Link Building

So you want to start to get some more traffic to your site and to get it ranked higher?

Link building is a valuable resource in helping to direct more traffic to your site and you should start by creating or getting a links page created for your site.

Before you begin on link building you should know this is one of the harder points in SEO and takes alot more time and should not expect results within a few days but a few months. The aim is to build up some high quality inbound links to your website.

You should starting by finding other similar websites that have some relation to your website that you think would be useful such as if your selling books another book store offering different kinds of books could be a good source of traffic. Writing them a quick email asking if they would place your link on their website and in return you will place their link on your links page if the first thing to do but many people ingore the bot generated emails so always avoid this sort.  Also always check to see if they have already a “submit a link” page where you can add your link first, to save emailing them.

Other places to add your website link is business directory’s there is many directory’s that you can add your link to for free is a good source of tariff. Doing a quick search for business directory’s on any major search engine will bring back lots of results of sites you could get your link added to.

There is many other places and service that you can add your website to for a cost but before doing this always check to see how many people are already listed and if it can really be beneficial to you and your business. An example of this type is the yellow pages you should try and stay away from people who offer ” a page rank 6 link at $33″  most of these wount help your site.

Things to remember when requesting and adding reciprocal links:

• Its better to add your link to sites that have some relation to yours in some way otherwise you could get alot of tariff but none of it of any use.
• The better quality of the site you add your link to will give you better weight with search engines. For an example a site that’s ranked on the first page of Google and has 1,000 hits a day is much better than 5 sites ranked on the 80th page of Google that gets 10 hits day.

If you have any questions or other ways in link building please leave a comment.

A Quick Guide to SEO

What is SEO?

For those of your that don’t know SEO stands for search engine optimisation in the basic sense of the word, making your site more search engine friendly so it can find your pages better and hopefully increase your weight with serach engines in turn bringing more traffic.

What does it involve doing?

There are a few sides to SEO but the main things involved that need to be optimised in your websites are:

1. title i.e. Anything that’s between <title> and </title> in your pages head tags. For an example

Yoursite.com – Welcome to this Great Books Website

2. Your websites Meta description. Example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Great stores is based in the UK and provides great books and great prices!” />

3. Your websites keywords, Example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”books, affordable prices”>

4. Finally submitting your site to quality sites.

How can I optimise my site?

 
- <!–[endif]–>Meta Title:

 To start, think about the keywords you would like to be listed for and what words you think people type in search engines that relate to your website.

In this example we sell books but “books” by its self is a very common search term we will need to be more specific if we want to rank high. So let’s take “affordable Books”.

Now we have the keyword you must try and fit it into your Meta title, things to remember when placing keywords:

Positioning – placement of the keyword can be important try and place it towards the front and not at the end!

Length – don’t make your title to long.

So ours is now: Yoursite.com – Affordable books at the Great book store, UK

<!–[if !supportLists]–>- <!–[endif]–>Meta Description

Your description is also very important try and places your search keywords toward the front of your description. Also try and create an informative but short description with everything that is appealing. More and more people will read the description in google and then click on the link,  if they like what they read rather than just clicking on the number 1 site.

Things to remember:

Don’t go over 200 characters as Google won’t show much more past this.

- <!–[endif]–>Meta keywords

Keywords need to follow the pattern you have created you should add the main keyword you want people to search for near to the front as you have done before. To find out what keywords you may benefit from one option is to view the source of other websites that rank top 10 in the search engines and check their keywords! Although keywords are becoming less of a factor but always worth adding.

- <!–[endif]–>Link Submitting

Check Out the Link on the right.

Final thought

Hopefully this has given you a brief insight into SEO and how to go about optimising your pages. There are many different opinions and ways of optimisation but this will give you a step in the right direction.

Please leave your comments and thoughts and SEO success with any different techniques.