If you search for the phrase “childrens physio” on Google UK, you will notice the web site in the second position has a blue link that says “Welcome” and the fourth website has a link called “Untitled Document”:

“Why is that important?”, you may ask. Well, that blue text is the Title Tag of the page that Google is linking to in the search results.

Most search engine optimisation experts agree that the Title Tag is the single most important element of on-page search engine optimisation,that is to say it is the most important indexing signal on your web pages.  Well optimised pages will have appropriate keywords in their Title Tags.   I’ve written a set of tips to help you understand Title Tags, how important they are, and how to write good Title Tags.

However, if that is true, how come two of the top four results for [childrens physio] don’t have the keywords in their Title Tags?

The answer comes down to my emphasis on the phrase “on-page factors” – as you might expect, there are “off-page factors” too, which essentially come down to your domain name and the links you have pointing to your website. This is the explanation for the [childrens physio] search results – Google uses the links to a website as the primary ranking factor, so the Title Tag comes a distant second in terms of importance.

Google is using the links to these websites as “votes” to understand whether other people think they are a useful resource and what the resource is about. Incoming links are a sign of usefulness, and the words people use in the link (called “anchor text”) helps Google to understand that the site is about.

So the sites with “Welcome” and “Untitled Document” as their Title Tags, despite breaking one of the fundamental rules of search engine optimisation, are still ranking well because of the links they have pointing to their sites.

Except, in this particular example, links are not what are causing the high rankings, either. One of the sites has a single, solitary link, whilst the other has none at all and indeed the site itself is a “coming soon” page. So what does that tell us? Links don’t matter either!?

Well, the reality of the situation is that [childrens physio] isn’t a very competitive search term. None of the sites in the top 5 results have many links at all and most of the pages in the top 10 aren’t particularly well-optimised for that phrase. So what’s happening?

The answer must be the domain names of these websites: childrensphysio.com and childrensphysio.net. They both match our search term exactly. In the absence of any particularly well-optimised (i.e. “relevant”) pages for this phrase, Google has decided that sites called “childrens physio” are some of the best matches for what we’re looking for.

Does that change my opinion on the importance of Title Tags and links to your website? Frankly, no. They are both extremely important factors in search engine optimisation and assuming that your market is a little more competitive than [childrens physio], you won’t get very far without them.

Contact me to find out about our search engine optimisation packages, which include on-page optimisation and link building.

Link building is the magic fairy dust of search engine optimisation. How hard can it be? Actually, it’s pretty darn hard and link building tips are always welcome.

Last week I attended Ian Lockwood’s  “Top Link Building Strategies” breakfast briefing and he’s agreed to write up a recap of his top 5 recommendations.

1.  Get listed in Local Business Directories

These listings will improve your visibility in the Google Local search results, and provide valuable signals as to the location of your businesss.  They also help with general link building.  We’re only looking for high quality directories, with links that are indexed by Google.  As a word of warning, many of these will result in telephone sales calls (just say No).

http://www.accessplace.com/
http://www.zibb.com/
http://www.bizwiki.co.uk/
http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/
http://www.shoplocally.co.uk
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/
http://www.uk-local-search.co.uk/
http://www.bview.co.uk/
http://www.applegate.co.uk

2.  Get Testimonials.

So easy, this one. Think of all the suppliers you use who have a website, who you would recommend to others. Offer them a testimonial and ask that they link to your website, so that their visitors will know it’s a genuine testimonial.

3.  Run a Competition

Why not run a competition to link to your site? Offer a reasonable prize and a time limit on entries, then promote it to relevant websites, forums and blogs. It’s a good idea to post about the competition on your blog too, so people can leave comments with links to their pages when they’ve entered. Remember to state who the winner is when it’s over, otherwise you’ll get lots of emails!

4.  Offer Your Product or Service for Review.

This requires a bit of research first, as you will need to find websites who will review the type of product or service you offer. Assuming you can find some, why not ask them to review it in return for a free product/service? They will link to your site as part of the review.

5.  Get Links from Other Regional Businesses.

Whilst reciprocal links are, in the main, pretty useless for SEO, reciprocal links from other businesses just like yours will still carry weight. Why? Because they’re about exactly the same subject! Google expects sites about the same topics to be linked together, so these links still count. If you only operate within a particular geographic area (locally, nationally or internationally), why not search out companies doing the same thing in non-competing areas and ask to swap links? It’s a win-win, you just have to explain the importance of links to SEO, if they don’t already know.

Ian also talked about a number of other tips, including asking for links on your website (best done if you incentivise people through a free gift or money off coupon), writing guest posts or articles for other peoples’ websites and creating useful resources related to your business, which you can then promote and get links to.

