘. Something like that anyway. All websites, new, old, good, bad and ugly, need to have conducted a full keyword research otherwise you are indulging in the webmaster equivalent of trying to nail jelly to a wall. If you haven’t produced a full keyword research document (or had one prepared for you) how on earth do you know what to target? How do you know where the search volume is? How do you know which keywords you actually have a chance of ranking highly for? You get my point.

• 4. Ignoring The ‘SEO Spine’: I have just made ‘SEO Spine’ up. Impressive little term, eh? Ok – I will move on. By ‘SEO Spine’, I am referring to your on-page keyword targeting. Ideally, your page should have your target keyword in the URL, the title, the heading tag, and the content, creating a ‘spine’ (but don’t over-do it and spam keywords). Can you see what I did there?

• 5. Images (only) For Navigation: The main search engines are still in kindergarten when it comes to reading text on images. They just aren’t very good at it. So, you should not be using images for navigation because you wont receive the positive ranking score from your anchor text, (which can be very valuable).

• 6. Title Tag Suicide: Your title tag is the ‘pocket dynamite’ of your web page. There isn’t a stronger signal of relevancy and Google loves to allocate bucket-loads of value to them. So, read this post about SEO and Title Tags now!

• 7. Unfriendly URL’s: Although the search engines can index ‘unfriendly’ dynamic URL’s these days, they still prefer the static versions of the same. I can tell you, for example, that Google certainly DOES prefer static URLs to their dynamic buddies. Perhaps more importantly, having keywords in the URL will increase your click-through-rate from the search engines as they appear in bold in the displayed listings.

• 8. Poor Site Architecture: Your website should be as ‘flat’ as possible to minimise the number of clicks from your home page to any other page (without using a search box). If you have less than 10,000 pages then you should, ideally, be able to reach any other page within 3 clicks.

• 9. Sub-Domains Not Sub-Directories: Google has changed the way it looks at sub domains and so, these days, it is much more beneficial to add any additional content (e.g a blog or an ecommerce facility) in a sub-directory. Reading reference: SEO Sub-Domains

• 10. Link Building:  We love link building. However, it seems that many webmasters don’t! A web page’s inbound link profile is the most important signal to Google when determining a pages trust and authority, which in turn, helps determine rankinings.We all-too-often see either very few links, or the worst set of spammy links since spam was invented in the world, ever, ever, ever. You need to build quality links, and when you have finished, you need to build some more.

Looking for a competitive SEO and/or link building quote? Contact us now!

Robots, also known as web spiders, crawlers, or many other variations of insect, are a form of automated web programming that goes from website to website, mapping and gathering data.

They can have many different uses, from the obvious legal methods of web indexing and search engine development (which I will be talking more about later), but they are also used by less scrupulous technical minds to gather data such as email addresses, and other personal information that can be sold to agencies for spam emails, and can be a facilitator for fraud and identity theft.

The Standard for robot exclusion was defined on the 30^th June 1994 by the majority of robot authors and other people with an interest. Though this was launched as a standard, it isn’t backed by any official body and there is no regulation that a robot must adhere to the rules in the txt file, so some robots may ignore the txt file, regardless of what you put in it.

Robots.txt can be used to direct the flow of these automated scripts around one’s website. They can direct the robot to avoid a page, a subdomain, or an entire site altogether. It is important to note however that whilst a robot may avoid a page, the page, and the robots.txt file is still public, so it is not a good idea to use the robots.txt to hide data.

Robots.txt is an essential tool for anyone who is looking to optimise website ‘crawling’. Whether you create your own .txt file, or whether you have a professional company do it for you, ensuring that the flow of the robots is adequately controlled is essential.

The structure of a robots.txt is very simple, but if it’s not done correctly the robots will simply ignore it.

The example below shows a robots.txt that tells all robots to ignore the entire site. If you want to add reminders for yourself as to what your specific commands refer to, you can use a ‘#’ at the start of a line to denote a comment.

The next example below tells robots to ignore any pages that start with ‘/fried chicken/’ and also shows how the comments tag can be used.

You can also use the ‘User-agent’ command to tell robots to avoid a page or domain, while at the same time, telling a specific robot to ignore that command, this is particularly useful if you have your own robot that you want to trawl a page or subdomain but you would rather it were ignored by other robots, the below example shows this.

