Have a peek:

Gomes explains that through this methodology, Google make roughly 500 improvements to search in a typical year. In a November blog post they detail 10 of these that span over the course of just 2 weeks, including:

• Cross-language information retrieval updates
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content
• Better page titles in search results (Google are paying less attention to anchor text as an indication of a suitable title for a page)
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian
• Extending application rich snippets to show details, like cost and user reviews in the search results.
• Retiring a signal in Image search.
• Fresher, more recent results – fresh content is more important than ever with this change impacting around 35% of all search results.
• Refining official page detection – ranking ‘official’ pages higher in the results.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries.
• Prediction fix for IME queries.

With all this change to Google’s algorithms, how can website owners and indeed, search engine optimisation experts, manage websites and plan campaigns or evaluate whether their changes are effective? It can certainly be difficult – Google’s PANDA algorithm changes have seen sites jumping all over the rankings this year and have left both businesses and SEOs in despair.

But whilst everything is changing constantly, nothing is really changing at all when you consider these changes alongside what Google are fundamentally trying to achieve.  Google state that their goal is to “get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek“.  Google just wants to deliver the content you want to see in the fastest way possible.  So whilst Google makes its tweaks and adds features like Instant which display results as you type, for website owners, creating that content (all of it – pages, videos, images…) in a well-optimised way is your best shot at good rankings.

Let’s take some of the updates above as examples.  Google has figured that a lot of people use keywords in their anchor text (e.g. in the text of links from other websites) to get their site ranked better for those terms.  This is just another form of search engine manipulation which, let’s face it, we all do (to be fair, Google’s webmaster guidelines do encourage link building).  Since we all do it, those anchor text links aren’t necessarily the best indicator of what the page is about. So Google is now taking that into account. Now, if your page already has great content, with accurate title/meta information formatted in the way that Google asks for it, does this matter to you? Not really.

Another update here is the fresh content update.  Google wants to display relevant, up to date content, to people who are looking to find that (hence why it only affects 35% of result, because some people are looking for the news, others are looking for the history of the Wombles, and that doesn’t need to be fresh).  We’ve known for years that Google likes fresh content, right? We know that sites rank better when they’re kept up to date.  It’s nothing new really.

In other words, if you’re following Google’s webmaster guidelines – recommendations for design, content and technical practice – these updates are highly unlikely to have killed your site.  Yes I’ve heard the PANDA horror stories and Google made quite a number of adjustments to get these updates right which saw some perfectly good sites disappear into oblivion for a while.  But I’d hazard a guess that if you’ve fallen victim to some PANDA trickery and not much has improved, if you take a good long look at your site somewhere there’ll be something that you’ve done to cause your rankings and traffic to fall. Hence my statement that not a lot changes. The algorithm changes are all designed simply to identify sites (and now, specific content like images, books and vids) that appear most relevant because they comply with best practice and bump them up the search results or bring them to the user’s attention in some way.  Of course, it does mean that if you’ve got a static business website, you’ve got to keep it updated with commentary on industry-relevant news and content, to stay ahead of the competition.

Google is simply about better results, faster.  It likes good content, speed, freshness, relevance – the cornerstones of Google search as an effective product.  The only thing that changes is how good Google gets at picking out the wheat from the chaff and how it displays its wheat to the user.

1. Are you using Google Analytics tracking and Google Webmaster tools?

These provide a goldmine of information such as how much traffic you’re getting, where you’re getting traffic from, and any crawl errors Google is encountering.

2. Does your site have broken links?

Google doesn’t like sites with broken links so get rid of as many as you can.  There are many ways of checking but my favourite is Xenu.

Another place to keep an eye on is Google Webmaster Tools because not only does it highlight links that are broken between your pages, but also links to your website to pages that cannot be found.  Since these links have some value to you, you’d do well to redirect them (using 301 redirect in your htaccess file) to the correct page.

3. Is your website code clean/valid?

Google does suggest in its webmaster guidelines that you use valid code although I wouldn’t list it as the most important ranking factor.  You can check your website code is valid here: http://validator.w3.org/.

4. Are you listed on Google local?

This is free local traffic so don’t miss out and make sure you make your listing as rich as possible.  Try to get customers to leave reviews for you, for more exposure.

5. Are you listed in other free business directories?

Check Yell, Freeindex, etc.  Make sure you take advantage of as many web links to your website as they will allow.

6. Are you ranking for some relevant keywords?

Make sure these are keywords that people are actually searching for.  You can use Google’s keyword tool for this, looking at the local search volumes (these are quoted per month).

There are three match types that appear as check boxes on the left hand side – broad, exact and phrase.

• ‘Broad’ means “tell me how many people are searching for roughly what I’m checking”.
• ‘Exact’ means (obviously) “tell me how many people are searching for exactly what I’m checking”.
• ‘Phrase’ means “tell me how many people are searching for something that contains the phrase I’m checking” – e.g. if I’m checking ‘plumber Nottingham’ then ‘find a plumber Nottingham’ would be included.

I use ‘phrase’ and uncheck ‘broad’ and ‘exact’, usually.

If you’re a small website, look at the possibility of local results first.  It’d be nice to rank for terms like ‘plumber’ of course, but these are really competitive terms that take a long time and a lot of work to achieve, because there’s so much competition. So it’s good to start with local terms like ‘Derby plumber’, and build up.

I would look at targeting a small number of terms to start off with. Think what makes you the most money (profit) and try to rank for that.

You really want a top 3 result in Google to be hitting any decent traffic. Past the top 3, you’re looking at only 5% of the search volume.

To check your rankings, you can use a free tool called Free Monitor for Google by CleverStat.  I also double check that the position I’m seeing is correct by searching in a Google Chrome ‘Incognito’ window (for anonymous browsing).

If you’re not ranking very well for terms, make sure your site has high quality original content, good links (see below) and is well optimised.

7. Does your website have a good link profile?

Google recommends in its webmaster guidelines that you “Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online”. That’s a nice way of saying build links to your site. Links are a bit like votes – if a site links to you, it’s like it’s voting for you, saying that you have something good to offer.

Unfortunately linking is heavily abused, with people trying to get rubbish sites ranked higher than they should be in the search results. So Google values some links over others. The best links are from sites that Google considers relevant, authoritative and trustworthy, and they use text in the link that you want your site to rank well for. But these really valuable links are hard to build, and it’s not a bad thing to have links of lower value as long as that’s not all you have.

