Search Engine Optimisation Advice

A business man asked me this morning “How can I find out what Google’s secret Authority websites are and how can I get links from them to my website?”.  When I asked him what he would do with such a list if he could get his hands on it, I quickly received the response I was expecting “I would contact all of them and try and get as many links as possible back to my site”.

I spent the next half an hour educating my new friend along the following lines…

It is more important to think about what would be regarded as an “Authority” site in relation to your business rather than what does Google regard as an “Authority” site.

For example Google may think that the Barney the dinosaur website is a great website and is one of it’s secret “Authority” websites. Knowing this does this mean you should get a link by any means from this website? Many people would say yes, personally unless your business is related to children’s entertainment my answer would be no.

There are 2 main reasons for this.

1) How likely is it that someone looking at the Barney website is going to be interested in your products and services if they click the link and come to your website? Link building should be about bringing in quality traffic no just increasing your rankings.

2) In my experience Google looks for patterns and themes. If your website is linked from 100 websites, all from different business sectors with no common theme how is Google meant to know what you are all about as a website? Having good anchor text can help but it would be much better to be linked from 50 websites that are related to your business in some way, giving Google a better understanding on what you are all about.

I would look to get some good links from PR 3 or 4 websites that are in your industry rather than chasing the big PR 6 and 7’s that have nothing to do with your sector.

How do you know if your website is a success in the eyes of Google and the other main search engines and do you have the tools to tell you why?

Is traffic the one and only metric that determines whether your website is performing well? The question really is what type of traffic will make your website a success.

Many part time (and some full time!) SEO’s believe the art to search engine optimisation is to get links from any source possible to build up the traffic the website receives. Links are very important for a websites traffic and page rank but generating links from all types of websites diminishes the quality and can sometimes generate penalties from Google for linking to tasteless or black listed websites or servers.

As with most things SEO quality should always come before quantity. By sourcing the right types of websites, blogs and web directories you can build you business online profile correctly, creating a focused, on topic theme for Google to take notice of.

Before delving into the world of link building you need to first work out what keywords these websites & directories should be linking to you with through the anchor text of the hyperlink – this requires keyword research.

The key to keyword research is to gain a list of keywords that have:

• A sufficient amount of traffic
• Are specific and not ambiguous
• Least amount of competition as possible

By generating a strong keyword list you can then use this as the foundation of all your search engine optimisation efforts. You can adapt your websites internal linking structure, generate new content specifically based on keyword themes, optimise link building activities by utilising keywords in the anchor text amongst many other uses.

It is to be noted that keywords with time can become more popular or lose popularity, with this in mind you should continue to monitor the traffic and competition generated by existing keywords and keep a look out for the new up and coming keywords.