Linking, linking, linking.  Search engine optimisation is all about getting high quality, trusted sites to link to your own site – but is there such a thing as the perfect inbound link?

There is no “one size fits all” answer I can give you for the perfect link, but there are certain criteria you can use to assess the possible value of any incoming link.  The more criteria it meets, then the more time and effort is worth devoting to getting “The Perfect Link.”

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Here are my top 21 signs that an incoming link is likely to be perfect:

1. The site that your link is coming from  must be relevant to what your business does or offers – it is essential to be “on topic”
2. The content that is on the page that the link is coming from should also be contextually relevant to your site
3. The link goes directly to the most appropriate content on your site, or the right landing page
4. The site should be trusted and authoritative, as measured by trust scores like Page Rank
5. The inbound link will have keyword rich, relevant anchor text
6. It is a text link, not an image or logo link
7. The link is likely to be moderated, meaning a human needs to approve the link, and it’s not an automated directory or free for all site
8. You’ve not paid for the link;  it is a gift
9. The link is not reciprocal
10. The link to your website will be the first link on that page
11. Even better if it were the only link on that page, or one of very few outbound links from that page
12. It should not be in the footer or sidebar – ideally it should be in the body of the text surrounded by relevant keywords
13. The page that the link is on should be frequently crawled by the major search engines
14. The site should not link out to any bad neighbourhoods (spammy links)
15. The IP address that the site is hosted on should not have any spammy sites on it
16. The site should be well established in age, but not out of date
17. It should have a lot of trusted inbound links itself
18. It should send as much relevant traffic to your site as possible
19. You want the link on a page that is likely to remain there for an indefinite amount of time (for ever would be nice)
20. The link does not have a NoFollow tag
21. The link is not redirected using a referral script

So many characteristics… and that is why there probably no such thing as a perfect link!

However if you can find sites that have three, or four or more of these criteria then what you just might have is your killer link…

Recommended Reading:

Recipricol Linking:  Good or Bad?

Link Building Strategy working with Bloggers

Getting Perfect Links:  Susan’s list from 2007

Developing your Inbound Linking Strategy

+++Wayne Barker+++

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So the summer is here and  business is a little quieter than normal – in other words it is the perfect time for an SEO Health Check. Rather than kick back and enjoy the sunshine use a little bit of your free time to ensure the SEO on your website is up to date, you will thank yourself later down the line when you have no spare time at all.

When giving your site an SEO health check it is important to make sure that you run through things in a specific order to ensure that nothing is missed out. To save you the trouble I have compiled a quick checklist so that you can ensure that all your bases are covered.

SEO Health Check

1. Make sure your Title Tags are looking good. Your Title Tags are the best way to ensure that the search engines understand what your site is about and it is essential to include the keywords that are most relevant to the page – and make sure your Title Tag is around 6o characters long. It is a good idea to avoid using stop words (like a, the, is, at) and using some form of punctuation the ‘pipe’ (the symbol that separates text | it looks like this |) is a  favourite over here at Hallam!

Never use Title Tags that mention ‘Home Page’ or ‘Welcome’ as they will mean absolutely nothing to a search engine. Never duplicate Title Tags across a site – make sure each one is unique.

Not sure about your Title Tags?  Then read our Title Tags Factsheet.

2. Check your Meta Descriptions. Although Meta Descriptions have no bearing on how well you rank within Google and the other search engines (at the moment!) they are crucial for usability reasons. The Meta Description is the two lines of black text that appears below the Title Tag in the search engine results. This gives you a golden opportunity to target more of your essential keywords in order to entice people to click through to your website.

3. Check your headings (h1, h2 and so on). Although recent investigation has shown that the headings tags do not carry as much weight as previously thought it is still important to include them for a usability point of view – it isn’t going to harm your ranking efforts either. Make sure they are keyword rich and relevant to the copy on the page. If you do not have the possibility of adding heading tags through your current CMS then don’t panic, some bold text on your keywords and featured at the top of the page will do.