To see your link profile, use Yahoo Site Explorer.  To gauge how well you’re doing, use your most important keyword that you want to rank for, type it into Google, find the top 3 results and check their link profiles, comparing against your own.  Here’s more tips and tricks on link building.

8. Are you using video to promote your site?

If there’s any possibility of making some ‘how to’ videos, these are an awesome way of targeting really difficult search terms in the search engine. I discuss promoting videos in ‘12 ways for small businesses to get more traffic, fast‘.

9. Are you using social elements to help others share/promote your site?

If you don’t have any social elements to your site at all, people can’t easily recommend, share or bookmark it. Google really values recommendations through its +1 button and has said in so many words that it favours sites who use that. There’s also a positive correlation between sites with social activity and good rankings (e.g. if people tweet/talk about and share your site a lot, it’s likely you’ll rank better), and Google recently rolled out a change in its algorithms that said hot, on-topic content would be bumped up the search results some of the time. How would it know that content was hot/on-topic if it wasn’t looking to social sites like Twitter for guidance? Social media/networking sites are becoming increasingly important for rankings so make sure you give people ways to tell others about you and your content.  Find out more about building a network of social sites through which to share.

10. Do you have awesome, original content on your site?

Google are great because they tell you exactly how to rank well in Google. Here’s their guide – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769. It’s pretty common sense stuff if you bear in mind that Google is just trying to give its users good websites.  Recently, there was a Google leak as to their quality guidelines (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/16-insights-into-googles-rating-guidelines). There’s nothing new in there, but one of the main things I take from this article is the bit that says:
“Raters are instructed to rate relevance along a continuum with 5 options: “Vital”, “Useful”, “Relevant”, “Slightly Relevant”, and “Off-topic”.

Make sure your site includes help guides or resources that would persuade me as a quality rater that the site is ‘vital’ or ‘useful’.  Also make sure your pages each have enough content – aim for 250-400 words a page.  Try the marketing copy guide for more help.

11. Is your meta information properly formatted?

Every page has information that search engines use to understand a bit more about what’s on the page, called meta information. Two really important bits of meta information are the title and the description.

When I’m optimising a site, I like to make sure that the title is no more than 60 characters with the most important keywords at the beginning or early on, and the description is no more than 120 characters with the same important keywords early on.

Don’t waste premium space on your company name – Google does a damn good job of realising you should rank for that anyway.  So put it after the key phrase that you’re targetting in the Title. Avoid any duplicate page titles and descriptions.

Xenu, the link checker I mentioned earlier, produces a report which shows you all your page titles – Google’s webmaster tools also makes recommendations when you have duplicate page titles or other issues with your meta information. These are under Diagnostics — HTML suggestions.

12. Do you have sitemaps in all the appropriate formats?

Sitemaps help search engines find all of your pages. You can generate them for free here: http://www.check-domains.com/sitemap/index.php then link them up from somewhere like your footer.  Your XML sitemap should be submitted to Google through Google’s Webmaster Tools as well.

13. Does your site load fast?

Google is all for giving a good user experience so favours sites that load fast. You can often make improvements simply by reducing the size of some of the images.

There’s a free scanner that also gives recommendations here: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

14. Could you grab more info about your visitors? 

Do you have a mailing list so as to send out special offers to your customers or prospects? Mail chimp is a great way of managing this, it’s free for up to 2,000 subscribers and really easy to use. You can get people to subscribe by putting a box on the website – for example, you could say ‘put your email address in here for 10% off’ (or whatever your offer of the month is).

Need help with any of these things? Contact us.

1. Give your website an overhaul

This sounds like a huge technical task but actually, it’s mostly the content you’re going to work on since content is Google’s numero uno ranking factor, so put on your writing cap.

Read our guide to writing good marketing copy before you start rewriting anything.

Here are your goals:

• All of your content is original – it’s not like any other website, and each page is not like other pages on your website.
• Each of your pages has a unique title and description. This is contained in the <title> and <description> of your website.  You can check this by viewing the web page, right clicking and choosing ‘view source’.  Alternatively, if you register your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll find the pages with missing or short titles/descriptions under Diagnostics –> HTML Suggestions, after Google has crawled your whole website.
• Each of your pages can be reached from just one static URL.  A static URL is one that doesn’t have question marks or funny squiggles in it.  An example is http://www.theinternetbusiness.net/building-links/ (static) vs. http://www.theinternetbusiness.net/wp-admin/post.php?post=150&preview=true (not static). So you need to make sure of two things – 1) all the pages can be reached, and 2) the can only be reached from ONE URL. If you can access the same page several different ways, Google may treat each of these ways as another copy of that page and view it as duplicate content.

As well as marketing copy, make sure your website offers something of  value.  A recent leaked Google document revealed that their raters are instructed to rate relevance along a continuum with 5 options: “Vital”, “Useful”, “Relevant”, “Slightly Relevant”, and “Off-topic”.  So even small business sites – electricians, plumbers, window cleaners etc – would do well to include some tips and tricks in ‘how to’ guides to satisfy the ‘useful’ element.

As a recommendation, your site should include at least 5 high quality, original, useful articles related to your business but that don’t directly advertise your business.

2. Build a network of social/sharing sites.

See our article on how to do this.  If you haven’t got time, as a mimimum, sign up for Twitter and Facebook.  Then:

• Add a link to your twitter and facebook account from your site (you might need some help with this if you’re not technical).
• Add the ability to Tweet / share on Facebook to the bottom of your content (ditto).
• Post the five articles you have on your website, mentioned above, through your network or on Twitter/Facebook.  Try tweeting them regularly, 3-4 times a day spaced over the course of a day for a few days.

3. Ensure your business/website is listed on Google local.

This is simply free traffic and free high rankings so not to be missed.

4. Add your website to free business directories. 

Here are some:

• FreeIndex
• Yell (free listings)
• UK Small Business Directory

To find more, Google terms like ‘business directory’ and ‘free business directory’. You may also like to try finding directories relevant to your industry by using additional keywords (e.g. ‘jewellery directory’).

Avoid paid directories as these are just like paid links so frowned upon by Google (unless you’re paying simply to be considered and it’s not guaranteed).