When we start to talk about robots and SEO, the advantages of being able to tell a search engine spider to avoid a specific page or set of pages are quite clear.

If your site has a log in page, or a contact us page that doesn’t add value to the site and doesn’t require indexing by a search engine then it is more beneficial for your site for you to tell the spiders to ignore those pages, which will, in turn, allow the spiders to use their ‘crawl quota’ on pages of higher value.

So when you’re looking to make the most of this very simple tool, you need to remember a couple of simple rules.

• You only want the robots to index the pages on your site that add value.
• If you don’t want your customers visiting a page, you probably don’t want robots going there either.
• Remember that any page, on your site that isn’t adding value as it’s crawled, is consuming ‘crawl quota’ that could be going somewhere more worthwhile.

Ensure that you can create even a simple robots.txt to tell the search engines where to look, and you could notice a marked improvement in the value of your site.

Assuming that you have at least some knowledge of SEO and that you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 3 months, there is a good chance that you have heard of the “Panda” Update which Google recently released.

Basically it was a fairly major update to the search engines algorithm and it had a pretty big effect on how a lot of sites are ranked. The main aim of the update was to push low quality content down the results pages and get the better stuff to the top.

Overall it has been a pretty successful update, at least that’s what most people are saying. But as in any war, there was collateral damage, and certainly a few good sites have suffered too.

So what’s a webmaster to do?

Good question, and one which we have been puzzling over of late here at Webtistic… so without further ado, here is my guide to SEO post Panda:

You won’t rank just because of a strong domain

Until recently, if you built a big authoratitive site targeting lots of long tail keywords, you could bet that a few pages would rank purely off the back of having a big site with lots of content.

Not any more though! Having a big behemoth of a site isn’t going to give you an advantage any more – not unless every single page on it is uber high quality.

Lesson:

Consider a smaller more focused site, target a smaller group of higher value keywords and focus on quality, not quantity.

Bad pages will bring you down

The scatter gun approach is now even more risky. If you have a few good pages and a whole load of bad ones your rankings could suffer.

Lesson:

Re-visit older, and low quality pages and tweak them or even consider getting rid of them and starting again. You need to figure out what content is performing and what content isn’t.

Poor quality links don’t work

It has been going this way for a while, but this seems to have been a tipping point. If your SEO company is still doing directory submissions then you should probably be a little concerned.

Lesson:

An effective link building campaign should include a nice mix of medium quality links and high quality “content links”. A couple of decent content links really can be worh 1000 submission type links.

Make your site look nice and non-spammy

Google can actually appreciate things such as how cleanly presented your site is and whether it looks spammy. That means that if you swamp your site with adverts and spammy links you may well lose rankings.

Lesson:

Keep it clean looking. Include a few adverts, sure, but try to make sure your site looks nice for the visitor. Also, try to add value to any affiliate type offers.

Low content pages are a problem

If you have a lot of pages with little unique content you may have a problem. This may be true for ecommerce sites which have different pages for different sizes of the same products, or for affiliate sites which have a lot of pages with little more than a link to the affiliate site.

Lesson:

The best thing to do is to spend the extra time on each such page and make it unique and helpful, but where this isn’t possible try to think of clever ways to introduce dynamic and user generated content such as;

User reviews, stat’s, related offers, case studdies, featured products etc…

Also, consider using “link rel canonical” tags on duplicate pages to assign credit to the main product page or category page.

Summary:

This update has really been something of a game changer for certain niches and it is definitely a sign of where Google is going.

Of course there is more to come and there have already been several more tweaks since Panda. Our best advice is quite simply that if your site doesn’t do something for the humans that you are targeting then you can forget about Google.

On the other hand, the playing feild has been levelled, smaller sites are very capable of competing with larger ones, just so long as they are better at what they do.

Want us to take a look at your site? Shout us over for a look…

Thank you for the introduction Joe, you have all welcomed me into the team so wonderfully and I am enjoying myself. I am looking forward continuing to work with you all.

As my first post I thought I would give you a few tips on how to write a press release.

It’s important to understand the power of a press release when done well; it’s an affordable promotional tool that can get you exposure within 24hours, which means that it can effectively increase the traffic to your site/products or services.

