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 The site should be well established in age, but not out of date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+++

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+++

Businesses located in, or search engine optimising for Northern Ireland face a number of particular challenges. The unique political, geographic and technical circumstances means there are a number of issues that will need to be considered if a Northern Ireland business is looking to improve its rankings in Google and the other search engines.

I recently had the pleasure of teaching 5 workshops on behalf of InvestNI, travelling to the beautiful cities and towns of Belfast, Newry, Enniskillen, Londonderry, and Ballymena.  During the workshops I found a number of key issues that kept cropping up, and thought it would be useful to compile them into a quick Northern Ireland SEO guide here.

Localisation: Northern Ireland IP Addresses?

Many businesses want to be serving customers in their own locality, ranking well for search terms associated with their local business community.  Google now serves local results tailored to the searchers location. For example, a search for even for a general term like “restaurant” or “plumber” will then trigger the Google Local Business directory, displaying results based on the searcher’s IP address.

You may be in Belfast, but if your IP address says you’re in London, then it is London local results you will see.

This presents particular difficulties for the Northern Ireland business community, as IP addresses are often incorrectly identified as being in England.  The inaccurate IP address problem is, by no means, unique to Northern Ireland, but it does seem to be particularly severe.

By way of example, I offered a set of course materials to attendees at the InvestNI workshops, and an analysis of their IP addresses shows that only 17% of the addresses were correctly identified as being in Northern Ireland, namely Belfast, Glengormley, Lurgan, and Newry.  Correct IP addresses are most commonly associated with larger organisations having a static IP address, so the correctly identified visitors could well be coming from government departments or universities.

London, as expected, was  incorrectly identified most frequently (40% of the time) with unexpected outliers like Royal Leamington Spa and Gateshead making an appearance.

What are the implications of incorrect IP addresses?

1. Google Local Business results will not be triggering correctly.  Instead, searchers will be seeing data tailored for their IP address location.  Whilst it is possible to customise your location, I’ve not seen evidence to show how many searchers are doing so.
2. Google Analytics data will be skewed toward counting most UK visitors as “English” visitors, and thus not providing any visitor location data that can be used reliably in terms of NI traffic.
3. Keyword research data (see below) will not be representative of the Northern Ireland search experience.

Using Keyword Research tools

There are some interesting vagaries in the availability of Google keyword research data.

Google AdWords Keyword Tools is one of the most popular keyword research tools, and it does provide aggregated UK data but does not provide data specific data for Northern Ireland, nor does it provide data for Eire (Ireland).

On the other hand, Google Insights for search does provide Northern Ireland data, as well as data for Eire.

Warning:  keep in mind the problem of IP addresses mentioned above!

In this example, Google Insights is providing comparison data for Northern Ireland and Ireland for searches for the term “facebook”.  Are Lisburn and Coleraine truly the hubs of search activity for Facebook users in Northern Ireland?

Optimising for Ireland

Many Northern Ireland businesses want to trade outside the province, and there are some straight forward techniques for developing a search engine optimisation strategy for getting business from the south:  Ireland | Republic of Ireland | Eire.

First, keep in mind that Irish searchers will be using Google.ie and as such Northern Ireland business will be doing international search engine optimisation to address this market.

In order to maximise visibility in Ireland, you should consider creating a website addressing that target market.

1.  Register a .ie domain name.

There are certain restrictions in applying for a .ie domain name.  Applicants must provide evidence demonstrating substantial trade or commercial activity within Ireland which includes:

• Copies of invoices (showing trade to or from Ireland),
• High-quality brochures showing a significant intention to trade in Ireland.
• a signed letter on headed paper from a bank manager, firm of chartered accountant(s), registered auditor(s), tax consultant(s) (where the tax advisor identification number is displayed), or solicitor(s) confirming the applicants trade with Ireland.

2.  Ensure your website is hosted on an Irish web server. You can check your hosting country using the Netcraft

3.  Create content that identifies your operation as being appropriate for Ireland.  This might include using an Irish contact address, mentioning Irish place names in your product pages, and the like.

4.  Get high quality inbound links from Irish websites. In particular, focus on the links that give local identification.

Related Posts

International Search Engine Optimisation: Improving Your Rankings

International SEO: Web marketing tools and tips

International Web Marketing Tips

Fermanagh Photographs: a teaching website used by Michael Hughes of InvestNI to teach Web 2.0 skills