5. Do some competitor research.

Using Google.co.uk, type in the keyword you think a searcher would most likely use to find your website.  Make a note of the top website result.  Then, visit Yahoo Site Explorer, type the web address in and click ‘Explore URL’.  Change the drop down settings to ‘except from this domain’, ‘to entire site’.  Use this to find places to add your website to (you can download the top 1,000 results to ‘TSV’ which you can open up in Microsoft Excel).

One good place (slightly off topic) that you can build topical links is in forums relating to your business.  Most allow you to create a profile which includes a website link, and many allow a ‘signature’ on your forum posts, often after you’ve built up some trust in the forum.

Remember that Google looks for a natural link profile so try and build lots of different types of links of different values.

6. Sign up to Squidoo and Hubpages. 

Then enjoy writing a squidoo lens and a hub page about a topic that interests you in relation to your business – it’s actually a lot of fun, although we can help you if you don’t want to.  Include several links from the lens/hub page to different pages on your website, making sure you link to them using words that are relevant to your website rather than generic terms like ‘click here’.

For your squidoo lens:

• Ensure you include a link to your website in the bio.
• After you’ve published your lens, go find a few other lenses on the same topic, comment on them and ask for feedback on yours.
• Ensure you submit your lens to squidoo lens directories (NB. not every one on this page is active).

For both sites:

• Post links to the articles through your network of social network sites (or Twitter/Facebook if that’s what you set up).

7. Sign up for Yahoo Answers and start answering questions. 

When you get to Level 2, you’ll be able to post answers with live links under ‘sources’ (for example, to the useful articles on your website).  It takes quite a lot of effort but it’s worth it – the site is spidered regularly and will help you get new content noticed by Google and indexed fast.

Obviously, don’t spam – only answer questions where a link back to an article on your website would actually help the person asking the question, and make sure you answer unrelated questions without links back to your site regularly too.

8. Record a short ‘tips’ video about a topic relating to your business. 

You don’t need expensive equipment – just a high quality camera phone, digital camera or camcorder will do the trick. Then promote it like this:

• Offer multiple formats – for example, if they want a high quality file (which will take longer to download) or a low quality file (which will play faster).
• Include company branding – there are 101 free or very cheap video editors allowing you to insert graphics at the beginning, end and sometimes all the way through your video (for example, in a bar at the bottom).
• Name your files appropriately – for example a video entitled ‘Repairing-your-television.avi’ will do better in the rankings than a video entitled ‘repair.avi’.
• Include appropriate keywords elsewhere in the URL – for example, you could place some of your videos inside a folder /television-repairs/ and others inside a folder /radio-repairs/ to help Google better understand that the videos are about televisions or radios respectively.
• Optimise the pages on which your video files are placed.  Ensure that the page contains relevant content to the video, to help Google understand further what the video is about.
• Set up your own video channel, on sites like YouTube, enabling you to add more information to the page and adjust the content.
• Optimise your anchor text – that is, when you link to the video, link using something descriptive like ‘Television repair guide’ rather than ‘click here’.
• Offer a transcript of the video – Not only is this a great usability factor for people who can’t watch the video (for example, because they have a slow connection) but it’s also great content for SEO.
• Mark up your video using RDFa or similar – allowing you to pass specific information to Google about your video.
• Create a video sitemap. This is a special kind of sitemap for Google to understand what videos you have.
• Promote – there are hundreds of video websites and search engines that you can submit your videos to – try this list.* Don’t forget to put your new vids out through your network of social sites, or Twitter/Facebook as a minimum.

*I have adapted this section from an article I wrote for another SEO company, with permission.

9. Create a ‘lesson plan’ or ‘teaching resource’ on your website.

This is a super juicy tip that you’re unlikely to get from anywhere else unless they’ve copied it from here.  There are hundreds of sites that will give you links to lesson plans and teaching resources placed on your website, MERLOT for example.  Many of them are trusted .edu domains too.  Make sure your resource is genuinely useful so that it gets shared and rated well – it also needs to be on-topic so you can build links from on-topic pages (more valuable).

TIP: Sites designed to help parents homeschool are a great place to get links to free education resources that you’ve put on your website.

10. Don’t dismiss Google adwords.

Adwords can really work for your business – unfortunately most people don’t know how to use it and end up spending too much on highly competitive search terms that aren’t going to bring good results.  Adwords is a good way to bring in traffic before you’re doing well naturally in the search engine results. Make sure you:

• Set an affordable, realistic budget.  If you got no sales at all from Adwords, can you still afford to spend that much? Make sure you can.
• Bid on very specific keywords likely to generate sales, like ‘buy crate of wine’ rather than ‘wine’.  Use Google’s keyword tool to figure out what people are actually searching for – make sure you tick the ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ boxes (pictured right), as broad match results are misleading (the help icon over that box explains the difference).
• Do set up Goals in Google Analytics to accurately monitor how your campaign is performing.
• Watch your conversion rate carefully (how much it costs per click and per successful sale) and adjust your bids accordingly.

11. Get kitted out.

People in this business always have their favourite tools for SEO – mine are:

• Xenu – check your site for broken links.
• Free monitor for Google – check your rankings
• Check Domains – sitemap generator
• Site speed analyser – gives you a free analysis and tips on how to improve your website’s speed

I also love Google’s webmaster tools, Google analytics, Yahoo site explorer and SEO Moz’s suite of pro tools.

Another way besides Xenu to check for broken links is to keep an eye on ‘Crawl Errors’ in Google’s Webmaster Tools.  You need to fix these by adding a 301 redirect to your htaccess file. If you’re using WordPress, install the ‘Redirection’ plug in by John Godley as this is a super easy way to do redirects without having to edit the rules in htaccess yourself.

12. Add sitemaps.

Sitemaps really help the search engines find every page on your website.  My favourite tool for creating sitemaps is Check Domains.  It’s free and it produces ROR, HTML, TXT, image and video sitemaps, and handles big sites well.  When you’ve run the sitemap generator:

• Upload your new sitemaps to your server.
• Make sure you link them up from your site’s footer.
• Submit the XML sitemap to Google using Webmaster Tools.

If you’re stuck with any of these things, contact us.

1. Put yourself in the right frame of mind.

Ensure you feel passionate about what you’re writing – the feeling comes through in your copy.  This can be really hard when your subject is rather dry – to inspire yourself, try using Google’s keyword tool to work out what information people are actually looking for (and to get yourself a bit over excited about all the potential search traffic you could attract) then Google some of those terms and see how the best results have done it, or muse over how rubbish the top sites are and how much better you can do.

