Everyone wants as many links as possible pointing to their site, for obvious reasons this is going to have a positive effect on SEO. However if your site has a tonne of outbound links, Google is likely to see your site as low quality and just another site that sells links to others.
Maybe you are not selling links, but on the other hand you may have far too many outbound links which will have a negative effect. So what is the best practice in this case? Well as we all know, SEO has no set guidelines. Any information found is basically advice which is based around research from well performing sites or case studies from experiments with different factors such as exact domains and so on.
Three huge keywords are: Insurance, Loans and Mortgage. There are obviously way more competitive terms which are a little more adult, but let’s keep the research tidy in this instance.
Confused ranks number one for the term insurance (congratulations), upon looking at their links, I found that they have 91 do-follow internal links and only 2 do-follow external links. The external links are to their social media profiles, Twitter and Facebook.
Money Supermarket’s loans page ranks number one for the keyword loans. On the loans page, they have 150 internal do-follow links and 12 external do-follow links. The links appear to be to sites and companies that they compare prices and quotes from.
Money Supermarket also rank number one for mortgage with their mortgage page. On this page, there are 161 internal do-follow links and 25 external do-follow links, similarly to their loans page, their external links are to companies in which they compare prices.
Confused.com has a ratio of 45.5 internal links to 1 external link. Money Supermarket and their loans page has a ratio of 12.5 internal do-follow links to 1 external do-follow links and finally Money Supermarket’s mortgage page has 6.44 external do-follow links to 1 internal do-follow link.
Conclusion
It is safe to say that the ratios do fluctuate quite a bit, however everyone has a different approach to SEO but what I can say is that there should always be more internal links than external, and the amount of links you should be aiming for is 100-150 ideally. Remember that these are only guidelines and that in each situation the approach will be different, but it is well worth researching your competitors to compare their campaign to yours.
There are obviously more than 4 fails in the world of SEO, but these appear to be the most common, the most pointless or the most annoying for users. Many webmasters have tried to game Google to get the best out of the SERP’s by using different SEO techniques, but the fails of SEO are consistently black hat methods, they are frowned upon by Google and they are strongly disagreed with by many SEO’s as they do not provide long term results, only short term. So let the 4 fails of SEO be presented to you so your website and yourself will benefit from a higher SERP and not being blacklisted by Google.
Cloaking
Cloaking is showing information to the search engine and then something completely different to the user. So when a search engine visits your page, it finds a really well optimised page which will do very well in the search listings, however when a user logs onto your site, they find something completely different. Google states in their guidelines that they will penalise websites for this, and they will eventually find out, it is just a case of when
Frames
Frames are something your webmaster should know of, but basically frames are a way of bringing in information from other webpages without showing it to Google. Google’s robots cannot read frames, so by using them you are wasting content that could be seen and potentially help your SERP’s.
Hidden Texts and Links
Hiding texts and links is a simple process, just change the text or link to the same colour as your background. This can be confused with cloaking but all the information is on page, but it is not visible. Again this will help you in the SERP’s but Google will eventually find out and penalise your site.
Page Redirects
Now you know yourself if you are searching for a page and get redirected to something completely irrelevant on another site, or even the same site. It annoys you, so why would you want to annoy your visitors? Not only does that but Google not approve of this type of behaviour and punshes sites accordingly.
Conclusion
Google has always done their best to provide the best user experience with their listings, and they are constantly updating and modifying their algorithms to provide the most relevant results for their users. So the best way has always and will always be to provide for the users and not the search engines.
I have had a few people ask me recently “why don’t people naturally link to my website?” Well the answer may be in the list below. I have conducted this list to show you a few comon mistakes people can make when looking for people to link to them naturally.
Your Website Is New – if your website is new people usually won’t link to you until your site is accepted by Google as being an acceptable source.
Your Website Is Slow – Why would anyone want to refer one of their visitors to your website if it is slow. The real question is could your site handle any more traffic than it currently gets if its that slow?
You Have Alot Of Outgoing Links – If your linking out to alot of other site, you could be considered as a link farm by the search engines, and therefore others do not want to be associated with your website.
You Have Duplicated Content – Duplicated content on any page on the internet is considered a bad thing by any search engine, especially Google. Your can get your site penalised for doing this, and no one will want to link to or from your website.
You Have No Contact Details – Most people who will link to you will want one back. If you have no contact details then they cant request a link back from you.
Hold A Competition To Win A Prize!
People love getting things for free, especially if it is something that they have had to do very little or nothing for.
Hold a competition on your website that includes the top commentor on a blog over a 3 month period will get a free weekend away (maybe a golf weekend, or a romantic weekend). This will work very well if you are looking to do link building from other blogs, or related websites. It will also keep people comming back to post on your website abd be involved in the community.
Once the competition is over, the people who have been posting on your blog over the past 3 months may continue to return and be involved with your blog just as they have been for the past 3 months, especially if it has been busy in the past three months with people interacting in the comments section.
There are other prizes and incentives that you can offer that will not cost you any money, but will still capture the interest of bloggers. For example, you can offer a sitewide link for the year to the top commentor over the last 3 months, or you could have this incentive as a rolling, monthly incentive. For example, the top commentor over the last month will have a sitewide link for the next month. This will capture the interest of people that are trying to build backlinks to their own site.
I have seen these tips work very well before in the past, and know of a few people that have gained many hundreds of links from other blogs talking about the incentive. for example: marketingpilgrim.com offer the top commentor a sitewide link for the month incentive, and I believe it works very well for them.
Start a Blog!
Don’t just write a blog full of content that does not mean anything because you will not get anyone want to return, or even more important, you won’t get any links from your readers. If you start a blog that is relevant to your topic, and you manage to keep it up to date on a regular basis with relevant content that is helpful to people, and that will be an interesting read, then over time you will start to generate natural links from readers that find your blog interesting and helpful.
You will then naturally gain more traffic to your site from people following them links to your website, and if they find it interesting, they may link to you too. Building a blog is all about quality rather than quantity. Ensure than you write quality content, this is how you will gain more backlinks.
If you are not sure how to build a blog, almost any Search engine optimisation Company should be able to help you intergrate a blog into your site for a low cost.
There are two types of blogs that you can start. First of all you can start up a free blog on sites like Blogger.com or myblogsite.com and you can link that blog through to your own website, alternativly you can personalise your blog abit more by adding a blog to your existing site. This in turn will make your own site bigger, and increase the amount of quality content to your site too.
This is the first blog post for SEO Positive on the new website. What better way than to start with a blog post that will help you to build links to your site to increase search engine positions, and also increase your inbound traffic too.
Building links to your website is one of the most basic methods of building good quality, relevant, targeted traffic. If you build the right kind of links to your website you should notice an increase in your traffic, and in your positions too. The best places to have links from, are sites that have keyword rich content with lots of good quality, relevant incomming links themselves. This will help pass on some link juice through your link to your website.
There are many ways of building good quality links from high ranking websites that are relevant to yours with very little or no expense to you at all. The main two things that you need when building links is, time, and knowledge. The knowledge part I can give you, with the time part however, thats why many people employ an SEO company like us.
I will continue this blog every weekday for the next couple of months buy giving you a new link building tip each day. I will of course be writing other posts in the mean time. I will number each tip as I go in the title so you can be sure not to miss any of them. (Link Building Tip #1) for example.