So here are some top tips to consider when writing a press release;

Write something NEWSWORTHY

This is quite a common mistake. You need to write news, there is not point writing a press release just because you haven’t done it in a while, this can be quite evident and will stop journalists from picking it.

Think about the audience

Make sure you concentrate on who your target market are, read blogs and magazines so that you know what type of news your target market would like to hear.

Write the headline first

This will ensure you focus on the content and not ramble on, even if you change it at a later date. Try not to add puns/cliché phrases, this is the sign of an amateur writer, and avoid the fluffy/flashy language.

First paragraph

This should be a brief introduction about the main body, always answer the following questions, who, what, where, when and why.

Second paragraph

Expand and try to make it factual.

The more you back up your story the better; this gives your release credibility and people like to read about facts/figures about their lives.

Be clear and concise

Short, clear sentences are key, this ensures you get straight to the point and stops you from waffling. Try to space the main body out to make it easier to read and write as the third person.

Lastly, it’s very important to use good spelling and grammar.

Well, I hope this has helped you gain an insight into how to write a good press release. Always remember, practice makes perfect, so get typing!

A lot of what happens within the Google Headquarters is obviously kept under wraps and not even Matt Cutts’ dog wouldn’t have an inkling as to changes being made. However, sometimes we are made aware of changes, especially recently, as it appears that a lot of innocent sites appear to have been affected by the recent change in algorithm made to try and differentiate between sites that offer quality unique content and those that farm their content from external sources and usually do not offer much value in their content.

Google’s ‘Farmer’ Algorithm Change

Google’s most recent algorithm change has been dubbed the ‘Farmer’ algorithm change due to Google’s attempt to crack down on content farms. These are sites that are specifically designed to offer a huge amount of content but very little relative information such as AssociatedContent.com and other article submission sites.

It is clearly apparent that Google want to reward users that spend a lot of time and effort into writing strong original and quality content. There are a lot of sites where their content is all pulled in from external sources and do not provide much of their own uniquely written content and this is likely to have a significant effect on them as in Google’s eyes they are copying other peoples work and as we all know, kids at school that copy their answers do not get any marks!

Image from www.vts.intute.ac.uk

Has It Had The Adverse Effect?

Time will tell whether Google got its algorithm right before it was implemented or whether something was clearly overlooked as recently, however, there have been a lot of what appear to be innocent victims to this algorithm shake up.

Look HERE for a current and updated forum of people who have been affected.

We are a strong believer that content is King and this is something that has been put into dispute in some cases with the latest update.

From the above forum you can see that people who have been successfully running well ranking websites and offering high value content seem to have lost out to websites that have been designed for a particular keyword.

Whilst Google has the right intentions in trying to de-value ‘content farms’ as they really do not add any value and can often be spam, they may have overlooked a vital part of its algorithm. A lot of websites successfully interact with their users, allow user submitted reviews etc. and now some of these sites are being put in the same category as article submission sites.

Have You Been Affected?

A common question we have been asked (and have asked ourselves) is how you now go about optimizing your site and what do you do if you have slipped down the rankings since the update. At the end of the day a lot of people rely solely on being ranked in the top 3 as it probably pays for their mortgage, and these are their main sources of income. Being shunted down the rankings a few places can have a huge effect on visits and ultimately sales, so what do we recommend you do?

Whilst this is being investigated and tested further, we recommend you carry on implementing best practice SEO and continue to develop unique, quality and relevant content. We have seen evidence of SEO having quite a strong effect on some sites now, such as keyword rich domain names and URL’s outranking probably better, more informative and content rich websites.

Therefore, continue to produce your own content even though it can be de-motivating knowing you are not as high in Google’s SERP’s and consider trying to make your site as SEO friendly to Google as you possibly can without sacrificing the usability of your site. This includes following these basic tips:

• Convert complicated URL’s into SEO friendly URL’s with keywords featuring in the slugs and get rid of any query strings that might be showing up.
• Try not to use flash or large images, try and convert images to smaller file sizes whilst retaining the quality.
• Continue to try and get links coming in to your site from all forms of sites such social media, blogs etc. with varied link text and aim for relevant blogs that might want to link to you because you have written an interesting article or you have developed a helpful webtool/tutorial.
• Make sure you have all the correct tags and Google is aware that what your site is about.
• Include a Privacy Policy on the homepage as it is then deemed more trustworthy.
• Try and include the address on the homepage as well as this helps Google to confirm where you are based especially if for example you own a ‘.com’ site but are based in the UK.

