by Karl Hudson | Nov 20, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
Wikipedia’s definition: “Back links, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page”. Source:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink
WHAT DO I MEAN BY “LINK PROFILE”?
I get asked this question every day. Put simply, a link profile is when someone or something goes through your entire website and creates a report based on your current link profile and portfolio of back links.
A link profile usually quantifies and evaluates the different types of links pointing to your site as there are many different content management systems and platforms that can pass you links.
SEO Providers tend to specialise in link profiles as it allows them to see what is happening with the website behind the scenes and because of that, it gives them the edge when it comes to creating online marketing campaigns.
SO WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS OF A GOOD LINK PROFILE?
- A good link profile should include the following elements:
One way links vs. Reciprocal links: These are the two main types of back links that a website can have. One way means website A points to B and that’s it. Reciprocal mean’s that both point to each other. See figure one.
Studies show that reciprocal links still work but usually don’t work as well as one way links. Barry Schwartz from the SERoundTable:
“The overall understanding from the thread is that reciprocal links still work and work well. The issue comes up when you do it “excessively” where your links are coming from unrelated web sites and you are linking back to unrelated pages.” Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022388.html
How relevant is the website to yours? The easy way of understanding this would be to imagine a shop that sells toothbrushes. They wouldn’t want to purchase TV’s and sell them as their niche is toothbrushes. So if you have a website that is selling toothbrushes, you would want other sites that mention dental work pointing to you to keep it niche specific. This also helps search engines figure out what your website is about.
I can’t preach this enough. Quality matters and it goes back to the old saying, “quality over quantity”. You only want websites that are trusted sources of information in the search engines eyes linking to your site. Many people believe it’s better to have a huge bunch of links pointing to your site, but these links could come from a variety of different places and have minimal value, whereas a website that is trusted by the search engine could have a much higher value if it links to your site.
This then leads into the next section:
Avoid sites that just seem to spam links. You don’t want to be associated with sites that have huge amounts of outbound links. Think “less is more” principle.
Bad link neighbourhoods can really put your whole link profile in danger. I have had many web masters approach me and ask how to identify bad link neighbourhoods. The simple way of doing it is by asking yourself this question:
“If I owned this website, why would it link to this website?”
If the answer is “It wouldn’t” and you happen to find that it has a bunch of outgoing links to a wide range of different sites, there is a chance that Google will see this site as poor quality.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER IN A REPORT:
There are various tools out there that can help you collect this information. Tool’s like Ahrefs.com & MajesticSEO are two of the top tools for finding out information on a websites back link profile.
Because of this you can quickly generate reports and identify flaws within your back link profile. If you need help in doing this, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Learn more about our SEO services. https://old.getmediawise.com/
by Karl Hudson | Nov 18, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
If you are looking into buying Search Engine Optimization services for your companies web site then you might be wondering how you make sure that you get good value for money, or don’t end up paying lots for it. There are a lot of companies out there who claim they offer affordable SEO services, but in fact don’t. There are only a few ways that you can be sure that you are getting the best value for money and this article will describe them.
Talk to other businesses and friends that you know have used SEO services before. Find out what companies they used and whether they considered them to do a good job for them. If you end up with a list or even just one company that you are told does good work then you are halfway there. You then need to find out how much they will charge for the work that you need to have done. You will need to compare that price to other companies to see if it is competitive and if it is you will know that you are getting a good service at a good price.
If you don’t know anyone who has had experience of using these companies, you will have to start from scratch with doing research yourself. Look into several companies and see what services they offer for what price. You will then get a good idea of what the average price is. Obviously there will be lots of companies that you could research and this could take you a long time so you will need to find other ways of narrowing your search. You might want a local company that you can go and talk to in person, or you might want a company who has a good reputation and has worked on SEO for large companies. Once you have looked into the services they offer and at which prices you will be much better informed and able to make a better choice for an affordable SEO service.
There is software that you can buy that will allow you to do some of the work yourself instead of buying in the services from a company. This means that you will have to do more of the work yourself and take time away from making money for your business. Sometimes this is a false economy as the money you will have to pay someone else to do this could be less than you will have earned, if you were working in your business rather than trying to submit your website to search engines. If you have some experience in this area then it can be worthwhile doing it yourself, but for most people this isn’t an affordable solution.
So you can see that there are ways of getting an affordable SEO service, but it will take some hard work. Unless you can find someone who can recommend a service to you, you will have to look at lots of companies and see what they offer for which prices. Always make sure that they are able to give you testimonials from companies they have worked for before so that you know that the work they do is something you will be happy with.
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by Karl Hudson | Nov 18, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
An interesting anecdote comes to the mind when speaking on the Google Panda update. When the world was saturated with sinners, God decided to end the world and allowed only Noah (for he was the most righteous of all men) and his family to survive. Google may not be the god of search engines, but it is a formidable force and with the Panda update it aimed to kill bad websites and cleanse the internet world of all duplicate and unworthy content.
