SEO Tips & Information

Trading links with other websites can still be a help in boosting the performance of a website. One way links are best but a link exchange can still be good. I tend to think of a good link exchange as an insurance policy. If the links to my sites fall away it’s likely my link partners will still pass me good link juice - a kind of safety in numbers thing.

If you’re going to trade links with another site there are a few things to look out for. Personally, I never feel comfortable about doing a link exchange unless I’m getting a fair deal at the time of the exchange. I also like to feel confident the value of the link I get won’t drop off over time. For these reasons I always do some research on a potential link partner before doing a trade. Here are the main things I look for:-

Check the backlinks make the PageRank believable

Does the PageRank of the site match the number of backlinks the site has? Examine the site’s backlinks using Yahoo SiteExplorer. Got to www.yahoo.com and type in link: followed by the domain you want to check, e.g.

link:www.dowebseo.com

If the site has a PR of 4 and only 2 links, the odds are the PageRank shown on the Google toolbar is out of date and the real PR of the site is a lot less.

What share of the available link juice will you get?

How many other outgoing links are there on the webpage you’ll get a link from? Are there loads of links in the sidebar/ blogroll and footer? I never trade with a site that has more than 10 outgoing links on its homepage and unless the site has PR > 5, I like to see less than 5 links. If the page is PR 3 and there are 50 outgoing links, you aren’t going to get a lot of link juice passed your way.

Does the site have unique content that will turn up in searches?

Check if the site contains content duplicated on other sites. Take a few phrases from the site and do a search for them on Google. Place the phrases in double quotes when doing a search, e.g.

"this is the phrase to search for"

If the phrase turns up on a number of sites, the content is copied and the site is not a good candidate for a link exchange.

Does the website look a bit shady?

Does the name of the domain match the theme of the content? For example if the domain name is pet-food related but the site contains reviews of gadgets like mobile phone’s stay away. It’s likely the site is a dropped domain and the value of any backlinks it has are likely to be discounted by Google.

Does the site look like it sells links?

Does the site contain other outgoing links to unrelated sites on different themes? If it does then the site may be selling links rather than gathering quality link exchanges. The value of any link from the site might be devalued by Google.

There are other things you can look out for but I’ll go into these in a later blogpost. Following the 5 tips above is a quick way to spot the majority of bad link partners.

General SEO, Link-building

Back a while ago I wrote about a simple way to find dofollow blogs. The method I recommended showed how to find blogs that were part of the “u comment I follow” movement. Recently I’ve come across another set of SEO tips on how to find blogs to comment on. This method lets you find blogs with a specific domain extension, e.g. .gov or .edu. These blogs are usually thought to be more valuable than .com sites since Google reputedly puts more trust in links from .gov or .edu sites.

Finding .gov or .edu blogs is really easy. All you need do is use the site: operator in the Google search box.

For example, to find blogs on .gov sites:

site:.gov inurl:blog

or blogs on .edu sites:

site:.edu inurl:blog

Of course visiting blogs found using the above method doesn’t mean the blog is necessarily dofollow. to make spotting dofollow blogs easier, I’d recommend using the FireFox browser and installing the NoDoFollow plugin. This plugin highlights nofollow/ dofollow links on a web page and will help you pin down possible linking opportunities.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

Happy blog hunting!

General SEO, Link-building

When you want to boost the performance of your website in SERPs, you need to get backlinks. Submitting to directories is one of the easiest ways of building links. Backlinks from directories aren’t normally the strongest types of backlink you can get but directory submission beats most other forms of link-building for its shear ease.

Often the recommended route for making submissions is to do it manually. Make a post on a webmaster forums asking for advice on directory submission and you’ll probably get a ton of responses saying that the manual way is the best. Trouble is, no-one every says what they really mean by doing it manually. Really, what people advise when the recommend submitting manually to directories is:-

Make sure you submit your site details to the most appropriate category in the directory

If you don’t submit your site to the most appropriate category, two things are likely to happen:-

1. The directory owner will be more likely to reject the submission as spam.
2. Since your website details are out of context the worth of your backlink will diminish.

The problem with using fully automatic directory submitter tools to do submissions is that your relying on the tool choosing the categories for you. You’ll save a load of time and make hundreds of submissions but you’ll never really be confident that the submissions end up in the best categories.

There’s a similar issue with paying someone else to do manual submissions for you. How do you know they’ll pick the best categories? A lot of times you’ll find people offering to do 1000 manual submissions for $10 or so. These prices are so low they make me suspicious - that’s 1 cent per directory! People must value their time very low to be able to run such a service. Are they really just running a fully automatic submission program?

The best method for Directory Submission

If you want to be sure that the directory submissions are done correctly, the best way is to do them yourself. You can still use a software package to help though - a semi-automatic directory submission software package.

Semi-automatic packages load up directories and prefill the submission form with your website details BUT unlike fully automatic packages they let you verify the selected directory category before making the submission. You save time but can still ensure quality submissions.

One of the best semi-automatic directory submitter packages I’ve come across is SliQ Submitter. This neat, easy to use package lets you submit to over a 1000 directories. The package costs $10 for 3 months use. If you want to use the package for longer you just pay another $10. For your $10 you get to submit details for as many websites as you like and you get updated directories download automatically from the SliQ Submitter website.

For more information on directory submission, see Directory Submission SEO Tips.

General SEO