If you do fear that you have been affected by this and would like some professional advice, please feel free to contact us!

Welcome to part 3 of our in depth look at Google. In the previous posts we looked at links and user behaviour, so today I just want to cover a last few “miscellaneous” factors that Google might also be looking at. These are just a few extra bits that you might want to think about when assessing your SERP ranks, food for thought if you will.

Staleness of page

Google likes to look at which pages are being updated, and also which sites are being updated. You don’t neccessarily need to panick though, the search engine is able to recognise topics which are more likely to become stale, and which topics are pretty much evergreen.

The best lesson to take away from this is that if you run a site based around a fast moving topic, such as fashion or technology, you should be updating your content regularly. If you have a page that ranks well, it is worth making small updates every now and then.

A regularly updated site will help your overall freshness score and probably make your site more helpful for your visitors. However, if you don’t have the time to be updating content regularly, you would probably be well advised to start a site in a slower moving niche. Topics like antiques for example are unlikely to need updating as often…

Seasonality

It goes without saying really, but the time of year can affect what people are searching for, and some markets can be quite seasonal. This can actually affect rankings in some niches.

For example: Say you have a site selling flowers. You are obviously going to want to rank well for searches such as “buy flowers online” etc…

But around the start of the year (in the run up to valentines day), your flower site might be a very relevant site for people searching for terms such as “gifts” and “presents”… because flowers are a pretty common valentine gift right? So in January your ranking for the term “gifts online” might jump up.

Fast forward a few months to Christmas… if someone is searching for “gifts online” at this time of year, they are probably not going to be looking for flowers, they might be looking gadgets, or tins of chocolate, or clothes etc… So your ranking for the phrase “gifts online” will naturally drop at this time of year.

What you can do

The key is: don’t panick, if you see your ranks drop for certain phrases, it doesn’t neccessarily mean you are doing anything wrong, it might simply be the season or time of year. Use common sense and think about what a searcher is looking for when they search for that phrase at different times of year.

Advertising traffic

Google attempts to get a feel for how much traffic different sites are getting. Of course this isn’t neccessarily always going to be a complete view, but the key is to get a feel for how rates of traffic are changing and judging how ‘well’ that site is doing.

There isn’t really a lot to take away from this, as you obviously want to maximise your traffic levels regardless of what Google is doing… I mean, you want lots of visitors anyway don’t you? What’s interesting to know though, is that Google will also try to judge how much traffic you are getting through different sources.

This probably means that advertising traffic will be discounted, but it would certainly be worth using some social media and other methods of boosting your natural traffic, this will obviously be a nice bonus for your site, and it may help improve your rankings at the same time!

Spam filtering

The final point I wanted to discuss is spam (no, not the tinned stuff). Turns out, Google will actually look at an awful lot of different factors when trying to spot potential spammy sites.

One thing I wanted to point out is that this is not a black and white sort of status. It’s not a case of either getting spam filtered or not. But if Google suspects that a site may be spammy in some way, it will likely rank that site more conservatively until it can get a better feel for the quality.

There are lots of things that can indicate a spammy site, and lots of factors that can help you to overcome a spam filter. Google may look at things like:

• Link growth: Like I mentioned previously, if your link growth is spikey, or looks “unnatural”, some of those links may be downgraded in their value. You shouldn’t ever be penalised for this, but it may make your link building less effective.
• DNS: The servers that host your site and the ones that host your domain, probably also host, or have links with other sites. Now you obviously can’t help it if someone else on your server is doing naughty things, so a penalty is unlikely, but this is the sort of thing that can slow down your progress, the best defence is to simply make sure that everything you do on your site is above board, make it clear that you have no affiliation with any spammers.
• Too many commercial words: Google has acknoweledged that it may consider overly keyword targetted domains as spam indicators, probably because of the number of thin affiliate sites on the net. So having an exact match long tail domain name might not be as important as it once was.

