Tasha Harrison

It’s all very well building the links, but how does this fit in with your keywords and phrases?

Google uses links to find out how relevant your site is. Each link is like a thumbs up, which it then takes into account when ranking your site for each search. It judges each link based upon how relevant and important the linking site is.

The links also show Google what your site is about. It does this through the linking text:

The link text, ‘social media for theatre’, describes what the page that it links to is about. In this case it links to the play’s website, http://suchtweetsorrow.com.

For your own website, you want the link text to be either your chosen keywords or words that describe what your site is about. You can’t always control the link text and most often people link with simply the name of your company or site. However, if you have information on your site that people think is worth mentioning they are more likely to use descriptive text.

See ‘The Basics of SEO – Link Building‘ for more on link building.

Just like with Titles, search engines use your URL to identify what your site is about. It is, therefore, extremely important that your keywords are included in the URL.

Using the example keyphrase ‘memory stick’, below is an example of how a site is listed on the first page on Google. Note the repetition of keywords and how Google highlights them in the URL.

This is how the page is optimised:

Note how the keyphrase ‘Memory Stick’ is repeated not only in Title and URL, but also in the main page title, called the H1 tag.

The saying goes that links are the currency of the internet. As social media has expanded, your followers and fans have become the most important currency, but as far as SEO (search engine optimisation) goes links are still very important.

Making your links relevant

Link building is by far the hardest part of SEO, creating relevant links that the search engines will deem valuable. There are a few rules that are worth noting:

1. Build links on sites that have relevant content ie the site’s content is connected to yours.
   For example, your site sells swimming pool accessories, so an ideal link would be a site selling swimming pools.
2. Include your keywords and phrases in the linking words.
   For example, your keyword is ‘swimming pool filter’, so in an ideal world your link would be – swimming pool filter

Building Links

Getting sites to link to you is a time consuming process, so don’t expect to suddenly have hundreds of links. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do this, but here are a few tips:

1. Directory submissions – there are hundreds of free directories that you can submit your site to. These aren’t as valuable as a link from a blog or news site, but it is the easiest way to start out.
2. Contact other site owners – if you find a site that is relevant, drop the site’s webmaster an email asking if they will link to your site.
3. Product reviews – contact bloggers that you think might be interested in your products and ask if they’d be interested in writing a review. Remember to always treat bloggers with respect, many of the popular one’s are inundated with these kind of requests.
4. Create content worth linking to – the most effective and most difficult way to build links. If your content is interesting and/or useful then people will link to it.

Good Luck

Having done link building campaigns for a variety of different businesses there really is no easy way to go about it. It takes imagination and determination! Remember to always think, ‘Why would someone link to my site?’

Meta data is information that sits in the code of your site. You don’t actually see it on your page, but it is how search engines display your pages in their results and how they judge what your site is about.

There are two important parts of meta data:

1. Page Title
2. Meta Description

There are also meta keywords, but these are no longer regarded by Google since it became too easy to cheat. See Google’s reasons for why on the Google Webmaster blog.

Below is an example of how the information is displayed on Google.

Note how the meta description ends with ‘…’. This is because the meta description is too long, it is 37 words or 228 characters, but should actually be nearer 150 characters.

The description is an opportunity for you to sell your site and increase your click through rate from Google. If it is appealing to your audience then they will be more likely to click through to your site than to your competitors.

The page title also appears on the browser.

The page title is a good indicator for Google to tell what your site is about, so make sure you include your main keywords in it. The ideal length is between 60 – 65 characters.

And remember that it is used by real humans as well as the bots, so make it people friendly.

There’s big changes on Google today. The search engine is going to include results from sites such as Twitter and from blogs. This is important, because it means that the search results we receive will be up to date news, as it happens. The explosion of  Twitter, in particular, has been the main catalyst for this change. It gives people the ability to publish news as it is happening. It is important that Google reflects this new real-time news source (Rupert Murdoch should take notice).

The other big change is the increased personalisation of your search. Google records your web history and bases its search results on the sites that you visit. So if you regularly visit a particular news site, it will place that site higher up the search rankings if it is relevant to your search. This is a big game changer for SEO, since it favours more established sites. It also means that when you view your own site on Google you will generally see it ranking differently than most of your potential customers, meaning that you have no idea how well your site is actually ranking.

Most good SEOs will have seen this trend already and will have been aware that personalisation has been increasing over the last couple of years. It provides us with a new challenge and increases the need for different forms of online marketing, like social media and online PR. It also creates a problem for SEO companies who still guarantee positions on Google, as they will find it hard to prove.

From a users point of view I actually think these changes are rather limiting. Surely the point of search engines is that we can find something new. Before the days of social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, we relied on search engines to bring us new sites and information. Now we will increasingly receive the same sites, having to look further through the results to find something new.