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.

The debate rages regarding paying for inbound links in order to improve your Page Rank, and Google’s efforts to detect (and penalise) sites playing the paid-for-links game.

As a quick reminder, Google is absolutely clear that buying links to improve your Page Rank violates their quality guidelines; however, buying links as part of online advertising is confirmed as a kosher activity.

To this end, Google is actively soliciting us to report those nasty, nasty link selling cheaters in order to help them improve the Google algorithm or method to detect paid-for links.

If you’re worried about paid links (and you probably should be) then read Matt Cutt’s long but useful overview. In it he clarifies Google’s view of paid-for directories (if the quality is good, then they’re OK) and confirms that sites selling links are likely to lose the ability to pass their link value onto other pages (which means it just not worth buying the link, after all….)

At the exact moment you are reading this posting, Google is probably tweaking its algorithm, the rules it uses to determine how your site ranks in its search results. This tweaking means your rankings in the search engine results will go up, and they’ll go down.

If Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information, then these tweaks means Google is attempting to get the most useful set of results for a particular search phrase.

So why does your website go up and down in the rankings? And why, sometimes, does it disappear and then reappear?

Google is looking at a huge range of quality measures, and whilst we don’t know the exact recipe, we do know that Google is looking at a number of fairly standard factors. It will weigh different factors in each tweak, and hence your website fluctuations in the search results.

So what can you do to improve your rankings in the search engines even when Google is tweaking?

1. Improve the links to your site

It can be a problem when too many of your links are reciprocal, or the links are of a very poor quality, or the links are not relevant to the content of your site. I would suggest that the effort of getting just one perfect inbound link far outweighs getting dozens of cheap and nasty links.

What’s a perfect link? It will come from a site that is considered an expert in your business arena. The page containing the link will have a good Page Rank. The words in the link (the “anchor text”) will have your key phrase in it. The page containing the link will have links to other high quality pages, but not too many links. And the page containing the link will be indexed by Google.

I won’t pretend it’s easy to get perfect links, but their rarity value explains their huge impact on your search engine rankings.

2. Improve the content on your site

Google is a text processing machine; that means you have to have great text on your website. How can you improve your content:

• ensure you have a coherent focus or topic for your website. Google uses something called latent semantic indexing which means it is able to figure out what you’re talking about without exactly matching the words you’re using. So, if you sell cheap perfume, you’ll also want to be writing about discount fragrances, bargain scents, and cut-price cologne.
• don’t duplicate your content. It’s a problem when a large percentage of your content is duplicated across multiple pages
• don’t have empty pages. Minimal content on your pages is a danger signal to Google, and too many minimalist pages will hurt your rankings
• link to other high quality websites in your topical community. I’m not talking about a general purpose links page, you need to link to appropriate sites within the body of your copy.
  

3. Respect your HTML

Web pages have specific characteristics that help the search engines to understand the content, so get your HTML right:

• don’t have duplicate Title tags
• don’t have duplicate Description meta tags
• don’t stuff keywords into your Keywords meta tag, or your Alt tags associated with your images
• don’t use invisible text (white on white background) or nearly invisible text, that is to say text which is too small or text that is nearly white on white

Search engine optimisation is a fine balancing act: getting the specific details of your web pages right, but also keeping a high level helicopter view of your content and inbound linking strategy.

I’ve had a rather stressful day sorting out a number of less-than-pleasant issues arising from marketing on the Internet.

The first of these concerns folk lifting content from this blog and publishing on their own websites. (You know who you are. And I know who you are.)

I knew this blog was good, but I didn’t realise it was good enough to plagiarise (or scrape, or steal)

I had received an e-newsletter that contained an article that looked suspiciously familiar. Upon closer examination, I found it was a cut-and-paste lifting of one of my articles from my blog.

My curiosity piqued, I searched Google to find if any other sites were re-using my article. All you need to do is select some copy, put it inside inverted commas, and Google searches for your text.

And to my surprise, I found 3 more sites, all happily using my text as their own.

What to do?

I just dropped each website owner a message, saying they were welcome to use my article but that they needed to attribute it to me with a link to my website.

And to my delight, I now how 3 new inbound links. A great contribution to my SEO strategy.

The moral of the story? Keep an eye out for your valuable Internet content. And remember that, like me, you probably don’t have the resources or inclination to fight a legal battle. My grandma always said “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” – and the polite request for attribution worked just fine.

This time, at least….

There are many benefits to blogging: keeping in touch with your client base, creating fresh content for your website, raising your company’s visibility in the search engines, raising your own corporate profile.

But how about making money from your blog? The buzzword is “monetising.”

Placing Google AdSense advertising on your blog has been one source of revenue for quite a while now. People click on the ads, you get the money.

Here’s another way to make money from your blog: paid for reviews.

I’ve registered my blog with ReviewMe and advertisers can buy a review on my blog, essentially paying cash for my esteemed opinion of their product or service. And of course, they’re also buying a valuable link from my website.

You can use the ReviewMe service either to buy links to your own site, or to sell links and earn a little extra money.

Now, I know you don’t want to be deluged with advertorial, but if e-marketing trends interest you, then you will want to read the Advertisement:

Basiclink.com, a web hosting company in San Diego, are trialling a marketing campaign where they are offering 11 lucky customers 50% off the price of their Shopsite Pro E-Commerce Hosting on Monday, 11 December at 11:00.

This promotion is capitalising on Amazon’s latest marketing campaign Vote for Deal where customers can vote for one of four cheap deals on offer. The deal with the most votes wins, and a few randomly selected folk who were lucky enough to vote for the winning deal are then sent a claim code to purchase the deal.

Basiclink.com are introducing this B2C concept to the B2B marketplace, and they claim to be leading on a trend that may set the tone for future business promotions.

What’s also interesting is that Basiclink.com are a local player, serving specifically the San Diego small business community. They’re using international e-marketing techniques to target their niche market. It’s a multi-pronged campaign; they pushed out online press releases, purchased inbound links from blogs, promoting the offering on their website, and I’m sure they’ve got email marketing in the mix.

So there’s an example of small business marketing lessons to be learnt from our SME cousins on the other side of the pond.