2. Think about who your audience are first and what they’re interested in.

Don’t just put yourself in your customer’s shoes – think, feel, imagine and act that you are your customer.  It doesn’t matter what you like – it matters what they like.  Many marketing agencies create personas – a character that represents their typical customer, sharing the same lifestyle, personality traits, likes, dislikes, feelings and so on.  Here’s an example.

As your typical customer, consider:

• What do you need to know?
• What factors are you buying on?
• Do you know about the company already?
• Do you know about the industry?

Many websites will have different personas using their site, and will plan a customer journey through various pages of information that cater for each persona.

3. Put the most important stuff that’s likely to make you buy FIRST.

e.g why is what you offer different.

Go and look at any news story and you’ll find:

• The headline – summarises the whole thing (your headlines must be enticing)
• A short concise summary (in marketing copy, it’s good to use bullet points)
• The story fleshed out later on with more detail if people want it

The whole page should make sense if only headlines are read.

The bullet points should also make sense if only the bullet points are read.

Bullets flesh out headline >> narrative fleshes out bullets.

Overall it should be easy to skim read – that is, if you haven’t got much time, glancing at the page gives you the overall message very quickly.

4. Use simple, emotive, punchy words.

There are already plenty of decent articles on using emotive words – this article has some examples: 50 trigger words.  As well as emotive words, tell your user what you want them to believe.  For example, if you want them to believe your company is trustworthy, tell them it is, and why.  If you want them to believe your product is reliable, tell them it is, and back it up.  Don’t overdo it or fill the page with fluff, though – you’ll sound like you’re trying to convince them of something that’s not true.

5. Use short sentence structures and short words.

Short words are best. They pack more punch.

Did you notice that all of the words in the above sentence have just one syllable?

Never pad your writing  and regularly prune – ditch anything that isn’t 100% necessary to make your point, especially flowery words.  Emotive is good, flowery is not.  Example:

Flowery: prestigious, unparallelled, endeavour

Emotive: satisfaction, success

Short sentences ensure that the real message is clear and appreciated.

6. Make one point per sentence.

Don’t overload your reader.

7. Write in a conversational style, not a presentational style.

i.e. write it as you’d say it.  Read the page – if that’s not the way you’d explain something to a friend, you need to lighten it up.

8. Use a consistent visual layout – stick to the same rhythm.

If you use the format: headlines > bullets > narrative > whitespace, use this throughout the page.

The reason for this is that human brains love patterns.  Give your reader’s brain a pattern to follow and they will keep reading, and take you seriously.

This page follows a pattern:

• Summary of the tip
• Explanation of the tip
• Sometimes, examples or extra information to help you better understand the tip

And you’re still reading!

9. Let yourself go – make it fun, unique, different.

Let people hear your voice come off the page.  Don’t be afraid to use real life examples as well as analogies so people can relate to what you’re saying.

Use the word ‘you’ a lot, rather than ‘we’.

People care about themselves, and what’s relevant to them.

10. Make sure there is a call to action.

What do you want people to do?!  Ensure your copy is tailored towards getting them to complete this action, whether it’s to make a purchase, sign up to a newsletter or simply share something they liked.

11. Always tell people what you do already, not what you will do. 

Otherwise it sounds like you’re hoping something will happen.  For example:

“We build …” rather than

“We will build …”

Another tip is to tell them what they are going to do – this puts the suggestion in their head that this is the action they will take next, as if it’s envitable.

For example:

“When you contact us, you’ll find…”

“When you use our service, you’ll enjoy…”

People waffle too much

12. Avoid writing meaningless dirge. 

This point is best explained by examples, which you’ll recognise straight away:

“Our company prizes itself in looking after its customers” – as oppose to what, treating them badly? I should hope so!

“Our friendly team are trained to deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction, ensuring your every need is met” – as oppose to what, an untrained, unfriendly group of people whose aim is to ignore what you ask for?

“We’ll endeavour to get it right every time” – okay you’ll try and get it right, great! Does it ever work?!

When we read these meaningless statements on a company’s website, we all die a little inside.  Believe it or not, people still write this stuff.  Here’s a great example that made me cringe.  Tell people the truth.  For example:

“You can trust us because we’ve been in this business for 15 years and in that time, we’ve helped more than 5,000 people with their something-or-other, achieving a customer satisfaction rate of over 97.5% for the last five years”. You can’t argue with that.

As a final thought, a recent leaked Google document revealed that their raters (people who manually review website content) are instructed to rate the relevance of content along a continuum with 5 options: “Vital”, “Useful”, “Relevant”, “Slightly Relevant”, and “Off-topic”. Keep these in mind when you’re writing your copy and aim to score highly on the vital, useful and relevant factors.

For help with writing copy for your website, see our blog writing service, copywriting services and researched articles service.

Structure

If your site has a clear hierarchy and text links (as oppose to image/flash/javascript links), both users and search engines will be able to navigate your content more easily. Ensure that every page is reachable from at least one static text link and that your most important pages are linked up from more places (for example, in the menu, footer, sidebar etc).

Write good content

The quality of your content has never been so important with Google investing millions upon millions of pounds in developing algorithms that drive the best content to the top.  Even if you’re promoting a business – whether it’s window cleaning, internet marketing or your local caving group – you need to create a genuinely useful, original information-rich site that adds value to the net as a whole.

Google encourage you to consider which words your target audience might type in if they were looking for the sort of content that you’re offering, and to use these on your site/page.  Avoid putting this content in javascript, images or flash as you’ll make it more difficult for the search engines to read it.

It will further help search engines to classify and rank your content if you label it well.  Use ‘alt’ attributes that accurately describe your images and elements, and mark up videos and contact info using formatting such as RDFa.  For help with writing copy for your website, see our blog writing service, copywriting services and researched articles service.

Pay attention to detail

Google’s huge beef is with delivering a quality user experience.  If it can’t crawl half your pages, not only will you miss out on ranking for that content, but you’ll likely rank lower.  So check for broken links and correct HTML – I like Xenu’s link checker which is free and you can validate your HTML here.

Some search engines also struggle with dynamic pages (i.e., where the URL contains a “?” character), so avoid them where possible and if you do use them, keep them to a minimum and be extremely careful that they are not causing a duplicate content issue, for which you will almost certainly get penalised.  Make use of your robots.txt file to stop Google and the other search engines crawling search results pages and other auto-generated pages (like WordPress tag pages) that add very little value for users.