If you are looking for other link building ideas, why not take a look at my blog archive of link building ideas.

And finally, I do offer a link building service so get in touch and we can discuss your requirements

Is it worth buying a link building package from an SEO company?

My maibox is awash with spam emails from Indian companies selling me a link building service. But today, my daily does of spam was accompanied by a rather sad little Tweet saying a Nottingham search marketing professional had been made redundant from her local web design agency.

And she was contemplating the influx of cheap SEO services from India.  Indeed, go to Google and search for SEO India and you’ll find dozens of companies advertising cheap link building packages.

Small businesses are tempted to buy these cheap services, but there is nothing new under the sun, and as they say “you get what you pay for.”  Cheap service could well mean cheap links, which  won’t help your rankings, and could possible do harm.

We all know that inbound links influence your rankings in Google.  But it isn’t the quantity of links, it’s the quality that does the influencing.

Every week I see examples of small business web sites that are ranking well in Google for their desired key phrases, they haven’t been playing the SEO game, and the site has only a few inbound links.  Lurking in that list of links, however, will be the one or two golden links that are doing all the influencing of the results:  trustworthy, authoritative, relevant sites linking in.  These links arise naturally because of the business’ position in the community.

Will an SEO consultant in India be able to get you links from your local borough council?  From your local university?  From your professional association or accrediting bodies?  Will the get you coverage in the BBC or Forbes or your professional press?

Be as careful in making the decision to use an Indian SEO company, as you would be careful in buying any service in the UK.

They all describe themselves as providing “ethical link building” – which should alert you to the fact that unethical link building will do more harm than good.

A quick survey of clients listed on some Indian firms are showing potentially poor quality link building activities. I took a look at their reference sites, and here is an example of the kinds of reciprocal links pages they are currently building.  Think nasty, cheap link exchanging at its worst:

India Link Building SEO service

My advice? Buyer Beware.

Google is looking for high quality links, and my first port of call would be to get a through understanding of the authoritative sites in your sector. Getting just a few perfect links will far outweigh dozens or hundreds of scammy, useless links.  You are probably better off using a professional, local SEO for just a few hours than getting into a long term contract with an offshore SEO firm.

Use a PR agency that has a sound understanding of how Google works to improve your profile, and drive visitors and links at the same time.  I believe PR agencies are better at link building than web designers and more likely to get you those all important quality links than a foreign agency.

And finally, remember that Google has a long memory.  What might be considered “ethical” but sailing close to the wind might get you slapped or banned by Google as it tweaks and adjusts its ranking algorithm.

Successful websites need to get alot of visitors, and alot of your visitors should be coming from search engines, particularly Google.

I’m often asked why a site isn’t ranking well in the websites, or why they’re getting the wrong kind of visitors.

In short:  what’s wrong with my website?

I want to talk about 3 problem scenarios that are typical for small business websites:  that they’re not ranking well in Google, that visitors just bounce right off the site, or that they’re getting the wrong kind of visitors.

1.  I’m not ranking well for my key phrases

Google is constantly tweaking the search engine results, testing sites for their quality and relevance.  These quality signals are coming from the content on your site, where your website fits in the rich mesh of links that Google trusts, and the behaviour of the visitors searching for and visiting your site.

If your site is not ranking well, then you need to review these factors:

Check the content on your website.  You want to be looking out for these poor quality signals:

• Duplicate Title tags used across multiple web pages
• Duplicate Meta description tags
• Duplicate content, either duplicated pages, or pages with duplicated elements such as large menus
• Pages with little or no meaningful content
• Keyword Diarrhea, also known as keyword stuffing, which applies to Title tags, Alt tags, meta tags
• Keyword rich content contained in decorative graphic images
• No coherent keyword strategy, often referred to as keyword density
• Pure keyword stuffing, without using keywords within a meaningful context

Check that your inbound linking strategy is delivering quality, topical links.  You want to be looking out for these danger signals:

• You’re purchasing links from a link brokerage service
• You have a high proportion of reciprocal links
• Your recipricoal links are not with quality, relevant, topical websites
• You don’t have outbound links to those authorative, quality sites
• You have acquired a flood of inbound links, and then just as quickly stopped link building

2.  I’m getting lots of visitors, but they bounce straight off the site

Your web analytics software will let you know what proportion of your visitors look at just one page of your website, and then decide to leave straight away.  Your bounce rate is a good measure of what kind of first impression your site is making, and an indicator of the quality of your site.

Google make it clear that Bounce Rate is an important contributor to their AdWords quality score, and I think it is reasonable to assume (and I’m only assuming) that bounce rate is also taken into consideration when determining your search engine rankings.