Summary

The main thing to take away from this is that Googles spam criteria are far reaching, but perhaps not as punitive as was previously thought. Unless your site is obviously spammy or throwaway, you will probably be given the benefit of the doubt or at least be given a sort of probationary trial.

The best things you can do to avoid the dreaded sandbox is simply to build your site for your audience. If Google trials your site in a results page or two, it will quickly become obvious whether your site offers real value or not. Thin sites that offer no added value will always to be shown up sooner or later, and the sites that offer the best user experience will always shine through.

So next time your rankings suddenly drop, if you know that you haven’t done anything spammy; Go check out your competition and ask yourself “How can I make my site more useful and valuable than this one”. Simple, right?

Hey there! Welcome to part 2 of my 3 part guide to the minutae of the all powerful Google algorithm. Last time we looked at some lesser known details to do with how links are valued and their contribution to SERP ranks. So today’s lesson is going to be about user behaviour.

Believe it or not, Google’s main concern is actually providing the best experience for it’s users (ie. The folk doing the searching), so it kinda makes sense that they would have a look at what those users are actually doing doesn’t it?

Why user behaviour matters

I like to think about the ranking process in 2 steps: First of all, you need to convince Google that your site is worth listing. This is where your on page optimization and your link building comes in.

At this point your site is a bit of an unknown quantity. But if you play your cards right, sooner or later the search engine will give you a try and put you in some results pages. Sadly though, Google is still just a computer program, it can’t really understand and appreciate the content on your website, only you visitors can do that.

So how can you convince Google that your site is indeed a relevant, good quality resource? By convincing users of the same. If Googles users react well to your listing, that can only be a good thing right?

Click through rate

The first metric available to Google is click through rate… This is a measure of how often your sites listing gets clicked on when it appears in a search results page.

Google will have a good idea how many clicks a listing should get based on where it is. If your listing is getting clicked on loads of times, that seems like a good indication that your listing fits the query pretty well, don’t you think?

So what can you do?

Well, think about how your listing looks when it does appear. Think about the keywords you are targeting and what those searchers are looking for.

Your page title and meta description are your sales pitch, they represent your only opportunity to convince each and every searcher that your web page is the best one to answer their query.

The most obvious things you can do are things like making sure that your keywords are in your title and description – these will appear in bold when they are searched for. Also make sure that you stick to 65 and 165 characters respectively, so that your whole title and description are actually shown.

Time spent “accessing the document”

This is Google’s own wording. Basically what it refers to is how the searcher acts after having clicked on your listing in the SERPS…

Imagine a scenario for instance, a user searches Google for the phrase “bus times”, there are 3 top results to choose from:

Option 1: The searcher clicks on site 1. He can’t see the information he wants, maybe it’s not there, or maybe the site is just too dis-organised. So he returns to Google and does a slightly different search which does lead him to the info he needed.

Option 2: The searcher clicks on site 2. He find’s the info he needed. Now returns to Google and does a different search, for “train times” maybe. It is clear that site 2 answered his query.

Option 3: The searcher clicks on site 3. Again, he find’s the info needed, but he also see’s a helpful link on that site, which helps him with the next stage of planning, so he clicks on it. He doesn’t need to return to Google because his needs have been met.

In a competitive market, which one of these sites appears to be best serving the needs of the user? Site 1 didn’t seem to be relevant for this user. Site 2 was relevant, but site 3 offer even more added value and looks like it might be a really helpful resource.

Changes over time

Google may also track changes in user behaviour over time, so it can see if your listing seems to be gaining or losing popularity. Some websites might be very popular for a brief time if they hit upon a new trend or a hot topic for instance, and Google will be on the lookout for these changes in popularity.

Summary

The lesson here is that user interaction is more important than it ever has been. Links and page optimization remain important factors, but Google is getting better and better at picking out the sites that offer the best value and relevancy and filtering out the sites that are thin and unhelpful.

Your best course of action is simple, optimize your site, build your links, and constantly review your site from the point of view of your audience. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and ask yourself “If I was searching for x keyword, and I found this page, would it solve my query better than one of my competitors sites?”… If the honest answer is no, then you might need a re-think.