Remember, it’s about user experience – so check your site carefully in a number of browsers including a text browser such as Lynx.  This is both for appearance and to ensure that your site can be crawled fully.  Most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would so it is very useful for identifying any features (such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash) that are preventing the engines from crawling your site properly.  Another way to identify crawl errors is to use Google’s Webmaster tools which will not only tell you if there are any problems, but will even give you advice on how you can better meet their guidelines.

Speed up

As part of delivering a great user experience, Google expects sites to load up fairly quickly.  Fast sites simply increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web.  Google gives a list of recommended tools for improving site performance including Page Speed, YSlow andd WebPagetest – and there is a Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools which gives data on  the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.  I’m a big fan of  Web Page Analyser, a free online tool for checking your site speed which gives easy-to-follow recommendations.

What to avoid

Google’s list of website no-nos is a lot of common sense when you recall (once again) that they’re simply trying to deliver good results to their users.  Here’s what they won’t allow:

• Cloaking – presenting one set of content to the search engine and another to the user.
• Link schemes – link exchange sites, link farms etc – these are all designed purely to manipulate the search engines and having your site listed on them can adversely affect your rankings.
• Use of ‘black hat’ and unauthorised software – this even includes programs to submit pages and check rankings such WebPosition Gold™, but would also include programs to automatically build links through spamming.
• Hidden text or hidden links – search engines can easily identify if your text is the same colour as your background.
• Keyword stuffing – industry opinion is that this won’t necessarily harm your site but won’t help it either as the content is poor so won’t be ranked well.
• Duplicate content – Google’s last major updates have been all about ridding the web of as much duplicate content as possible so keep your content original and be very careful that each web page only has one URL.  Find out more about our website originality check.
• Sites that exhibit malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• “Doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Contrary to what some think, SEO and link building is not necessarily considered a bad thing.  Google actually advise that you “make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online”.  Search engine optimisation and good link building actually helps Google deliver better content to its users.  It’s just not good when your site isn’t worth all the links it has, or you use underhand techniques to try and get your site ranked far above where it would likely fall after a human review.  Find out more about our link building services.

Sitemaps

Create a sitemap for your users to help them find all of your pages (for example, this is TheInternetBusiness.net’s sitemap).  If you have a large site and the sitemap therefore has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break it up into multiple pages.  Generally, I’d advise no more than 100 links on any page (sitemaps or otherwise).

Also create sitemaps for the search engines for the same reason and keep these updated. My favourite tool is ‘XML sitemap generator’ which is a free online tool that handles large sites very well and creates html, xml, txt and ror sitemaps for you.

Make sure you add links to your sitemaps somewhere on the site (I usually add mine to my footer) and submit the XML sitemap to Google through Webmaster Tools.  These type of sitemaps can contain a lot more links – up to 50,000 – as they’re not part of the user experience.

Find out more about our website and blog design and build services.

You can do this by creating a network of accounts – social networks, bookmarking, etc – and once set up you’ll be able to use some tools that enable  you to quickly push the content to this entire network in a couple of quick steps.

My three tools of choice are Ping.fm, Amplify and Onlywire.  Ping and Amplify are free.  Onlywire has a free option but this allows only 300 updates per month.  If you only use Onlywire, since you add around 50 places to it, and each post therefore makes 50 updates, that’s only about 6 posts a month that you can make.  However, by using Amplify and Ping.fm’s services to post to as many places as possible and just using Onlywire for the handful of accounts that are left, you can get a lot more out of your free 300 account.

Start by setting up your Ping.fm account, no need to register any services yet.

Next, register with Amplify and each of the services supported by Amplify. Currently these include:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Google Buzz (soon to be gone)
4. Posterous
5. Tumblr
6. WordPress (hosted option)
7. Blogger
8. Flickr
9. Ping.fm – enter the account information you’ve just created
10. Plurk
11. FriendFeed
12. Diigo
13. Delicious
14. Clipmarks

TIP: When you’re setting up social accounts like these, always make sure you check out your profile options.  Most allow a free link back to your website, so use it!

TIP: You’re going to be setting up a lot of accounts, and unfortunately you will get spam as a result.  I recommend setting up a new email (e.g. gmail) just for these accounts.

TIP: Try to use the same email address, user name and password across all the sites.  I record all of mine in a spreadsheet, with a link to where my posts appear so I can quickly check them any time.

When you’ve set them all up, do a test post – just a quick message like ‘Hello! It’s great to be here!’.  Make a note of any that don’t work.  I’ve found with Ping, Amplify and Onlywire that sometimes accounts simply don’t link up properly.  So you have to be a bit flexible – if it doesn’t work from Amplify, add it to Ping; if it doesn’t work from Ping, add it to Onlywire and so on.

Now go back to Ping and set up the services you haven’t already set up on Amplify.  DON’T add your twitter account to both Ping and Amplify, as you’ll end up double posting which just irritates your followers! If all of your Amplify services worked okay, you should only need to set up:

1. MySpace
2. Ning – paid
3. GTalk Status
4. AIM Status
5. LinkedIn
6. Identi.ca
7. Brightkite
8. Jaiku
9. Plaxo Pulse
10. Bebo
11. YouAre
12. Multiply
13. Yammer
14. Flickr
15. StatusNet
16. TypePad
17. StreetMavens
18. myYearbook
19. Photobucket
20. Yahoo Profiles
21. Tagged

You don’t have to set up all these accounts if you don’t want to but don’t forget that you’ll get ‘free’ profile links to your website from most of them.

Now! If you make a test post through Amplify, it should update ALL of the accounts you added to Amplify accounts and ALL of the accounts you added to Ping.fm, all in one go.  Give it a whirl and as before, check carefully that they really did update, otherwise you may want to add the account to Onlywire as a last resort.

Finally, set up with Onlywire’s free option (or their paid option if you’re so inclined – I use the paid version and believe it is worth the money).  If all your accounts have worked with Ping and Amplify, you should only need to set up:

1. AOL Lifestream
2. Bibsonomy
3. Bookmarks.com
4. Connotea
5. Digg
6. Folkd
7. Google Bookmarks
8. Hi5
9. Jumptags
10. Kaboodle
11. Karmalynx
12. LinkaGoGo
13. LiveJournal – paid
14. Mister Wong – paid service
15. Multiply
16. MyAOL
17. My Link Vault
18. Netlog
19. Netvibes
20. Newsvine
21. Oyax
22. Reddit
23. Scribd
24. Serpd
25. Sonico
26. Stumbleupon
27. Yahoo Pulse
28. ycombinator.com
29. Yelp

A note about posting on Onlywire – you get the option of putting ‘notes’ and a ‘status’ update when you make a post.  If you do both, it’ll use up an extra credit for every service that allows you to do both.  So I just do one (notes).