So a bad (high) bounce rate is a double whammy:  you are losing visitors after just one page view, and their decision to leave your site may have an negative effect on your rankings.

You need to figure out what your visitor’s don’t like about your site.  Of course, it may be that your site is perfect and they found exactly what they wanted in a single page.  Bravo for you, and dream on.  For the rest of us, it means checking:

• that the design of the site reflects your business core values.  Does your website look professional, or home made?
• that your site looks trustworthy, someone I want to give my money to?
• that your site loads quickly
• that the navigation is clear and easy to use

3.  I’m getting lots of visitors, but no buyers

Once upon a time I wrote an article about the mystery canoeist who faked his death and went to Panama with his wife Pam.  I wanted to highlight the fact their fakery was discovered by a casual searcher discovering their photograph on Google Images, and the importance of image search.

My article, John and Anne Move to Panama ranks highly in Google for people searching for John and Anne, is the landing page for many thousands of Google searchers, and it’s even been translated into Russian.

But it hasn’t earned me a penny.  It’s a badly optimised page delivering irrelevant traffic.  But it is useful as an example in my workshops!

If you’re getting lots of visitors, but no buyers,then check your web analytics to see if you are receiving traffic for irrelevant key phrases.  If you are, then:

• amend the culprit pages to have more appropriate keyword rich text in the Title Tags, headings, body copy and all the other relevant places on the page
• generate more content relevant to your key theme
• work on getting high quality inbound links from appropriate websites
• and accept the fact that you will be getting a proportion of irrelevant traffic

So, if you are struggling with your rankings, your visitor behaviour, or getting the right kinds of visitors then these are some suggestions to help you out.

Good luck!

.

Your web page rankings in the search engines is a function of the quality, quantity, and relevancy of other websites that link to you.

One common strategy to boost your number of links is to build reciprocal links; that is to say, a swapping arrangement where I will link to you, if you give me a link back.

There is much debate as to whether Google approves of reciprocal links or not. The answer to whether reciprocal links are good or bad is it depends.

Good reciprocal links are those links where we should link to each other naturally. If your business is about Renewable Energy then you are very likely to be linking to other green energy sites, solar power websites and the like. And it is only natural and logical that these sites are going to link back you.

High ranking renewable energy sites are very likely indeed to have a high proportion of reciprocal links with other energy sites. They all like to link to each other, and they provide the links in the authentic spirit of signposting other useful resources to their visitors.

Bad reciprocal links are links coming from irrelevant sites that have nothing to do with your business. Particularly worthless links are coming from spammy sites that will give absolutely anybody a link in return for a link back.

Some characteristics of good reciprocal links are:

• the site will be in the same topical area of my website
• the site will be indexed by Google, especially the specific page containing the link to my site
• the site will have a good Google Page Rank
• the site will not have hundreds of links on its linking page
• the site will have an element of moderation, meaning it is not a”free for all” links page

When seeking reciprocal links with suitable partners, keep in mind:

• that you might want to ask your linking partner to link to a specific internal page on your website, for instance you might ask the solar specialist website to link directly to your solar energy page
• that you will want to ask the linking partner to include keyword rich anchor text in the link to your site
• that your link is embedded in some text that is relevant to your business area

Want to know more? You might also like to take a look at these articles:

Getting Perfect Inbound Links

Commercial Link Building Services

Backlink Checking Tools

Who is a failure? According to Google, it’s George Bush:

Yup, Googlebombs are back.

A Googlebomb is a deliberate effort to force a website to the top of the search results for an inappropriate phrase by manipulating the inbound links.

Quite simply, there will a significant number of websites sending links to the White House having anchor text with the concept of failure in it. This is an example of such a link: failure.

A year ago I wrote how Google was diffusing the Googlebomb phenomenon, but clearly it lives on. Google occasionally will diffuse a Googlebomb, removing the hapless site from the top of the rankings.

It probably isn’t simply a case of anchor text any more, but also the context and relevancy of the articles pointing to the White House. And there have been some genuine White House failures here and there, eh?

What does this all mean for us as small businesses?

You need to get links to your website containing keyword rich anchor text. Typically, inbound links will have your company name, or your website address as the anchor text.

Your keyword rich link will say Search Engine Optimisation Nottingham instead of Hallam Communications.

Building high quality, relevant links to your website is a tough job, and I’m often asked for tips to make the task easier.

My advice: Spy on your competition.

There are free tools out there like Yahoo! Site Explorer which allows you to discover the links coming into your competitors’ successful websites.

