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 cast its ‘vote’ in your favour. Strong links such as these mean that your website must be of a suitable quality in order to get them in the first place, thus your website will be looked upon favourably by Google.

However, when your link profile is made up from ostensibly poor quality websites, with little or no content that exists purely to offer links, then the nature of how those links was obtained becomes obvious.

For example, we looked at the backlinks of a particular website (we won’t mention what website it is, or who the SEO company involved is) but we found the following websites within its link profile:

http://www.linaskvallsbok.se
http://www.drogalivsmedel.se
http://www.ljuvadofter.se

These websites (and many others linking to the site in question) are foreign TLDs (top level domains) – these ones in particular being from Sweden. This in itself should be considered a red flag, because a UK website can expect to naturally attract UK links – not links from foreign websites. If a website has predominantly foreign websites show up in its link profile, there is usually a good reason for this – such as paid links.

Now, when you look at the websites in question, you’ll see that they all follow the same pattern, existing purely to provide links for clients of the SEO company, and they look EXACTLY the same. Don’t think for a moment that Google won’t notice this, as it’s glaring obvious for all concerned. A link profile containing links such as this makes it clear where the links have come from, and the rankings of the websites being linked to will suffer as a consequence.

If you’re interested, you can find the websites that link to your site by using Yahoo’s Site Explorer, here. Just enter your website address and look at the ‘inlinks’ tab. Remember to select ‘except from this domain’ to just show the links from other websites. If the links being shown are from low quality websites, you should probably start to worry.

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 aware of what a fully-bought link profile can do to a site.

Part of the problem with paid links is that a site can largely get away with them, for a time. Many sites with entirely bought profiles survive and prosper… until the day when they don’t. Google doesn’t always immediately detect paid profiles, but when Google does become wise to a site that has done nothing more than pay for its links, the reaction from Google is very nasty. A sudden drop in rankings can be attributed to an all-paid link profile being detected, and links should be one of the areas to look at if your rankings take a dive.

A good link profile is one that contains links from high-quality, very relevant websites. It’s always a good idea to have natural links in your profile, even if you have gone down the paid link route. Do what you can to develop relationships for link building when you engage in SEO.

No, we’re not referring to the poet, we’re referring to the more famous Sam Beckett. When you perform a Google Image Search for the name you’re presented with photographs of Scott Bakula from the 1980s, rather than a black and white bloke with a beard; the real Sam Beckett.

Back in the 80s Sam Beckett was a time traveller on a TV series called Quantum Leap. Every episode would see Sam leap into the body of someone new, somewhere (and some when) within his own lifetime. He couldn’t control the leaps and every time he did leap he had to change history for the better before he would leap out, and on to the next person – hoping each time that his next leap would be his leap home, etc etc.

On his travels through time Sam was aided by Al (Dean Stockwell), who appeared as a hologram that only Sam could see. Al was really in the future, where the people who Sam leaped into would appear while Sam possessed their bodies in the past. Al would advise Sam on what he thought he needed to change in order to leap out, guided by the super computer named Ziggy.

It all sounds very complicated, but really it’s not. Sam explained the science behind Quantum Leap in several different episodes, and it follows the principals of string theory. If you imagine your life as a piece of string, with a beginning and an end, your life will pass along it in a linear fashion. However, if you scrunch up the string in your hand, so that many different parts of it are touching, you can leap between different parts of your life, and different times in your life. That’s what Sam did, he would ‘leap’ to different times within his own lifespan.

The same principal applies to the Internet. While a person’s journey through the Internet may be linear in the sense that they pass from one website to another, it isn’t linear at all because many websites link to each other, back to themselves and off to dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of other websites. The Internet is a complicated, intricate stringy thing that links all over the place, allowing users to ‘leap’ from one website to another. While the user may set out with a plan of where they want to go, they will rarely follow that plan as they pass through the Internet, instead being guided by what they see, what they read and what links they find.

Just like Sam Beckett, they need to complete a task before they ‘leap’ onto the next site. This task, unlike Sam’s, isn’t necessarily to ‘put right what once went wrong’, it is more likely to be to find some information, complete a transaction, find the answer to a question or merely to find a link that looks interesting.

What you need to do is to ensure that as many opportunities as possible for them to ‘leap’ to your website exist and, once there, that opportunities also exist for them to leap around within your website, and complete the task that you want them to, before they leap away to another site.

Remember that, just like Sam Beckett, each user is looking for the leap home. This doesn’t mean they’re looking for their homepage, or their Facebook page, but instead they’re looking for the site that will finish their browsing for that session, or day. Whatever website they finish on, will be their leap home – back to the real world. You want them to find your website before their leap home.

The more links you have online, the more content you have on your own website and the more links you have on your own site linking back to relevant sections, the better placed your website will be to receive one of these ‘leapers’.

Oh boy!

Review sites can be handy for search engine optimisation because they often allow a link to the reviewed site. If the review site has a good reputation, this link can be quite valuable. They also allow your business name to be associated with relevant keywords. On top of this, you get positive information about your site distributed around the net.

Here are some tips on using these review sites for SEO:

1. Encourage your site’s users to place the review. There’s nothing more shaming than being caught out placing your own review on a site. It happens all the time, and it’s difficult to recover from, reputation-wise. A lot of businesses take this option when trying to generate reviews as part of their off-page SEO plan, but there is a simple way to get genuine reviews: ask for them.