4. Review the content of your site. Have a good look round the content of your site and ask yourself if it is useful. The content should be relevant to your business, be keyword rich and useful to visitors to your site. Put yourself in the position of the visitors to help you consider this. When reviewing your content you should also ask yourself if you have been adding enough new, fresh content – Google loves new and unique content more than ever. If you haven’t got one already you may want to consider setting up a blog on your site in order to add this fresh content (that is topical to your business niche) on a regular basis. Make sure your keywords are used in the body of the text but don’t worry too much over keyword density (there is no known perfect keyword density!)

5. Consider your keyword research. When did you do your keyword research? Is it still valid or are people searching using different terms now. There are a bunch of ways to carry out your keyword research and Katie wrote a great post on keyword research tools that you may want to have a look at. My personal favourite is the Google Wonder Wheel which is great for brainstorming new keywords. And don’t forget the trusty old Adwords Keyword Tool – which recently had a face-lift.

6. Check your Alt Tags. Recent research has shown that the Alt Tag carries more weight in the ranking process than we previously though. If you are unaware of the Alt Tag it is the text that accompanies a picture to help describe it if it is not able to be displayed, or to enable or enhance the user experience for people with disabilities. So with the Alt Tag carrying more weight than we once thought you may want to use your summer SEO period to make sure all the pictures on your site have relevant Alt Tags – just make sure they are descriptive and helpful and then try and squeeze a keyword in.

7. Check your internal linking. Make sure that all your important page are linked to from other pages on your site using keyword rich anchor text (anchor text is the text that is used for the link).

8. Check your inbound linking strategy. As you probably know link building is the bread and butter of any SEO campaign and every site should have an ongoing link building campaign. With your SEO health check it is important that you are using techniques that are up to date and do not break any of Google’s guidelines. Consider using guest blogging as a way of getting inbound links and spreading the word about your company and the services or products you offer. Never (ever) buy links!

9. If you have videos, photos and other media – optimise for Universal Search. If it has been a while since your last SEO Health Check then you may be missing the boat on this one. Make sure all your media is properly optimised in order to help your site get good rankings through other channels. Check out this post on Optimising for Universal Search for all the information you will need.

Whilst I don’t claim this SEO Health Check list is exhaustive it should prove to be the launching pad for continued success on the Internet, after all it is important to keep up to date if you want to keep the rankings you work so hard for.

+++Wayne Barker+++

Link building is crucial to any SEO campaign but it is also the most time consuming and frustrating. One of the best ways to get inbound links is from blogs that are in the same niche as your business and these offer some great benefits:

• Solid inbound links often within the body copy of the text on the blog
• They help your business reach out to a new audience
• Blogs can drive new, relevant traffic to your site
• It may lead to more exposure and natural links through social media sites like StumbleUpon, delicious and digg.

Like a lot of SEO techniques the key to success in link building with blogs is building relationships. Before this can be done you need to identify influential bloggers that write about topics that are related to your business.

Finding influential bloggers

There  are a number of ways of finding influential bloggers within your niche and these are some of the techniques I use:

• Go over to Google and search for the blogs that are using similar keywords to you. The blogs don’t have to be an exact match to your business – be creative and look for blogs that have similar ideas and concepts to your business.

• Make a list of the ones that you like the most – obviously the number of blogs yo0u choose will all be based on how much time you can give to the project. Set up a an Excel spreadsheet with the name of the blog and then it is time to do your research.

• Check the Page Rank of each blog – this isn’t the greatest way of measuring the popularity of the blogs but it is a good starter for ten. Remember the more trusted the blog the more link juice will be passed down to your site if they link to you.

• Run each blog through the Hubspot Blog Grader

• This is a great way to find out the quality of the blogs you are researching and it will show statistics like traffic, authority, frequency of posts and blog engagement. Pay particular interest to the traffic the blog is getting and blog engagement (twitter mentions, facebook likes and comments) as this will help you build traffic to the site as well.

