A blog is a great way to get regularly updated, relevant, unique and good quality onto your website. Getting fresh content like this onto your website everyday can play a big part in the success of your website and your SEO campaign. Most blogs will allow users to post comments on your blogs, which have to be moderated before they are published. Comments are great because they can start discussion and add new content to your site. Infact, Google treats comments as updates to the pages.
However, be aware of SPAM comments. Most of the time these are easy to spot. They won’t make much sense and are normally peppered with dozens of links to very dubious sounding websites! These should be deleted and definitely shouldn’t be approved. However, some of the comments are starting to quite clever and are quite generic in that the response doesn’t look out of place in most blogs. Recent examples I have seen include:
- Nice blog! I’m now subscribing to your feed, and I’m looking forward to your next post
- Thanks for this post, I found it really interesting
- I came across this website and I’m so glad I found it
It’s easy to see why most people don’t suspect these comments to be SPAM posts, there are no obvious links and people like receiving comments that are complimentary to their site. However, these comments contain links in the ‘name’ of the user, and often link back to gambling sites or worse. Recently, I have heard of a number of cases where websites have dropped considerably in the rankings purely because they have approved comments with links to these types of site. Because their site is linking to a site that could be blacklisted, or is a known SPAM site, the website has been penalised. Remember, a link to another site is effectively an endorsement for that website so being seen as endorsing that site reduces your credibility and trust ranking.
So what can you do to prevent this? First of all, check all your comments to make sure they do not contain links. If they do, and you’re unsure if they are reliable, simply delete them before approving the comment. You can also ask your programmer or SEO company to “nofollow” all links within the comments section which will help. Be on the look out, and if a comment seems a bit fishy, check it out before you approve it!
It is now common knowledge that Google is cracking down on websites that pay for inbound links. Paying for links has always been viewed as ‘morally grey’ from an SEO perspective, but now more and more sites are being penalised and dropping out of the rankings. As such, we are now getting asked a lot more about our natural link building techniques. So, in answer to your questions, here are 5 top link building techniques:
- Directory submission: It’s an old favourite, but directory submission is a great way to instantly get links to your site. We recommend not using any type of automated submission process or program, but instead manually selecting appropriate directories. Make sure that you include high PR business directories such as BOTW, Yahoo directory and of course human edited and niche directories.
- Link bait: Link baiting was once considered bad practice, but is now an acceptable and very powerful link building strategy. A link bait normally involves creating something on your website that is either useful, humorous, or unique in such a way that people will link to it (a bit like a viral).
- Article submission: Writing good quality content and submitting them to announcement sites is a great way to get good quality inbound links to your site. The article should be about something related to your industry, and will be made publicly available for others to read and use on their own site. The article will include a link back to your site which can provide a huge quantity of relevant links back to your site.
- Blogging, forums and comments: Writing good quality content on your site will attract visitors and links to your site. If you write good content, you will be perceived as an expert within your industry or niche. This can be backed up by regularly posting on forums (which can also include links in i.e. footers) and by leaving comments on other blogs in your industry. Some webmasters will allow links from the comment to your site, which can be powerful links if they are .edu or .gov sites.
- Reciprocal linking: Reciprocal linking gets a lot of bad press, and there are many SEO experts that believe it has little or no value. However, for a new website reciprocal linking can be very useful. Linking to other sites helps Google to categorize your website, and the reciprocal link will no doubt have a higher PR than your site so it will be a good link. You may also generate a lot of traffic from these links if it is from a popular website. Additionally, you could be a bit sneaky and ”nofollow” your link back to the site…
Hopefully this will answer a lot of the questions you have a give you a good start on your link building strategy. The great thing about link building is that over time your inbound links will rise exponentially as it gathers momentum (a snow ball effect). The downside of link building is that is can be very time consuming, and you have to be very careful about who you link back to!
There are many other techniques that you many find useful, including the current buzzword, ’social media’. Most links from social media sites do have the “nofollow” attribute, but having a large quantity of links can help generate traffic and your trust rank. We would always recommend leaving link building to an online marketing expert, such as ourselves! For more information, feel free to get in touch.
With any SEO campaign, it is important to measure the successfulness by regularly analysing the analytics data. When looking at your analytics data, you may see that your site is starting to get some good traffic and is attracting a lot of visitors, but if your bounce rate is high (i.e. over 50%) then you may need to re-think your on page strategy. A ‘bounce’ refers to when a user leaves a website from the landing page, and your bounce rate is the percentage of users that bounce. A good website would expect an average of around a 10-25% bounce rate.