Onlywire does give you great reports to tell you how successful your posting was.  Again I recommend checking through the sites at least once manually, and making sure your posts are appearing as they should.

Now you’re all set up – to push your new website content out – simply post on AMPLIFY (which automatically pushes to Ping.fm and all linked accounts) and post using ONLYWIRE.  You’ll instantly push your content to 64 places in just two really quick steps.  I have a list of additional places to push to, not covered by the three services, so my content goes out to the 64 places then I manually push it to all the extra places too like 43things, a1 webmarks, Buddymarks, Bumpzee, Buzzle and more.  To get ideas of more place to push your content out to, see the ‘AddThis‘ service directory.

You’ve got a great network but don’t forget that to maximise its effectiveness, you also need to get involved, helping people out, commenting on how you enjoyed something they posted, if you genuinely did, and if it’s relevant to your market.

For help with promoting your website, see our internet marketing services.

Are the lower value links worthless? In my view, if you have a site with no links vs. a site with some low-value links (and the sites are on a par, content-wise), the one with some links will likely do better – but that’s often not the reality (you’ll rarely be up against a site with no links!) and you can’t rely purely on low value links to get you better rankings. I think it’s important to build a diverse, natural-looking link profile, which means having a mix of links from different sources and of different qualities. Even links often considered low value (like forum links) can sometimes be powerful, as I’ve explained below. What about really spammy links? Here’s a great article from Rand Fishkin on that topic (opens in a new window). In short, don’t go after spammy links but if you get some to your site, it’s unlikely to do you any harm as long as you’re doing everything else right.

Competitors

The very first thing to do is to look at your competitors’ link profiles using a tool like Open Site Explorer, or Yahoo Site Explorer if you don’t have an SEO Moz subscription. Your competitors are the sites that are already ranking in the top spots for the keywords you’re targetting, in the search engines you want to rank in. Looking at their link profiles gives you loads of ideas for sites that might give you a link. SEO Moz has got a number of other tools to help you find links, like Juicy Link Finder.

External blogs

Building a blog from scratch and getting it to the stage where it has enough link juice to be of any benefit to your main site is a lot of work. There’s a strong argument for putting all your best content on your main site instead (and perhaps having a self-hosted installation of WordPress in a subfolder for blog posts). However, there are many sites that offer you a free blog which creates a subdomain of their (sometimes highly authoritative) site. For example, My Telegraph. I haven’t done any testing worthy of publishing but when I post an article with a link on my Telegraph blog, the content I link to is spidered by Google within the hour and sometimes within seconds, and I’ve noticed positive correlations in traffic. I suspect it is better to have a hosted blog on a subdomain of an authoritative domain than it is to try and build one from scratch.

If you would rather have a blog on your site, consider using a subdomain. I’ve been watching a client’s competitor’s website that’s using subdomains for different countries for a while now (all English content). Each subdomain has unique content and its own link profile. I strongly suspect from watching them climb the rankings that those subdomains are adding authority to the root domain.  See here for help with blog writing.

Answer questions on Answers websites

I’m not the first person to recommend doing this to get links to your site! The Yahoo Answers pages get indexed quickly and some hold high positions in the search results. Links are ‘no follow’ but I’m with the crowd that believes no follow links do have some value. There are more answers sites besides Yahoo Answers but it’s Yahoo that I use most.

You’ll need to get to Level 2 before the links you post are live, but once you’re there, all the links you’ve ever posted suddenly become live. I recommend you don’t spam but answer questions in different subject areas to those you’re trying to promote and don’t just link to your own site. Try and give really good answers as you’ll get picked for ‘best answer’ and you’ll get to Level 2 a lot quicker.

Scribd/Document sharing

Just signing up to Scribd, the document sharing site, allows you to add a profile link (and there are plenty of other doc sharing sites – try DocStoc, Google Docs, MS Office Online, Gazhoo.com). As well as profile links, doc sharing sites often let you put links in your documents – okay, not great for SEO but great for driving traffic if you get a popular article (I released one on tips for taking your GCSE exams around exam time and I’ve been really happy with the number of views – it includes a little promotion and a lot of good content).

Wikipedia and Wiki sites

Wikipedia lets you have a user page where you can stick some no follow links. I’m told they will be deleted if they are viewed as spam – so interact with Wikipedia, add some value to the community and you’ll likely keep your user page complete with links which I have. Don’t add promotion-type links to Wikipedia’s pages themselves – they’ll be deleted as spam and you’ll lose your account with it, plus you just junk up what is a valuable resource for everyone else.

Article websites

Since Google’s PANDA update, there’s been a lot of talk about article websites being of less value. This may be the case, but it’s hard to ignore that Ezine still has a PR of 6 and there are plenty of article websites that still have high PRs. Look at their traffic rank too.

To date, I’ve had 30,659 views on Ezine with 12,470 of those on a single article entitled ‘Separate Legal Personality of a Company’. Traffic from the 35 articles I have live (linking to various different sites) is around 600 visits a month and growing. Even if my links are worth nothing, I’m happy with that stream of traffic for the little bit of effort I’ve put in, in creating the articles.

TIP: If you already use article marketing, check back over your old articles and make sure all your resource links point to sites you’re actually promoting.

Social networking sites

There’s plenty of social sites where you can get a link – Facebook pages/groups, Bebo, MySpace – these sites often allow you a link back to your website. You can use a service like Ping.FM or Amplify to update them all at once. Ping.FM has a good number of sites it works with which gives you more ideas for places you can get links from.

Photo sharing sites often let you have a profile link too – do upload a few decent pics as a minimum to make your account worthwhile though.

Forums

People often say forum links are low value. Sure, they can be – but I still see forum threads appearing high in Google’s search results for some topics. It’s like anything else – post up quality content – answers to questions, helpful information – and the thread may well get noticed.