Through some basic research you should now have found a number of blogs that you will want to get a link from – for both SEO purposes and for exposure of your business. It is now time for you to get the link and this is the difficult bit! As the title of this post suggest you have to build a relationship with the blogger in order to become successful in getting those killer links.

Building relationships with bloggers

• Most bloggers have Twitter accounts so begin by following them – everyone like to see their numbers of followers go up!

• Retweet their Tweets and comment on their Tweets. Don’t overdo this as you may come of as a bit of stalker let it develop over time so they start to recognise you. Tweet the occasional link to one of their posts.

• Comment on their blog posts saying how much you enjoy them. Make sure you have read the posts and comment accordingly.

• Link to the posts that interest you the most. Link from a post on your site or blog that is relevant to something they have written about.

• Locate the blogs that they post on and post a few comments there as well.

• If they are active on Linkedin and Facebook leave comments there as well.

• Connect with them on mybloglog.

• After a while you can send them an email asking a question or making a comment. If they recognise you this could lead to a few emails back and forth – and if you haven’t pushed it too hard you could possibly ask about the possibility of them writing a post about your fantastic business or product.

If you put the time and effort into building relationships for your links you will find you suffer less rejection. Bloggers are more likely to link to you if you have been participating in the community.

They key to success in getting links from bloggers in to give and then give some more and only ask for that link or review when the time feels right.

Follow these links for more information on linkbuilding:

Updating your Inbound Linking Strategy

How To Write Link Bait In Five Easy Steps

+++Wayne Barker+++

We all know that Google visibility is crucial to online success; however an eagerness to appear in the first page of the Google results can sometimes lead you into trouble.

If you experience a sudden drop in rankings for your main keywords there are two likely reasons:

• There has been a change to Google’s algorithm and you have been one of the unfortunate losers.
• You have received a penalty from Google for breaking (or bending) their guidelines.

If you feel your drop in rankings may be the result of some infringement of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines it is important to correct them immediately. I am sure you are aware that Google will never make it that simple for you and many of the reasons they penalise sites is only known to those locked within the walls of Google headquarters. There are, however, some sure-fire ways to get yourself penalised (or banned) by Google:

• Linking into ‘bad neighbourhoods’. A ‘bad neighbourhood’ can include spammy sites, link farms or just generally sites that have no value to the Internet user as a whole. A good rule of thumb is: “if you are in doubt then it is probably best left alone”. If you want to check for sure then do a search for the Home Page in Google and if it doesn’t appear in the first page of the results it suggests that Google doesn’t trust it that much. Check out the Bad Neighborhood tool for help.

• Keyword stuffing. Always write with the user in mind first and the spider second. Stay away from repeating the same keywords over and over again.

• Excessive reciprocal link building. Some reciprocal link building can be considered natural – especially if you share the same topic in a niche. However stay away from unnatural amounts of ‘off topic ‘ reciprocal link building – always make sure your reciprocal links are from trusted ‘on topic’ sites and make your reciprocal links a small part of your overall link building campaign.

• Buying links. It is thought that that buying links can harm your rankings (like most things with Google though it has only been hinted at rather than confirmed!). It is always better to be safe than sorry so try and avoid buying and selling links and you are less likely to be penalised for it.

• Hidden text on your site. An old trick and very likely to get you banned – don’t make the text the same colour as your background, you will get found out sooner or later! The same applies to hidden links on your site.

• Check your site is considered safe. Here is how we check our site is safe:

Go to Google and type in http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=shcl.co.uk (obviously replacing the shcl.co.uk with your site). This we show you this screen which will give you Google’s details on the ‘Safe Browsing’ details of your site:

Other ways to reduce the risk of getting banned or penalised by Google by Google include:

• Make sure the anchor text of any links pointing to your site is varied as possible
• Do not link to any currently banned sites
• Avoid excessive cross linking with any other sites you own
• Avoid over optimisation
• Avoid excessive use of directories
• Make sure your link building increases at a natural rate (about 10% of the total number of inbound links you already have)

The final tip for avoiding Google penalties is:

• Use your common sense!

