Wednesday, February 10, 2010
SEO and Web Design Checklist VI - Backlinks
Backlinks ie other websites mentioning and linking to your website are important as they indicate in general terms to the search engines how popular your website is, however it is not quite as simple as that and you do need to be careful about who is linking to you. Obviously you do not have control over which websites link to you but there are some simple thigs you can do to keep a check on your backlinks. The most obvious way to ensure good quality links to your website is to write good quality updated content ensuring that you do not use words or phrases that indicate spammy or bad subjects or websites.
One easy way to keep a check on which websites are mentioning or linking to you is to set up Google alerts for your company name and domain address. The other is to regularly check the backlinks listed in Webmaster Tools.
1. Look at the quality and Relevancy of websites linking to your website paying attention too to the content of the page that the link is on. If these websites have absolutely no relevancy to your website consider emailing the webmaster to ask for the link to be removed. You cannot oblige them to do this but it is worth asking.
2. Backlinks from websites on servers different to your own website host are more valuable, you want a variety if IP addresses linking to your website.
3. Try and ensure that there is some diversity in the links to your website, if most of your incoming links are from social networking websites try and find another source of links, maybe by submitting articles to article directories or respected blogs for your industry.
4. Look at the anchor text used for the inbound links and ensure that the link text includes the keywords and phrases that you are wanting to target. If the anchor text for a particular link is not what you want again try emailing the webmaster to ask for it to be changed if possible.
5. Try and gain links from different TLDs eg .gov, .com, .co.uk,
6. Obtaining high authority links for example from BBC, CNN etc is particularly valuable.
7. Try and make sure you do not have backlinks from bad neighborhoods eg malware, spam or inappropriate content websites.
8. Reciprocal links are of little value, however if you do participate in this try and ensure that your link is not just listed on a page but forms part of a paragraph of text relevant to your business.
9. Check the speed of adding backlinks to your website, a sudden increase of say a hundred links every few days will flag your site as buying links in and your website will be penalised in searches. Try to increase inbound links at no more than 30 or so a week. If there is a sudden increase in the inbound links to your website check where those links are coming from, this can easily be done in Google Webmaster Tools.
10. If you can get mentions and links in Wikipedia and Dmoz these can be very valuable.
11. Check the location of an incoming link, links in the footer or navigation of a web page have less authority than a link within a relevant paragraph within the body text.
12. Check the alt attributes of images linking in to your website by looking at the source code for the web page linking to you. If this alt attribute does not include keywords for your business then consider emailing the webmaster to ask for it to be changed.
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