Google isn’t new to updates. There have been updates in the past (Vince, Mayday, etc.), but what makes the Panda Update the big daddy of all updates is the fact that no other algorithmic change was as multi-faceted and as multi-variable as this one. It addressed several SEO parameters including link building, on-site optimization, user metrics, search data, content, and even social signals. To be precise, it has punished sites that:
- Thrive on substandard (read grammar errors), copied, and duplicate content. Also, you cannot afford to showcase duplicate content with multiple tags within the blog
- Promote aggressive link building
- Contain excessive Adsense and banner advertising on multiple pages
- Have a high bounce rate
- Have backlinks from low quality site
While it is appreciable that low quality sites with low quality content were shown the door, there also exists a downside to this. It is no secret that the article directories were the most hit with the update. HugPages, Squidoo, Ezine Articles, and Wise Geek were among the most hit. These sites in an attempt to sanitize themselves sometimes went overboard. Thus, certain topics including internet marketing became taboo, even if the directed link does not contain an affiliate tracking ID. Ehow too, decided to get rid of user- generated content even if it was popular and managed to get visits.
There are several other factors that have gained significance, including low social activity. Through these changes, it aims to enhance user experience. Factors that are likely to dominate the experience of a user have been incorporated in the algorithms. And where this actually differs from previous updates is that if your site has been hit by the Panda, you cannot just make cosmetic changes and expect things to be sorted out. You will have to wait until the next update comes to know if you are on the right track. The best way to handle this is by going back to basics, and follow guidelines that Google has always insisted that you follow.
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by Karl Hudson | Sep 24, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
Pagerank is primarily a measure of a particular website’s incoming links. In order to increase your own pagerank, you will need links from sites that have a higher pagerank than yours. Ideally, the sites with the highest pagerank would be the most important; however, this is not often the case. Take a look at the top ten results for any keyword and you will see many instances of pages with a lower pagerank outranking those with a higher pagerank.
When the next PR update happens, it is unlikely to give you any sort of rankings boost, whatsoever. The reason for this is that there are over 100 different factors that Google takes into consideration when determining a page’s position in the search engine results, and pagerank is only one of those factors. Google is constantly getting smarter at determining what sites deserve the top positions in the search results. As Google has evolved, pagerank has played less of a role in that determination.
So instead of concerning yourself with just one rankings factor, your website will fare much better if you take a holistic approach to your SEO and try to satisfy all of the other rankings factors. Although, it is nice to be given a score from Google in the form of a pagerank, the only score that really matters is where your site ranks in the search engines and how much traffic it gets. Pagerank does not mean traffic, so the best thing to do is to ignore the next PR update altogether and work on things that can bring traffic to your site.
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by Karl Hudson | Sep 24, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
O my god, There is another penguin update being launched by Google, let’s run around frantically and scream at each other on forums. Well, why not? That’s what happened the last time there was a penguin update. Everyone started to panic.
But not us
Granted we held our breath when the update was launched, but we soon saw our results increase. This is because of a simple technique that we use.
We don’t over optimize our anchor texts, and we don’t have a huge focus on ensuring exact keyword volumes are used, that’s right, we try to make it look as organic and natural as possible.
Google wants to catch the companies/individuals that are abusing the system, it knows that there are many white hat/grey hat SEO guys who focus solely on producing quality content and then use various promotional techniques to help it increase in the SERPs – this is normal and what is called Organic. They rank it for a various amount of keywords and don’t have a huge focus on one specific type.
This is the practice in which will stop you from ever suffering from a Penguin update.
Practical Example:Let’s say we were ranking a website within the “dog training” niche. We write an article or two and place it on our website that is specifically focused on a certain aspect of dog training i.e. “Stopping my dog pulling on the lead”. Current practice states that we want anything from 12-30% of all of our anchor text in our backlinks pointing back to this page/site for our main keyword, so in this example “dog training”. Well we think this is wrong!
We have found with extensive practice that we have had better results at targeting just a 4-8% Anchor text ratio for the main keyword, this then allows us to bring more keyword’s into the mix, let’s say for instance, we want to use 20% of our anchor text diversity just for the root URL, this leaves us with a huge amount of anchor text to play with, this mean we can rank those articles etc. for longer tail keywords, thus improving their visibility and potentially increasing the amount of visitors to our dog training site.
Follow this strategy and we can guarantee your results, it also means you can relax in knowing that your not misleading people and providing high quality information to which you deserve to rank for.
Learn about our winning SEO Strategies. https://old.getmediawise.com/
by Karl Hudson | Sep 12, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
Of course not. SEO can’t ever be rewritten as the core principle is based on optimizing websites to coherently work effectively with a search engine. The algorithm’s that are being created are designed to ensure that the user’s get relevant searches to the keyword’s they are looking for. You wouldn’t like to search for “treatment for warts” and get given information on “acne” now would you?
With each update that comes, as long as your sticking to your niche, creating relevant content, active within a social arena and actively participating in other social venue’s online, such as blog commenting or forums. Then you should have nothing to worry about.
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