However, many free services provide you with just the quantity of links, with no indication of quality. They do not provide you with the information you need to evaluate the value of a link:

• Google Page Rank
• Whether the specific page is indexed by Google
• The age of the website (older generally being better)
• Whether the inbound linking pages have duplicate IP addresses
• The relevancy of the linking page to your business
• Anchor text of the link
• How many other outbound links there are on the page
• The use “No Follow” which means the link has no value to your site

I strongly recommend using a commercial link analysis tool like SEO Elite or Axandra iBusiness Promoter.

SEO Elite costs US$167 and Axandra costs 250 euros (and yes, these are affiliate links, and thank you in advance for helping me to buy new shoes for my children.)

SEO Elite provides a quick and simple interface that allows you to get the detailed information you need to analyse inbound links. Axandra offers more functionality,

There are other free tools out there that you might also like to take a look at, but I find these aren’t available in such a reliable and effective way:

Link Diagnosis
iWebTool Backlink Checker

There are unscrupulous search engine optimisation companies out there, and you must recognise their behaviour, and avoid them.

One tactic that is still going strong is selling a link building service that comprises sending out bulk spam link requests. It’s bad practice, but lots of small businesses are still falling for the con.

Here’s an example of what one looks like:

Why are spamming link building services like this likely to do more harm then good?

• they are using software that scans through the web, scraping up random email addresses to generate link requests. Fundamentally you are paying the SEO to generate email spam that harm’s your company’s good reputation
• you are actually paying them your hard earned cash to get utterly irrelevant websites to link to your site
• they are probably getting links from sites that are never going to generate a single click or enquiry to your site
• they are getting links on “Links” pages that have dozens or even hundreds of other random company links
• and you are certainly going to do more good linking to them then you are ever going to get in the link back

And my personal view of the particular company selling this service?

The SEO company sending the spam mail has a website Google Page rank of big fat zero.

They are hiding behind a post office box address and an 0845 number.

The SEO company has been reported as a spammer by Scamdex an email scam, fraud and phishing resource

And other people are complaining about the SEO company’s idiotic link building activities

So, if you are considering using one of these services be sure to check the SEO company’s reputation, and the kind of practices they use.

And don’t ever reply to any of these link reciprocating requests!

Inbound links worry my customers. I hear the same questions over and over again:

I need links. What is a quality inbound link? And how do I get them? And why is it so hard to do?.

And my answer to you is: If it were easy, I would be a rich woman by now.

Getting high quality links is hard work, and that’s why Google values quality links so highly.

My advice to you always is to get a few perfectly formed links, which are infinitely more valuable than a bunch of rubbish links.

Here’s my Top 10 Tips for good quality links:

1. Is the website in your topical community, that is to say, is it related to what you do?
2. Is it an authoritative or trusted site on your subject matter?
3. What other pages does this site link to? Is it linking to other high quality sites?
4. Is it clear that the sites they are linking out to are vetted and evaluated, not just machine generated?
5. Are the links mixed in with other “real” text and copy? Or is it just a list of random links?
6. Who links into the site? Does it have a zillion spammy links coming into it, which might artificially inflate its Page Rank?
7. How old is the site? Older is better, trust me.
8. Who owns the site? Does this person have lots of other sites, probably all developed for the purpose of playing the links game? Bad news, that.
9. Are they requiring reciprocal links? Stay away, unless it is a powerful site.
10. Beware buying links. A few high quality strategic purchases will kick start your linking, but penalties may arise if you buy too many.

And of course, do your research, check out your competitors’ links and keep your eyes open for linking opportunities.

Can an online business succeed without the assistance of the search engines?

What about if you deliberately exclude your site from the Google search engine results?

Jennifer Laycock is conducting an experiment whereby she is deliberately excluding her brand new web site from the search engine results. She wants to demonstrate it’s possible to grow a business, increase traffic and succeed online, all without the help of the search engines.

You go for it, girl!

Dependence on traffic from Google appears to be a fact of life for small businesses: nearly 80% of all searches in the UK taking place on Google. And at my workshops I’m always hearing small businesses moan that ranking well in Google is a Catch 22: “my business is new and small, so can’t rank well in Google, but if it doesn’t rank well, then it stays small or goes bust.”

So how can you succeed online if you can’t rank well in Google, or can’t afford (or won’t pay) the Pay Per Click Prices?

Jennifer has concocted her robots.txt file to tell the major search engine spiders to go away, and instead will be depending on the lesser search engines, link building, blogging, social networking, and other online marketing techniques.

And her underlying assumption is that by building good links and content, she will have a successful business model, and will rank well in the search engines anyway, eventually.

Follow Jennifer’s progress with her new online e-commerce venture Bento Yum on the Search Engine Guide website.