If you think that your actions could be construed as slightly dubious then stay away. Make your link building look natural and design and optimise your site with the user in mind and remember it can take time to rise up the rankings – patience is a virtue!

Here are some tools and links to help you with diagnosing and solving Google penalty issues:

Bad Neighborhood – Bad neighbourhood checking tool

Google Webmaster Guidelines

MajesticSEO – Backlink checker and neighbourhood checker

Google’s Malware help

Google’s reconsideration of your site page

+++Wayne Barker+++

Inbound linking is an essential part of search engine optimisation, and from time to time it is worth revisiting the basics to make sure we’re not missing obvious opportunities for getting those all important inbound links.

We need to get the right quality of links and we need to get an appropriate quantity of links.  The difficulty, of course, is balancing the two:  finding enough of the high quality links.

It isn’t a question of getting any old links; we need to be getting perfect links with characteristics that are acceptable to the search engines.  Good quality inbound links have these three characteristics:

1.  They come from authoritative web sites – if the links to your site come from trusted and important sites they are essentially telling Google that your site deserves to be trusted also.  Read this article on identifying the characteristics of authoritative websites.

2.  They have Keyword rich anchor text – you want the keywords that are relevant to your site to be used in the text that is linking to your site. This will tell Google that theses words are relevant to your site.

3.  They come from a wide range of IP addresses – the IP address of a host computer uniquely identifies a website, and having lots of links from sites on the same IP address isn’t just useless, it can also be a sign of spam to Google.

The best quality links to your website are always a “gift” from another website.

It means they like your site, and the link is a “vote” to say here is some great contnet.  Links that you can generate for yourself from free directories are, as a general rule, not worthwhile.

Writing quality content for your website- Having great content on your site means people want to link to it, and this is called “Link bait”.  Create content that people will want to link to and then submit it to the top social media sites. The sort of article that oftens does well on these sorts of sites tend to be helpful top ten lists and top tips – make it easy to digest.  Take a look at this list of ideas for generating link bait.

Generating content for other websites- We all need fresh content for our websites, and a great link building strategy is to give away content that you’ve written that can be used on other authoritative, trust worthy sites.  In return for the content, of course, you must get the keyword rich link coming back into your site.

Researching your competitors’ links – Investigating the inbound links from high ranking websites forms the cornerstone of your link building strategy.  Here are some suggestions for back link checker tools; this list is out of date, and we’ll be writing an updated review soon.  From this list you can ascertain who is linking to your competitors and try get yourself a link form them also. Remember that you want sites with good authority and to be topically relevant. Often the pages you find will have links or resources page that you can get a link on. If your competitors are getting links from blogs you may want to suggest that you write some topical unique content for them in exchange for a keyword rich links

Getting listed in Niche Directories – Niche directories and directories specific to your industry still provide valuable links due the fact that they are often authoritative and are always topical.

General Directory Submissions – This may be a good starting point for your link building efforts, but it doesn’t hold the influence it did previously. You want to start with DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory as these will give you good authoritative links to begin your campaign with. DMOZ is free but can take a long time to get accepted. The Yahoo Directory costs the equivalent of about £200 but is worth every penny. There are a number of Directory of Directories you can use for your research, including  the Top Web Directories List.

There aren’t any magic ways to get high quality links;  it’s all about generating great content, and rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work.

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Wayne Barker

Linkbait – an easy way to get inbound links rolling in, right?  But wait, you followed my How to Write Great Linkbait in 5 Easy Steps guide to the letter, and you haven’t seen your inbound links increasing yet.  What’s gone wrong?

You’ve been waiting for visitors to come to you, that’s what.  If you want your linkbait to be a success you need to get out and promote it, and here’s my 3 step Social Media plan of how to do it:

1. Encourage Social Bookmarking

Start off by adding bookmarking buttons to your pages, making it easy for visitors to bookmark your linkbait.  Here are a few examples I’m sure you’ve seen before:

These are simple buttons that encourage readers to share your linkbait through their social network of choice.  By adding bookmarking buttons, not only are you making it easy for your visitors to share your content with everyone they know, but you’re also reminding them that they should.

