Links are widely recognised as one of the most important factors to your website’s improved search engine rankings. The more links you have (assuming they’re from good quality, relevant websites – and we can’t stress that enough) the more Google will look upon your website in the same manner as a father would look upon his child as he takes his first steps.

Sickly golden syrup analogy aside, the point still stands. If your website has loads of good quality links from similar websites, your website will perform better. With that in mind, one of the best ways to increase the number of links to your website is by commenting on the blog posts of other websites within your industry, adding a link to your own site within the URL field.

Now, this raises one or two important points – points that must first be made clear before you rush off and start spamming the bejesus out of your competitors.

Firstly, while the anchor text used within a link is important in SEO (the text used for the link itself), and the name you add when you post a comment becomes the actual link text, your name should (more…)

There are many SEO companies, despite Google’s crackdowns, who still insist on buying low quality links for their clients. Whenever they sign-up a new SEO client they immediately begin buying links on low quality, obviously spam filled websites – or adding links to low quality websites that they own themselves. This increases the number of links that the website in question has, thus increasing their rankings – for a short while at least. The problem is that low quality links won’t aid your rankings in the long term, and it’s oh so easy to spot.

If anyone can find out where your links are coming from, and how poor in quality they are, then Google (with all of its power over the Internet) can easily detect the sources of your links also – and Google isn’t very forgiving.

So what do we mean by low quality, and why is it bad for your rankings?

Google started the whole concept of PageRank itself, and worked out that the more websites that link to yours, the more important your website must be, and the better it should rank. Of course in doing so, Google opened up the whole process for dodgy SEO companies to attempt to build links en masse for clients, thus exposing the weaknesses in Google’s ploy.

Good quality, strong links are good for your website because it means that a strong website has (more…)

A good link profile usually makes for a good PageRank, and for a good spot in the search engine results pages for relevant searches. Link building is one of the current must-haves for an effective SEO plan. Many site owners get around the problem of finding links by simply buying them from link suppliers, and for the most part this does no real harm, as paid links does give you a boost in the search engines. When your link profile is entirely made up from paid links however, you’d better watch out.

Paid linking is a tricky area of SEO. Many search engine optimisation experts still approve of the odd paid link here and there. Others are entirely against them and would never advocate the use of paid links on the grounds that the search engines disapprove. Whether you buy some of your links or decide to go entirely natural, it’s important to be (more…)

As you will know if you’ve been reading up on search engine optimisation and competing sites, your competitors can be very helpful in the world of SEO. They can provide you with all sorts of ideas for your own website’s optimisation, can be a source of keywords and can even guide you away from mistakes to make. Of course, the best part is that your competitors don’t know they’re doing any of these things for you. Another area in which competitors can be unknowingly helpful is with link building.

Link building is a difficult task, and one that many site owners put off. It’s difficult to get a start with building links, particularly if you’re optimising for yourself. It’s one of the areas in which having an SEO company on board can be helpful. It’s also an area in which analysing your competitors’ websites is very helpful indeed.

Most SEO experts will analyse competitor sites for basic hints as to backlinks, such as where (more…)