To the critics

Some readers will argue that these metrics are open to abuse. That you could for, instance, set up a robot to auto find and click your listing to improve your click through rate, or to click and bounce your competitors listings to push them down. But the fact of the matter is that by the same token, you could waste your competitors advertising spend by auto clicking their Adwords adds too.

Google as a company have litterally billions of dollars riding on their reputation for providing relevant results being impartial. Spam detection and fraud prevention goes in with that, so you can’t bet that there are some serious amounts of money going in to detecting and preventing any strategies that might be used to game the system.

Thanks for reading again, see you next week for part 3: Other metrics.

Today’s post is the first in a series of 3 posts in which I am going to take a closer look at Google and a few of the subtle details that make this search engine what it is.

Be warned, this is (hopefully) going to be pretty in depth stuff, but it should be pretty interesting too, and I think it’s always nice to understand what exactly is going on under the bonnet so to speak, so stick with me…

Right, we all know that links are the mecca of the SEO world don’t we? it’s been drilled into us enough by now… But not all links are equal, there are lots of little factors which figure into how good a link is and how it affects your overall rankings. Let’s have a look shall we?

The Link

We’ll be looking at 3 different aspects of inbound linking; First aspect? The actual link of course! Here are a few things that matter when link building:

Anchor Text

I put this one in for completeness, nothing new here, but in simple terms; if you are trying to rank well for the phrase “power showers” (for example) then having lots of links using text such as “shower supplies” and “power shower units” will be more beneficial than links using the text “shop here” or “buy now”… Pretty common sense right?

Recommendations

Erm, well try to build links with anchor texts that describe our site well, a link with generic anchor text is worth less, so build them if you like, but don’t invest too much time into it, focus your time on the links that give the biggest benefit.

Link Age

Google likes to see permanent, or long term links. If a link has been pointing to your site for a while then it is probably a better indicator of authority than a brand new link that for all Google knows will be gone by next week. That said, all old links were new once.

This is common sense anyway, but this point just goes to show that you should really be looking for links on sites and pages that are going to stay put for the long term. Links that will be pushed into obscurity (or be deleted altogether) as time passes are much less worthwhile.

Position

Google can “understand” the layout of a page, so it know’s which bits are header links, where your side bar is and which areas are reserved for the all important content. Put simply, a link within the body text of a page means something different than a link in the footer etc…

This makes sense really, we all know which bits of the page are the most important, that’s where want our links to go. Again, you can still go for lower value links, but a link in the first paragraph of a page is worth much more than one in the footer for instance, so these are the ones you will want to work hardest for.

The Page

It’s not just about the link ya-know! Google cares about who it is that is doing the linking. The page that contains your link is important too. Here are just a few things that the big G looks for in a linking page.

Authority

The “Good-ness” of the page is the most important bit of course. If you can get a link from the NewYork Times website, that’s going to give you a lot more brownie points than if you get a link from some unheard of site.

Recommendations

You just have to put in the work. You may struggle to get a link from the Times, but try to aim for some well known sites related to your niche. The more important the site, the more effort you should put in. Equally though, look for new, up and coming sites. If you get a link now it might be worth a lot more in the future.

Freshness

Google assigns sites and pages a ‘freshness’ score. This is a more important factor for links in some niches than others. So whilst an old link is usually great, if it is on a ‘stale’ site or page, it may actually begin to lose value. Some niche are much more sensitive to freshness than others, so if you are in a very high speed niche (fashion for example), try to get links on sites which are updated often.

Tip!

If you have any guest posts which have been around for a while, why not offer to update that post? It will freshen up the page and rienforce the authority of your link and probably get your post some extra exposure too.

Page Age

As well as the age of the link, the age of the page matters too. Brand new pages, even on established sites, are untested and need to earn authority. Long standing but regularly updated pages will score big points.

Unfortunately, a lot of (good quality) link building is done on newer pages; but if you can get a well positioned link on an established page, all the better.

Editorial Discretion

Every link you get will be on someone elses site, so it will have to be moderated in some way. Google attempts to get a feel for how picky the site moderator is. If the site owner will link to any riff raff, then your link isn’t going to be worth a whole lot. This is why hard to get links are generally worth the effort.

Here are some rules of thumb. Directories where any link is accepted are worth very little. Blog comments do need some substance, go for blogs where the other comments published have some substance. Basically, if your link is one of few, it’s likely to be a better link.

