Website Link Building

You do have one, don’t you? If you have a website, you should be working every day on building relevant links to your website. Contribute in forums, comment on blogs, write your own blog (that links to your site) and market that too. Write an article, a guide, a product review – and link to your website. Keep it focused on the subject of your website / company and keep going…

If you post a comment, article etc, Tweet it – get that exposure. Inbound links to your website are so important, it cannot be understated. You may have to think outside the box to build those links.

Start with a list of your online competitors and, in Google, type ‘links:www.competitorwebsite.com” (replace that with the name of your competitors website). Find out who’s linking to them and see if you can get a link there too, can you see what your competitors are doing from this?

Use Google Reader, or other newsreading software, to follow blogs, Google news etc. Comment on articles (not forgetting to provide your link). Some websites have the ‘nofollow’ attribute set so your rankings won’t benefit, but if its relevant and popular, that won’t stop you getting additional traffic you didn’t have before will it?

Tweet everything you do, don’t forget to add the personal touch. Build up your Twitter following.

Internet marketing is such a huge subject, which you really need to think about and be pro-active about. Could you build one link per day? Sure you can. If you can’t, should you be paying someone to perform these activities for you? What’s the ROI like? Potentially very big!

Content is the primary focus for SEO, good quality, well structured, original content will do more to enhance the performance of a website in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) than anything else on its own. Following these steps will help you to structure and author your content.

Website Structure

When planning the content for a website, or even part of a website, you are looking to build a theme to increase relevance of the sections of a site. Before writing the content, you should consider producing a simple sitemap of the content you will be preparing and organising it so that all related information ‘links in’ appropriately. In the case of a conferencing business, consider:

Hotel Rooms

- Basic Rooms

- Double Rooms

- Suites

Conferencing

- Conferencing Suites

- Meeting Rooms

- Catering

Transport

- Rail Links

- Bus Links

Using the above example: Everything under hotel rooms is related to hotels, conferencing is related to conferencing and everything under transport is related to transport. If you were to mix these up, the ‘theme’ would be diluted with irrelevant information. There isn’t a specific right or wrong way to set out your site structure, it’s just worth considering this when you’re deciding where to put you content.

Page Titles

The title will be displayed in Google’s organic listings in the search engine and also in the browser title bar when a visitor goes to the page.

Page titles are really important. Keep them short and use the appropriate keywords / phrases and related phrases in your pages. Consider:

a) Hotel Norwich

b) Red Lion Hotel and Conferencing suite : Hotel, Conferencing, meetings, Norwich City Centre

If you’re optimising for ‘Hotel Norwich’ then b) would not be a good choice. The words are in there but totally saturated by other words and phrases.

Each page must have its own title that is short, descriptive and unique. Don’t be tempted to reuse a title. The best titles are: page specific, include the right keywords, short and in keeping with the ‘theme’ of the site or section of the site.

Page Description

This will be used in the Description Meta Tag. It should be short (absolute maximum 150 characters). Write it to be readable, avoid repeating words or producing a list of words. Keep it within the site theme, page specific and unique. Try to use your main keywords.

Page Content

When writing content for a page, you need to use all the appropriate keywords within the page to ensure you get most use from them. Try to also use different abbreviations and semantically similar words. Google utilises Latent Symantec Indexing – which will analyse the content of your page and see which words are semantically close to each other.

Each page on the site should have different keywords that it will target. Avoid keyword stuffing to force one phrase throughout a page. Utilise the page to help build the theme for other pages.  Try to use keywords at the start and the end of the article.

Write for humans, not search engines. There isn’t much point getting people to your site and then having them leave, as they can’t make head or tail of what it’s about.

Article length is something of constant debate. My personal view is 250 – 450 words per article, if the article needs to be longer, find some way of breaking it at 300ish words and continuing it on another page.

Bold words may be used to highlight things but don’t overdo it or it becomes difficult to read. Think about linking to other pages internally using keywords. Don’t use ‘Click here’ – use something like ‘For more information about Hotel Rooms in Norwich’.

Random Thoughts

Don’t copy content from elsewhere, you’ll get massively penalised. If you have the same thing to say as someone else, re-write it – using your keywords.

Don’t forget to spell and grammar check.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) isn’t difficult at all, in fact it’s a straight forward thing to do. Imagine for a minute, if you will, you have just written an essay on French Cheeses. What title would you give it? What summary would you give it? Each picture in the article will need a title too, won’t it? If lot’s of people like your essay, they’ll tell others about it and then you’ll have more people read your essay won’t you? So there you have it, the essence of basic SEO, tell people what your page is about, they’ll find it and link to it…..if it’s “relevant”.

OK, so it gets more complicated than the above example but if you were to do these things, Search Engines will like you. Google released a document in November of 2008 which lays out in simple English the basics of SEO. So a good starting point is the Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.

We spend a lot of time talking to people about SEO, the best thing (in my opinion) to do for SEO is create content, describe that content in the meta information, write relevant articles and learn how to share them. How did you find this page? Did you read about it in a Tweet? Did you get here from the Blue Lobster Website? Did I tell you about it and then you came to look? Will you be telling others about it or linking to it from your website? Did you hear about it from someone else? Did you notice I linked to another website from this post whilst talking about SEO, articles, content and websites? Did I just create a relevant link? Yep! Understand it yet?