There are two ways to get links in forums – the first is easy, sign up, create a profile and add your website link. It’s a little naughty but you can get stacks of links just doing this, albeit low value ones, without interacting in the forum itself, although if you never post up you sometimes see the account being deleted. Another thing to watch is that those profiles aren’t always visible if you’re not logged in, in which case they have no search engine value.  The second way is through signature links – you’ll often find restrictions on these, like you can’t have one until you’ve made 50 or so decent posts.

Don’t spam forums with links though – you’ll lose your account and lose all the links you’ve built on there with it.

Blogs

You can get high value links posting comments on decent blogs. Again, don’t be tempted to spam them, it’ll just get removed. If you offer a sincere comment of value, it’s less likely to be deleted.

Industry specific sites

Search for industry-specific sites that allow you to register as most will let you pop a link in your profile! You can then of course create further links by submitting articles/press releases, contributing in the forum, and creating quality content just for them (guides, reviews, etc).

Google local

If you’re not already on Google local, get your business (or your client’s business) on there, along with the website link it gives you.

Business associations

You’ll find plenty of these online – search for business associations in your local area that work to promote local businesses. They often let you have a listing, with a link back to your website. Some of these you have to pay for so consider the value of the site (link profile, traffic) before you shell out the annual membership.

Business directories

FreeIndex and TouchLocal are two examples of business directories where you can have a link to your website. FreeIndex lets you build deep links to product landing pages which is handy. If you can get customers reviewing your site, you’ll get bumped up the listings. Yell also offers a listing with a website link.

There are thousands of other ‘business directories’ but these are frequently very low value. There’s a pretty good list here which you can order by PR: Directory critic. Here’s a better quality list that’s more of a review. The links will be more valuable if they’re relevant to your business so search for terms like ‘keyword’ + ‘add URL’, ‘keyword’ + ‘add website’, and so on, to find relevant directories which will be worth more. Stay away from paid directories unless the payment is genuinely to consider to be included (not guaranteed) – Google’s advice is not to buy a link unless it’s no follow, and I’d stick to that.

Squidoo lens

Squidoo has an awesome domain authority and I’ve seen lenses we’ve created get very good rankings and decent traffic as a result. Build a decent quality lens and get people to ‘like’ it to get it climbing up the rankings. You can also use HTML to drop a website link into the profile section on the right hand side of every lens.  Sadly, Squidoo have made sections of the lenses ‘no follow’ – but not all of them.

Other sites like Squidoo

More and more sites like Squidoo are springing up all the time – check out Hub Pages, Wikinut, Wizzley.  See here for help with building Squidoo lenses and other similar types of pages.

Sponsored reviews

It’s great to get external feedback on your website and one way of doing this is through sponsored reviews.  A review on a high profile website (sponsored or otherwise) can bring you recognition and traffic from both search engines and readers. Sponsored reviews, such as those offered by SponsoredReviews.com, are a bit of a grey area in SEO and if you want to go down this route, you’d do well to follow Google’s guidelines on paid links. If you pay someone to review your website, product or service, you can:

• Insist that they add rel=”nofollow” to any link they make to your site – instantly, this is okay with Google.
• Ask that any links are redirected to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.

These measures are taken directly from Google’s webmaster guidelines.  If you purchase reviews that include a link and these guidelines aren’t followed, you risk a penalty.

Linkbait

I love the idea of links that build themselves. Create a good enough article or something valuable to people and they WILL link to it, saving you the trouble of running round searching for links yourself. Link bait can include videos, articles, games, scripts, widgets, free stuff like website templates and graphics. Try and keep what you’re giving away relevant to your website – for example, if you’re a coffee shop and you want to give away a website template with a link back to your site in the footer, at least make it a coffee themed template!

When it comes to creating content, you need to put stuff together that isn’t available elsewhere, or create a sort of ‘101’ that pools lots of ideas together (rather like this one!), giving due credit for any brilliant ideas you include that come from other people. Being provocative, controversial or a contrarian about a particular topic can also get you attention.

Sales listings

I’m not suggesting you create these just for links but if your business (or your client’s business) sells stuff on eBay, make sure you link back to your main website. The same goes for job advertisements and any other online advert. It all counts.

Affiliate links

Running an affiliate program means not only do you get other people promoting your site for you but you also get affiliates linking to your site from theirs. Sometimes these have a value with link juice, not always – otherwise, they drive traffic to your site.

Press attention

Some press release sites will allow you to pop links in your articles (although often you can’t specify the anchor text) – you usually have to pay to post a release or for an annual account. Some of these sites have a high PR – journalism.co.uk for example has a PR of 6. I’ve noticed Nexis news feed pick up content from Instablogs before (free to create an account and post) currently with a PR of 5. Other sites for submitting press releases include: http://wn.com/ and http://www.pressonshd.com (Do you know of any more?)

Don’t make the mistake of distributing the same news article all over the web as well as putting it on your client’s site. I’m currently looking after a client who does this (they simply don’t have the time or budget to rewrite) and their articles are ranked higher on other sites than the news section of their website. I worry that one day Google will give them a penalty for having duplicate content on their site – even though it’s actually theirs!

Bookmarking

Although not strictly linking, bookmarks do draw attention to the content of your sites – getting Google and the other engines to index it quicker. It also has the potential to drive some nice traffic your way. Look out for those cheeky profile links – Clipmarks for example allow you to pop a link in your profile. Don’t spam – bookmark other sites too, or you may find your account is deleted. Here’s some to try: Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Tagza, Bibsonomy, Buddymarks, Folkd, Mylinkvault, Jumptag, a1 webmarks, Delicious, Faves, Diigo, Clipmarks. I’ve had some fair traffic from Stumbleupon with 400 or so daily uniques from this source for some of our articles – you can see the peaks below in this one website’s traffic graph when we have released articles (this shows traffic purely from Stumbleupon).

Video sites

If you can create even a single video, you can get links from all over the place including YouTube and Vimeo. You can make videos of your screen (for example to demo how software works) using free software like CamStudio if you don’t have a video camera. Mark your videos up using something like RDFa and use video sitemaps for extra exposure. Don’t forget to set up your profile links on any sites you submit your video to.

Reviews/testimonies

People like it when you review their products or services. Do a good job and you’ll get links to your review. Don’t forget to let them know!