If your bounce rate is high, you need to consider why people aren’t visiting other pages in your site. Perhaps it is because of a usability issue? If your navigation is complicated, or doesn’t display properly in different browsers, this may be preventing people from being able to view other pages in your site. A common issue is that the homepage contains too much information or is unattractive to the user. This can be addressed by creating call to actions, or obvious choices that the user can make based on their personal preference. For example, if you had an online clothes store, your starting links or choices could be clothes for men, clothes for women, clothes for children etc. This provides your users with a clear path they need to follow in order to help them find what they are looking for.
To help you reduce the bounce rate for your site, it may be worth thinking about the main reasons why users bounce. The top reasons, in no particular order, are:
- The page doesn’t load or render properly
- The page loads too slowly
- The user hasn’t found what they are looking for
- The user has found the information they were looking for
- The user is overfaced by the amount of content
- The user doesn’t trust the website
- Other usability issues
If your bounce rate is high, have a cold hard look at your homepage and top landing pages in your site. Alternatively, you should get an expert to analyse it - the results could be enlightening and profitable!
Internal linking can be a very powerful technique when used correctly. This refers to the internal linking structure of your website, and includes the importance of both the link and the anchor text that is used. For example, everytime we use the key phrase Manchester SEO company in a blog or webpage, we make sure that it links back to the website homepage. Using this technique alone before gaining external links to your site can help improve your position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
If you’re using a WordPress blog, you can use a plugin called ’smart links’ that will turn all of your chosen keywords into links. I’m still a little but dubious about this plugin, but I’ve been assured that is good and can save a lot of time! Personally, I like to have control over which of the keywords are links and which aren’t. For example, if I mention the keyword SEO several times on a single page, I only want one of those to be a link.
Additionally, improving your internal linking structure can aid the usability of your site. For example, a lot of the content on this website can be quite technical and includes acronyms which could appear as gibberish to an SEO novice. We convert these acronyms into links which lead to the relevant page in our SEO glossary.
Recently I have been working with a client that requested some search engine optimisation for their website because they had not been getting any sales enquiries. On further investigation, it became apparent that although their website was badly optimised it was ranking well and getting a lot of daily traffic. However, this was mainly due to their competitors having similar issues with their sites. Once the client realised that they were actually getting decent traffic, they questioned whether or not they needed to optimise their site, which is completely understandable.
However, although their site was currently ranking well, we still recommended performing some crucial on-page search engine optimisation to their website. This was to make sure that they maintained their current search engine position. If a competitor was to raise their game, it wouldn’t take much effort to start ranking above them in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Additionally, we recommended starting a monthly link building campaign (off-page optimisation) to their site as part of an overall strategy to continue ranking well for their chosen keywords.
Once the optimisation was complete, we recommended performing a full website usability analysis to address the issues with the navigation, and general site usability. These changes combined with modifications to the design increased the conversion rate of the visitors (sales enquiries). Although the key issue with the website was that it wasn’t converting visitors, it was important to make sure that they maintained their position within the SERPs. This is something that is often overlooked, but as a general rule with SEO, it is better to be proactive instead of reactive. Maintaining your position within the search engines is generally easier than trying to improve your position.
The dangers of SPAM comments on your blog
However, be aware of SPAM comments. Most of the time these are easy to spot. They won’t make much sense and are normally peppered with dozens of links to very dubious sounding websites! These should be deleted and definitely shouldn’t be approved. However, some of the comments are starting to quite clever and are quite generic in that the response doesn’t look out of place in most blogs. Recent examples I have seen include:
It’s easy to see why most people don’t suspect these comments to be SPAM posts, there are no obvious links and people like receiving comments that are complimentary to their site. However, these comments contain links in the ‘name’ of the user, and often link back to gambling sites or worse. Recently, I have heard of a number of cases where websites have dropped considerably in the rankings purely because they have approved comments with links to these types of site. Because their site is linking to a site that could be blacklisted, or is a known SPAM site, the website has been penalised. Remember, a link to another site is effectively an endorsement for that website so being seen as endorsing that site reduces your credibility and trust ranking.
So what can you do to prevent this? First of all, check all your comments to make sure they do not contain links. If they do, and you’re unsure if they are reliable, simply delete them before approving the comment. You can also ask your programmer or SEO company to “nofollow” all links within the comments section which will help. Be on the look out, and if a comment seems a bit fishy, check it out before you approve it!