Overall Link Profile

Ok, so we’ve looked at the link, and where the link is placed. The other factor to consider is how your whole link profile hangs together. Google is very good at spotting patterns, so look out for these nuances.

Accumulation of links

How are your links accumulating? Google will look at how fast your links are growing, spikes in number of links, any loss of links etc…

Quite simply, slow and steady wins the race. Building a lot of links fast is not neccessarily as good as building a few links gradually, especially if you burn out and your link growth drops off. Try to make it look natural and consistent.

Anchor text distribution

Google likes natural links, ie. the types of links that you don’t ask for. They are wise to engineered link profiles and targetted anchor texts.

When you are building links, try to make it look natural, even if you are only targeting 1 keyword, you can still use related keywords in your links. It all helps to build your authority and relevancy scores and you lessen your chances of links being discounted.

Summary

Well, that’s your lot for now. Thanks for sticking with me through all of that. The next part of our 3 part series is going to be about user behaviour. There should be plenty of interesting new ideas for you to have a think about, so I hope you’ll join me again next Monday for that.

Quora is the phenomenon that is appearing on everyones lips when they talk about microblogging and FAQ’s.
We’re going to take a short look at the new phenomenon that is Quora and while I take you through it we will look at it’s potential for link building.

What is Quora?
Quora is a relatively new concept in the question and answer niche of social media that was developed by 2 former facebookers. It is unique in that it allows users to submit questions in a very simple, twitter-esque manner which the Quora community as a whole can then offer answers to.
Once an answer has been submitted, the general Quora populace can then rank answers by way of a simple up and down arrow to determine an answers accuracy, relevance to the question asked and usefulness.

The beauty of Quora is it’s simplicity, if you’ve got a question you really need an answer to it is really just a matter of a few moments to log in and type your question into the ‘unibox’ at the top of the site, and while this seems pretty simple and straightforward, Quora has another trick up its sleeve.

When you enter a question, Quora doesn’t immediately ask that question to the community, first thing it does is search for anyone who may have already submitted your question, or a similar question. This way you might be able to get an answer straight away, and by removing that annoying wait as the community ponders your question Quora suddenly becomes much more useful, and it’s branding as a take on the quick and easy world of microblogging comes into it’s own.

Ok. You’re convinced, Quora is useful, but why use it?

Why not? There are lots of ways to use Quora to your benefit, and, even though quora ‘no-follows’ any links within answers and on profiles, you can still use it, it just takes a little bit more imagination:

Quora is the perfect place to be helpful, if you have an outgoing personality and you enjoy solving peoples problems for them, get yourself on there now.
By offering useful and good quality content you can position yourself in your chosen market and you instantly become an expert in that field, especially as anything you write is visible on your profile, your target audience is, by definition reading your answers and if you put site links and other social media links in your profile you will invariably build traffic.

I have already mentioned that your target audience is already there, and it’s never been more true. Quora allows you to attach your Facebook and Twitter accounts to Quora and link to your contacts already on the service. It forces the social media onto you, making you utilise the networking aspects that Quora has built into it’s structure. As with any social media site, remember to be a human being. There’s nothing worse than having all these networking tools at your fingertips and ignoring them.

The Rules:
The rules of Quora are controlled by the populace, there is nothing that can’t be posted provided it adds value to the site and to the question you’re answering. You can not only vote on content as I discussed earlier, but you can edit it as well, making a not so relevant answer much more relevant and claiming the credit for it.

Make sure you take the time to learn the etiquette however, there is nothing worse than jumping in head first and permanently ruining whatever personal brand you are trying to set up.

Summing up.
So to close, if you’re looking to build links, Quora’s strict policy on nofollowing any external link makes it’s direct link building potential limited, however, connecting with communities builds links in itself and for the purpose of traffic building, Quora can be extremely useful.

Don’t post useless content, and don’t rehash the same data over and over as all this sits on your profile for the world to see.

Do get involved, show the world that you have something interesting to add and you will build your reputation as an authority in addition to traffic to your sites as people look to learn more about you.

My top tip for Quora: Stop reading this blog and get yourself an account.

Start reading and finding your way around and before you know it you’ll be networking and building traffic.