Finally…

It’s likely that Google will move further and further towards a model that counts only high quality links – reviews and in-content – as indicators of a quality site. So your long term strategy should focus on obtaining these, but that’s not to say you should ignore everything else – and don’t forget that Google isn’t the only search engine.  It’s also worth remembering that links are likely to take a back seat as a ranking factor over time, with quality content being by far more important – check out this article by Dr. Pete.  But for now, links are still important so happy link building, I hope my ideas are helpful.

That’s it for now. If you’ve got any more ideas of where you can get links, high and low quality, please share them below.

Find out more about our link building services.

Common problems

In dealing with outsourced link builders, here are some issues I’ve encountered:

Confusion over what is a link

It might seem relatively straightforward to you but link builders have very different thoughts on what creating a link for you actually means.  Some count social bookmarks as links, others count posts on social networks.  Many link builders will try to create links through blog comments and forum posts for you, but these often require moderator approval so that, at the time they report to you, you can’t really see if you’ve attained that link or not.  Other link builders use  and directory submissions which again require weeks or months to approve.  Others create links in forum profiles but these frequently sit behind log in screens so aren’t seen by the search engines anyway.  To add to this, there’s often confusion over what (say) a PR3 link is.  Just because the site is PR3 does not mean a new profile on that site will also be PR3. It’s page rank, not site rank.  But link builders will happily tell you they’ve built 150 PR3 links for you, failing to understand this.

Link quality

You might have a very definite idea of what constitutes a good quality link – your link builder will have other ideas.  Whilst I’m in the school of thought that a link is a link, most links have at least some value, you don’t want millions of spammy links and no quality.  Unfortunately, without any direction, that’s very likely to be what you’ll get.  For this reason, I prefer to use link builders to build specific types of low value link (forum profiles, forum comments, blog comments, directory submissions, etc) and do the quality link building myself.  Higher quality links, like in-content links on trusted websites, take more time to achieve but these are likely to be the ones Google really places weight on in the future – it’s possible but unlikely your link builder will be able to achieve these for you.

More issues

Link builders using my personal name on accounts they create has been one issue I’ve had, especially as some of those have popped up on the kind of websites I’d prefer not to be associated with.  Volume has been another issue, with huge disparity in what one link builder can produce in a week compared to another – better to pay piecemeal.  Subcontracting is a further trap to avoid – once you’ve got a business email address, you’ll be contacted by all manner of companies offering competitive rates for link building and SEO work, but they are outsourcing themselves, which means someone somewhere is ultimately getting paid just a few cents per hour to do the work.  Even if you have no problem with this ethically, it’s also another body in the line for chinese whispers when it comes to your instructions.

Dishonesty is a rather sad issue that you’ll have with some outsourced workers regardless of where they are based – you need to check the reports you receive carefully to make sure they are not the same as previous reports, and to ensure the links have actually been built.  Also look at the links created to ensure that your link builder isn’t using automatic, black hat software to build links through spamming, which could be frowned upon by Google.

Language 

Language is more of an irritation than an issue – most foreign link builders speak some basic English and as long as you present your instructions clearly, without using too many technical words, you’re unlikely to have any problems.  You just might have to reword things a few times over – always let them know that you’re very open to questions.  Most Filipinos speak excellent English as this (alongside Filipino/Tagalog) is their main language.

Get the instructions right

It’s worth taking some time to give clear instructions to your link builder so that you stand a good chance of getting what you want.  If they don’t follow your instructions, you can then dispute their invoice.

Ask yourself these questions and make sure the answers are explicit in your instructions.

• What type of links are you expecting (e.g. blog comments, forum profiles, directory link building) and what do you not want?
• Will you accept links from adult-themed websites?
• May they create accounts and profiles using your actual name, or must they use a pseudonym?
• Must your links be mostly from a particular country (e.g. UK, US)? Consider specifying a percentage.
• Are you looking for links from websites with particular extensions (e.g. .net, .com, .org, .edu)?
• Are you looking for links from pages (or websites) with a particular page rank?
• May your link builder use software to create the links or must it be done manually?
• What balance of follow/no-follow links will you accept?
• Must the links be confirmed or will you accept that they have tried to build the link but it may not yet have moderator approval? You might be happy for the link builder to provide log in details so you can check they have genuinely left a comment which is awaiting approval.  For directory links, you could set up an email address for them which you have access to, and can see where they’ve applied for a directory.
• Who will confirm directory links? (frequently, the directory sends you an email with a link in that you have to click to confirm your submission)
• Are there any specific sites they should avoid?
• Do you want them to use variations of your keywords in the anchor text (e.g. ‘link building’ ‘build links’ ‘how to link build’ etc)?
• Must the links be from topical websites relating to your keywords? (you might want to specify a minimum X% must be on-topic)

Tips for managing outsourced link builders

• Start out with a quick test – 2-4 hours or so – to see how well they perform.
• Ask for a spreadsheet of links built each week – easier to read than screenshots.  Tell them exactly when you expect the spreadsheet to be delivered to you each week.  You can give them a template to fill in, to make sure you get the information you want – the very least you want is the confirmation link showing you where the link they built is.  It’s also helpful to get the log in and password details they are using to sign up to any sites, so if you spot anything disasterous, you can quickly log in and correct it or delete it.
• Give simply worded instructions with clear expectations and deadlines.
• Make sure they know they should ask questions if they’re unsure about anything, and always be kind in the way you answer questions so you don’t discourage them in future.
• Never assume they know what something means.
• It’s a good idea to ask them to confirm to you the instructions as they understand them, especially if their English isn’t great.
• Review their work regularly, weekly as a minimum, to make sure they are on track.  Give any additional instructions or clarification if you think they don’t understand what you’re looking for.
• Use sharing tools to help communicate – favourites are Google Docs, Dropbox and Skype, all of which are free.
• Give feedback regularly, and make sure you praise them for work that is well done.

Is it ethical to outsource link building?

The answer to this is quite simple. It’s ethical if you pay a fair price, and if you take care that you’re dealing directly with the link builder.  A fair price is an hourly rate that would allow that person a reasonable standard of living. You don’t need to compare to hourly rates in your home country, or even pay the same rate to all of your link builders – you need to compare to the cost of living in the Country in which they are based.  If you want to be confident that what you’re doing is ethical, Numbeo.com is a great site to find out the cost of living by country.  You can also check out any Government set minimum wage for the Country in question.

Do praise and reward your best link builders – they are just like employees.  You want to keep good people motivated, and working on your project rather than someone else’s.

Find out more about our link building services.