There are a number of different services around that offering bookmarking buttons.  You can get buttons just for Twitter and Digg, or a more generic share button, like addtoany.  A service called AddThis offers a highly customisable share button that works across many different CMS, blogging platforms, email providers and even collects analytics data on how often your page is shared.

Whatever button you go for, remember it needs to be visible, alongside or just below the headline is often a good place for a bookmarking button.

2. Use Social Bookmarking

At the same time, create a few bookmarks of your own using sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon.  These sites are easy to use and normally let you install a toolbar so that when you’re on a page you like (e.g. your lovely linkbait) you can just click and save.

NB: Always add tags and a review, some users subscribe to these and will be sent your page without any extra work from you.

Don’t forget that it’s called social bookmarking for a reason.  If you’re going to be really successful and get loads of link love coming in you need to really engage with these sites.

Build your profile by subscribing to relevant tags and connecting with other users who share your interests.  Gain credibility by engaging with the voting systems (but don’t only vote for your pages!) and link to pages other than your own.  Add links from related sites (and if you’re really clever, from other pages linking to your website) and you’ll build trust with other users.

Each of these sites work slightly differently – for example on Digg it’s frowned upon to link to your own pages, where on Delicious that isn’t an issue – so the best thing to do is get online and start using them.

3. Use Social Networks

Do you tell all of your friends on Twitter / Facebook / Google Buzz that you’ve got some exciting new highly link-worthy content on your website?  You should be – if you’ve built up a following on a social network then you’ve got an audience for your content ready and waiting.  And if they really love it, they may just tell all their friends about it too.

If you’ve been neglecting your social networking profiles now’s the time to think about getting it up to scratch.  Make sure it’s up to date and start connecting to people with shared interests.  Once again the rules of engagement will depend on the network you’re using, but the key is to get involved and start conversations.

So hopefully that’s given you a taster for how to promote your linkbait, and remember my two final pearls of wisdom:

• Remember you are using social networks – don’t do a hard sell or people will switch off
• You’ll only get out of this what you’re willing to put in.  Not every campaign will go viral instantly, but if you keep working at it, testing new ideas and making those all-important connections in time you’ll see your volume of inbound links increasing.

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Katie Saxon

Inbound links: we all want them, but how do you get them? One SEO tactic is to create Linkbait.

Linkbait can be anything that will get website owners, social media mavens and bloggers across the Internet linking to you. You can use video, images or good old-fashioned words to get the link love flowing. But for now I’m just going to tell you how to write great linkbait in 5 easy steps:

1. Solve a Common Problem

First up, pick your topic wisely. One thing that people love to read about (and link to) is a simple solution to their everyday problems.

Are you a mechanic? Tell us how to pass our MOT. An account? Give us a budgeting trick that’ll make our money go further, or discuss the government’s most recent budget. And photographers? I think everyone wants a few secrets for how to look great in every photo.

Think about the questions you get asked time and time again and turn that into great linkbait.

2. Entertain us

Or why not just entertain us. Do you have a shocking/funny/stupid story to do with your product or service? Can you compile a list of the most ridiculous accidents with/misuses of your product? As long as it sharing it won’t harm your brand go right ahead.

3. Create a Catchy Headline

You need to give your article a title that will stand out in a crowd and make people want to read on. Something short and descriptive should do it. If you’re really stuck “How to…” is often a good place to start.

4. List It Out

People, especially Internet users, love lists. Numbered lists especially. They’re easy to read, easy to digest and you know roughly how long it’ll take to read.

Whether you’ve decided to be funny “Top Ten Mobile Phone Disasters” or helpful “How to Pass Your MOT in 5 Easy Steps”, use a numbered list. It’ll help you to write short, snappy paragraphs that people will want to read.

