Chapter 6 Search Engine Optimisation, not all links are the same
SEO is a subject that deserves a book or two all by itself. The old days are over and the popular search engines really do a good job of seeking out the websites out there that are genuine authorities on their subjects. Or in the case of Wikipedia, authorities on pretty much any topic you can think of.
This is why we recommend choosing your specialisation and URL wisely, that is the first stage to creeping up the search engine rankings and becoming noticed by web surfers trying to find your products or services.
On-topic content that search engines can read will help, so in the early days of launching your website keep adding content, keep blogging and keep circulating your stuff round social media. Keep the content natural and avoid keyword stuffing (overusing your key search terms in a bid to aid SEO) as this will be obvious to the word counters within the search engines and your efforts will be penalised.
Avoid content voids, pages that are mainly images with minimal text will look bad in the eyes of the search engines, they won’t know what the page is about and will take a dim view. Although the web is now really about video and pictures for human eyes, text is important for the search engines to know what they are looking at.
The next vital ingredient in your site working it’s way up the search engine results pages are LINKS. High quality links are the holy grail of SEO. Gone are the days when you could circulate content on article sharing sites in exchange for a link back to your site, the engines are wise to this practise and a lot of article sites only offer “no follow” links (a link with code that stops the engines from following the link)
So you need to invest serious time and effort into working with other site owners and bloggers to gain link to YOUR site from other HUMAN OWNED and EDITED sites. This is a time consuming practise but ONE decent link from an independently owned and ranked site is worth 200 links from junk sources. You will need to be patient but trust me, if you can add 10 links a month from bloggers and website owners who will swap you a link for some original content then your site will steadily march up the rankings.
When you start don’t waste time hitting up big name sites for a link, work with hobbyists, bloggers, influencers and web site owner / operators who will understand where you are at. This is called blogger outreach and it works. The deal is simple, find websites that have a level of synergy with yours then use the contact us page to write a nice email along the lines of:
Hi ********
I found your site on google last night and really like the work you have done, we run www.door-knobs-online.co.uk and are passionate about all things to do with architecture and self building homes. Could we write you an original piece on selecting high security doors and windows for your self build home or another construction topic of your choosing in exchange for a link back to our website? Let me know and I promise you that the piece will be original and unique to your site.
Kind regards
Mark
This sort of approach will let the webmaster know that you are serious and understand the need to keep content original and unique to the site it is part of.
PLEASE don’t fall for all the cheap link building services out there promising that they will blast your content to over 300 link sharing sites while “spinning” the content to be original each time guaranteeing you high quality google friendly links each time!! It’s not 2005 any more and this just will not work.
More than likely nothing will happen OR worse still your ranking level will drop. With link building, add your site to a few industry specific directories, share some infographics then stick to building quality links. If your content is really good, the people will link to it of their own accord too, this is the ultimate approval of your work, someone saying “click on this and check out what I’ve just found” and that is why search engines like sites that other sites link to.
In webmaster tools you can keep tabs on sites that link to you, as this number creeps up, so will the perceived authority of your website. It must be said that every other website owner will be doing this too, so normal business rules apply, don’t throttle off or the others will catch up.
You can see how your competition is doing by running their url through a back link checker (just search on back link checker) this will let you know how many links they have but not the quality of those links. If you stick to quality link building and your site is optimised in the other ways I have covered you can catch up and out rank your competition with a few months of solid effort. Less if the search terms are not that competitive.
Anchor text, this is a chunk phrase for a simple thing, a simple link is looks like this (the bold text forms the link) :
go check out https://www.door-knobs-online.co.uk
This will link back to your home page AND has your search terms neatly in (one of the reasons good url choice is important)
A more complicated link involving a little code is this
Go check out door knobs online I just bought a great front door knocker from them
Now this type of link looks neater and will be more common as bloggers and webmasters care about presentation. Using a simple piece of html code any text can become a link out to another site. This is called anchor text is simply the chunk of text that people can click on.
Internal links:
These only require you to cooperate with yourself, make sure your pages link to each other using natural anchor text that describes the page the link is heading to. This will help the engines crawl your site and to know what it is about. We relaunched one of our sites onto a new platform losing a lot of internal links in the process. The homepage hung onto it’s ranking well, while every internal page dropped away in the SERPs cutting our organic traffic in half!
We spotted the problem quickly and recovered the situation by adding internal links from one page to another.
Bit of a scare but everything can be fixed if you know what you’re looking for!
So link from your blog posts to your other blog posts and into your main site and from page to page and department to department, this will help readers and search engine crawlers navigate round your site. You can steer your own internal linking to focus your SEO project towards certain products or departments that make the most commercial sense to you. For example if you have a retail website that stocks a lot low margin products that pad it out while a few core products you import direct you can funnel links towards these higher margin products by making your internal links point to them. This will also help make the website rank well for these specific products too.
Building a search engine friendly website is time consuming, the purpose of this guide it to help you use your time well and not waste it. Quality link building is time well spent.
A quick word here on my experiences with the SEO industry, over the years I have paid various monthly retainers to various marketing companies with surprisingly consistent results. All except one small three person firm delivered disappointing results, sometimes even losing ranking on the site they were working on. Let me tell here why I think that happens.
A lot of time consuming fiddling goes on which will just not effect much at all, secondly link building is hard and time consuming and it seems that most SEO companies just aren’t very good at it yet.
Either they are slow to catch on or they think there is an easier way.
For me, the ideal SEO company would have a network of privateer blog owners on their books so they could easily add quality links to any new site they were working on, driving that site up the rankings. Instead they tend to talk big and deliver small. We tasked one small SEO firm to build links only and our site marched up the SERPs very reliably.
BE CAREFUL with SEO firms as they usually tie you in for 6 months or more, it can be very frustrating and expensive, imagine paying money out while you watch your website fall down the rankings.
This goes back to you being the expert in your field, if you write a blog post on your profession it will be insightful and up to date. If a writer within an SEO firm pens a blog post on your behalf it may be the first time they’ve ever even thought about your specialisation. Its stands to reason that your blog post will be better and won’t take you long to write either.
In defence of SEO companies it is a tricky industry to be involved in because the goalposts shift all the time and customer expectation is high that results will come quickly. The key with SEO is to know what you are doing, invest your time wisely and be patient. The results will come.
The real pay off on the internet is if your content is really compelling like the electric car company Tesla or the current King of Youtube Casey Neistat no SEO is required, people will just naturally link to and share your stuff.
If you think about your content like that, and make genuinely stunning content then the SEO load can be lightened. Obviously building a 600HP electric car from scratch then housing it all in a giga-factory is all pretty interesting stuff, but you know what I mean, be cool, be funny, be original and the secret sauce of the internet will work for you!
Link on my fine friends, and remember this one high quality link is worth 300 nonsense ones.