SEO Tips & Techniques Lens

Getting backlinks to your site is vital to your success on the search engines. Naturally you need to have your research done, keywords selected, on-page correct so you rank for the right terms; But without backlinks you might be lucky and rank for a handful of keywords that generate a few visitors.

You also need to ensure your off-page work (obtaining backlinks) matches your on page work as I mentioned in my previous post. You need to use a variation of your keywords in your backlinks. That's not all though, you need as many links as you can from relevant web sites or web pages.

If you have a web site about flowers, then ideally you want links from other sites about flowers. You could then get links from florists and other sites about flowers such as forums, blogs and other online communities.

There are many sources of getting links out there but you need to be cautious in your efforts. Don't just take a link for the sake of a link, you want links from quality sites, larger sites with more authority are also better.

Below I will go through the different resources I have found very beneficial when building links for a site. Just remember though, when using forums, blogs and similar, participate and contribute rather than just chase links. Chances are it will get deleted as spam anyway, if it doesn't, it isn't the way to go about building brand awareness.

WEB DIRECTORIES & CLASSIFIEDS:
Directories & Classifieds can be very useful, especially those dedicated to a specific topic (vertical directories). Having said that they aren't considered a top grade link by Google, you want to use all the good ones then move on. When building links you need to mix up the resources your links come from.

BLOGS & FORUMS:
Blogs & Forums are a great way to get links. By participating you gain links back to your site while building good personal relations and brand awareness. You can also control the text in your backlinks via your signature.

NEWS SITES:
News Sites are another great resource for links while building personal relations and brand awareness. You won't always get a high PR link but you will build some brand awareness as these sites can get a lot of traffic.

SOCIAL MEDIA:
Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites are another great way to build some backlinks along with personal relations and brand awareness. Each of these sites can vary in their nature, again though, you need to make a genuine contribution to reap the rewards.

RSS FEEDS:
If your site is RSS enabled then submitting your feeds to submission services and RSS Sites is an excellent way to get your content out there and generate some links and brand awareness.

LINK MINING
This is by far the best way to get valuable links. It's tedious but you pick up relevant links of high quality. You can mine links a few ways;

Software:
This is a nice fast way to build a list based on keywords or your competitors. You can also use search engines themselves to see how many links a site has and work off those lists.

Manually:
Using Google you can type search queries like the following to source out great links, for example the following returns pages that have the word domain in the page title and guestbook in the url.

intitle:domains inurl:guestbook

You can try the following at Google to find competitors backlinks or your own;
link:http://www.yourdomain.com/

You can try the following at Yahoo to find competitors backlinks or your own;
linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

Another great way to build helpful links is to simply type your keywords in to Google and find any top ranking sites you can get links from. These links will help your rankings as they come from established sites on your keywords. When building links to your site be sure to build them to other pages in your site, not just the home page.

We all know the story about the tortoise and the hare right? Be the tortoise with your link building. Doing too much at once will cause more harm than good, build them up gradually and regularly.

As mentioned in the Link Building section, your site is going nowhere unless you get quality links to your site. At the same time, if your site is isn't optimized correctly, it'll be headed in the wrong direction. In this section we will go over all the things you can do to make your web site as search engine friendly as possible.

SITE & LINK STRUCTURE:

The structure of your site relates to the files and directories in your site, ideally you will have done this when building your site, if not it will be very beneficial if you implement the following style of structure for you site. I have named this section 'site and link structure' because they directly affect each other. The folders and filenames for your web pages make up the link structure of your site.

Let's say your site is about flowers again and your domain name is www.iloveflowers.com. The site is a general information site about the many types of flowers out there and we want seperate categories for each. In this case you would want a site and link structure similar to the following;

www.iloveflowers.com
www.iloveflowers.com/rose/roses.html
www.iloveflowers.com/daffodil/daffodils.html
www.iloveflowers.com/daisy/daisies.html
www.iloveflowers.com/violet/violets.html
www.iloveflowers.com/tulip/tulips.html

In this example we would have folders for each flower (rose, daffodil, daisy, violet and tulip). Then accordingly named web page files in each folder (roses, daffodils, daisies, violets and tulips). Setting up your site structure like this not only gives us the above example, it makes it natural for you to use your keywords in your site menu/navigation area. Other web configuration files like .css or javascript files can also be named using keywords.

Another important part of site structure is files that aren't web pages like images, documents, audio and video files etc. etc. You should also try and incorporate your keywords in them as they will also make up part of your link structure. Lets say we have a video about a rose show, it would be placed in the 'rose' folder with the name 'royal-roses-show-2009.mpg and it would give us the following URL;

www.iloveflowers.com/rose/royal-roses-show-2009.mpg

URL's play a very big part in how your site rank within search engines, so having your keywords present within them is a big advantage. Additionally, the search engines spiders that crawl your site basically do a better job if your link structure is organized and easy to follow.

The last thing I would include as part of your site structure is whether or not your site is standards compliant or W3C compliant. Having a site that is standards compliant means all its code uses valid structure, there are no broken links or missing files and so on. You can visit www.w3.org to learn more about web standards and run some tests on your site.

Having a compliant site doesn't necessarily mean you will rank better, there are millions of sites ranking just fine that aren't valid. Still though, if you want a site that's error free you should look in to it.

CONTENT:

The content within your site relates to the actual text that can be read on your site although any text that is, or is in an image can not be read by search engine spiders. Your keywords should be present within the content and you should optimize each page according to its keywords with the homepage showcasing all or most of them, at the very least your main 3 - 5 approx.

Each page within your site has the potential to gain rankings and that's why you should optimize them all according to their relevant keywords, just as important you need to build links to all optimized pages in your site.

Placing your keywords in bold and tags places more importance on those words assisting the search engines rank your site accordingly. The same can be said for using keywords within the link text (anchor text) on your own pages and within your site's navigation menus.

PAGE TITLE:
Always ensure your page titles are written in a natural manner and don't use the same page title for every page in your site. Write unique page titles for each page that reflects the content or subject of that page. Considering the page title is a strong element search engines look at, you want to ensure your keywords are in them. Dont spam the page title out as search engines are smarter than that.

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