5. Be Controversial

Love it or hate it, being controversial is a sure fire way to get you noticed. You might just decide to deliberately leave someone out of your top five to get attention. Or you might write a bad review, create a “Top 5 Worst…” or just add an alternative point of view to an ongoing debate.

Warning! Don’t be rude, abusive or libellous just to be controversial. It won’t get you the right kind of attention – and may get you into trouble legally.

There are lots of ways of creating linkbait for even the most unexpected products and services. The Will It Blend? videos by Blendtec prove that it just takes a bit of creative thinking. Get brainstorming, trying to see what you do from a different angle and soon you’ll be creating some quality linkbait.

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Katie Saxon

If you search for the phrase “childrens physio” on Google UK, you will notice the web site in the second position has a blue link that says “Welcome” and the fourth website has a link called “Untitled Document”:

“Why is that important?”, you may ask. Well, that blue text is the Title Tag of the page that Google is linking to in the search results.

Most search engine optimisation experts agree that the Title Tag is the single most important element of on-page search engine optimisation,that is to say it is the most important indexing signal on your web pages.  Well optimised pages will have appropriate keywords in their Title Tags.   I’ve written a set of tips to help you understand Title Tags, how important they are, and how to write good Title Tags.

However, if that is true, how come two of the top four results for [childrens physio] don’t have the keywords in their Title Tags?

The answer comes down to my emphasis on the phrase “on-page factors” – as you might expect, there are “off-page factors” too, which essentially come down to your domain name and the links you have pointing to your website. This is the explanation for the [childrens physio] search results – Google uses the links to a website as the primary ranking factor, so the Title Tag comes a distant second in terms of importance.

Google is using the links to these websites as “votes” to understand whether other people think they are a useful resource and what the resource is about. Incoming links are a sign of usefulness, and the words people use in the link (called “anchor text”) helps Google to understand that the site is about.

So the sites with “Welcome” and “Untitled Document” as their Title Tags, despite breaking one of the fundamental rules of search engine optimisation, are still ranking well because of the links they have pointing to their sites.

Except, in this particular example, links are not what are causing the high rankings, either. One of the sites has a single, solitary link, whilst the other has none at all and indeed the site itself is a “coming soon” page. So what does that tell us? Links don’t matter either!?

Well, the reality of the situation is that [childrens physio] isn’t a very competitive search term. None of the sites in the top 5 results have many links at all and most of the pages in the top 10 aren’t particularly well-optimised for that phrase. So what’s happening?

The answer must be the domain names of these websites: childrensphysio.com and childrensphysio.net. They both match our search term exactly. In the absence of any particularly well-optimised (i.e. “relevant”) pages for this phrase, Google has decided that sites called “childrens physio” are some of the best matches for what we’re looking for.

Does that change my opinion on the importance of Title Tags and links to your website? Frankly, no. They are both extremely important factors in search engine optimisation and assuming that your market is a little more competitive than [childrens physio], you won’t get very far without them.

Contact me to find out about our search engine optimisation packages, which include on-page optimisation and link building.

Link building is the magic fairy dust of search engine optimisation. How hard can it be? Actually, it’s pretty darn hard and link building tips are always welcome.

Last week I attended Ian Lockwood’s  “Top Link Building Strategies” breakfast briefing and he’s agreed to write up a recap of his top 5 recommendations.

1.  Get listed in Local Business Directories

These listings will improve your visibility in the Google Local search results, and provide valuable signals as to the location of your businesss.  They also help with general link building.  We’re only looking for high quality directories, with links that are indexed by Google.  As a word of warning, many of these will result in telephone sales calls (just say No).

http://www.accessplace.com/
http://www.zibb.com/
http://www.bizwiki.co.uk/
http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/
http://www.shoplocally.co.uk
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/
http://www.uk-local-search.co.uk/
http://www.bview.co.uk/
http://www.applegate.co.uk

2.  Get Testimonials.

So easy, this one. Think of all the suppliers you use who have a website, who you would recommend to others. Offer them a testimonial and ask that they link to your website, so that their visitors will know it’s a genuine testimonial.