2. Think outside the box. It’s a good idea to go for the main review sites in your industry, but have a look at specialist sites as well. There should be a number of sites you can use as a resource. Don’t forget to look at the local angle as well – Google Local can be a good place to be featured.

3. Don’t overdo it. A lot of businesses get into trouble with review sites because every single review is 100% positive. This also looks very suspicious, and is even something that some SEO companies do for their clients, so beware of that too.

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 they’re coming from and how many they have. There will be a number of sites in your competitors’ like profiles that may also be willing to link to you. When looking at your competitors, think about which sites are going to be open to your approach.

Another area in which competitors’ links are helpful is in covering broken links. If your competitors have got at all sloppy about keeping contact with their link partners, you should be able to find a couple of broken links directed at their site. If these links were organic and coming from sites that have a genuine interest in your industry, the providers may be happy to have you approach them in order to replace the broken link to your competitor, with a live one for you.

Site owners can’t use psychic powers to meet user needs, but there are clues. The page the user is coming from and the keywords used in the link are two solid factors that can tell you what a user is looking for when they come to your site. These things will tell you which page of your site is best suited for that user. Choosing the right landing page can make a huge difference to a site’s retention rate, conversions and return traffic.

Businesses tend to be creatures of habit, particularly when it comes to their websites. Business owners get into the habit of checking in on the website every so often, changing things only when absolutely necessary. SEO comes as a bit of a surprise, but some of the old business habits tend to stay with the site throughout search engine optimisation. Using the same old landing page is one of these frequently unbroken habits.

When you SEO, you can’t afford to assume that the homepage is the best page for every internet user to land on, and link to it out of habit. The possibility that different groups of users will appreciate different pages doesn’t occur to many business owners, and they lose out. Don’t forget to address your landing pages as part of your SEO and link building strategies.

Content and links are two products offered by many SEO companies, with many offering the ‘paid’ variety of links. In actual fact, when you pay for links you’re more often than not actually ‘renting’ them, which means when you cease paying your SEO company, the links are removed, and your website dips in the rankings. This is why content is far more important, valuable and powerful than links. While links that are paid for are rented, and frequently on irrelevant websites (relevancy is one of the most important parts of how powerful a link to your website may be) links that are acquired through content tend to be relevant, and permanent.

Good quality attracts links, meaning that your website is building (not buying, or renting) links that will last forever – or for as long as the website in question remains active. Content also allows you to gain links for your website that you would otherwise never be able to get, certainly not through paying for them at least.

For example, a content piece that I wrote some years ago earned a link from the Hitwise blog, and that’s a link from an extremely powerful website that covers Internet marketing trends – a link that you could never, ever buy.

In addition to gaining links through content (and we really do mean good quality content here, we’ll come onto this in a minute) content also provides something extra that you could never hope to achieve through links – and that’s enquiries driven through your content.

For example, some years ago I wrote an article about how Facebook had taken over from Friends Reunited, and how the latter had made Internet marketing mistakes that led to its demise. This caused a reporter from Sky News to get in touch and led to my being quoted on a news article on their website, here:

“When Facebook (and to a lesser extent MySpace before it) came along, they gave all of that functionality for free,” points out creative developer Darren Jamieson.

“Friends Reunited should have switched to a free model years ago, but failed to do so, so lost the market share that they had.”

Had it not been for content, Sky News would have never found us while researching the news item.

Content written by us at StuckOn has also led to interviews and quotes being given for TV programmes, assistance being sought by researchers for shows such as BBC Watchdog (who were using Google to look for information on the subject, of course) and naturally new clients and customers finding the websites through the content – something that would never happen through link buying.

But, as mentioned earlier, the content needs to be of a high quality. More than this, it needs to be interesting, unique and relevant. There’s something else though; there’s no use writing content with a view to selling your products and services. When you write content for your website you want people to read it, you want them to pass it on, and you want them to link to it. They will not do this if your content is an advert, or is stuffed with keywords for your website.

How you write your content is paramount to its success, and filling it with industry buzz terms, obvious keyword stuffing or mentions of your company name in every post will simply serve to put people off. Only the best content gets picked up, linked to and ranks within Google for relevant search terms. The best content will ‘kick the ass’ of paid links every day of the week.

Widgets became very popular as a way of distributing links and spreading information about a site. It’s easy to understand why. A widget is basically any piece of code that can run a small application independently upon a page. All of the useful little tools that you see around the net, all of the clocks and gadgets, all of the badges, are all widgets. They’re very attractive, and they’re very easy to create.

The area which caused trouble was the embedded links contained within widgets. Site owners would embed links in their widgets for their off-page search engine optimisation. The more successful widgets became attractive to other site owners who would then pay to have their link embedded instead. It got messy. Google became aware of this and started to panic about spam and paid links.

Site owners continue to embed links in widgets, and this continues to be accepted as a white-hat practice of SEO, as long as the recipient is aware of the link’s existence. The line appears to be crossed when the widget’s purpose has nothing to do with your site. Google defines off-topic widgets as spam. If you’re using widgets as part of your off-page SEO, watch your topics for safety and make sure that your widgets are relevant.