3.  Run a Competition

Why not run a competition to link to your site? Offer a reasonable prize and a time limit on entries, then promote it to relevant websites, forums and blogs. It’s a good idea to post about the competition on your blog too, so people can leave comments with links to their pages when they’ve entered. Remember to state who the winner is when it’s over, otherwise you’ll get lots of emails!

4.  Offer Your Product or Service for Review.

This requires a bit of research first, as you will need to find websites who will review the type of product or service you offer. Assuming you can find some, why not ask them to review it in return for a free product/service? They will link to your site as part of the review.

5.  Get Links from Other Regional Businesses.

Whilst reciprocal links are, in the main, pretty useless for SEO, reciprocal links from other businesses just like yours will still carry weight. Why? Because they’re about exactly the same subject! Google expects sites about the same topics to be linked together, so these links still count. If you only operate within a particular geographic area (locally, nationally or internationally), why not search out companies doing the same thing in non-competing areas and ask to swap links? It’s a win-win, you just have to explain the importance of links to SEO, if they don’t already know.

Ian also talked about a number of other tips, including asking for links on your website (best done if you incentivise people through a free gift or money off coupon), writing guest posts or articles for other peoples’ websites and creating useful resources related to your business, which you can then promote and get links to.

If you are looking for other link building ideas, why not take a look at my blog archive of link building ideas.

And finally, I do offer a link building service so get in touch and we can discuss your requirements

Is it worth buying a link building package from an SEO company?

My maibox is awash with spam emails from Indian companies selling me a link building service. But today, my daily does of spam was accompanied by a rather sad little Tweet saying a Nottingham search marketing professional had been made redundant from her local web design agency.

And she was contemplating the influx of cheap SEO services from India.  Indeed, go to Google and search for SEO India and you’ll find dozens of companies advertising cheap link building packages.

Small businesses are tempted to buy these cheap services, but there is nothing new under the sun, and as they say “you get what you pay for.”  Cheap service could well mean cheap links, which  won’t help your rankings, and could possible do harm.

We all know that inbound links influence your rankings in Google.  But it isn’t the quantity of links, it’s the quality that does the influencing.

Every week I see examples of small business web sites that are ranking well in Google for their desired key phrases, they haven’t been playing the SEO game, and the site has only a few inbound links.  Lurking in that list of links, however, will be the one or two golden links that are doing all the influencing of the results:  trustworthy, authoritative, relevant sites linking in.  These links arise naturally because of the business’ position in the community.

Will an SEO consultant in India be able to get you links from your local borough council?  From your local university?  From your professional association or accrediting bodies?  Will the get you coverage in the BBC or Forbes or your professional press?

Be as careful in making the decision to use an Indian SEO company, as you would be careful in buying any service in the UK.

They all describe themselves as providing “ethical link building” – which should alert you to the fact that unethical link building will do more harm than good.

A quick survey of clients listed on some Indian firms are showing potentially poor quality link building activities. I took a look at their reference sites, and here is an example of the kinds of reciprocal links pages they are currently building.  Think nasty, cheap link exchanging at its worst:

India Link Building SEO service

My advice? Buyer Beware.

Google is looking for high quality links, and my first port of call would be to get a through understanding of the authoritative sites in your sector. Getting just a few perfect links will far outweigh dozens or hundreds of scammy, useless links.  You are probably better off using a professional, local SEO for just a few hours than getting into a long term contract with an offshore SEO firm.

Use a PR agency that has a sound understanding of how Google works to improve your profile, and drive visitors and links at the same time.  I believe PR agencies are better at link building than web designers and more likely to get you those all important quality links than a foreign agency.

And finally, remember that Google has a long memory.  What might be considered “ethical” but sailing close to the wind might get you slapped or banned by Google as it tweaks and adjusts its ranking algorithm.