It’s commonly known that link building is a key element of search engine optimisation, but as with most SEO factors, taking short cuts can actually have a detrimental effect on your website search performance so it’s vital to do it in the right way. In this article we cover the misconceptions and mistakes that surround link building for search, and look at the most effective way to get results from the process.

The biggest mistake

It’s often thought that simply having a massive volume of backlinks is the way to go with link building, and there are countless companies offering link building as a quick-fire service. However, these services more often than not involve masses of links from irrelevant sites, link farms and generally disreputable sources. Take a quick look in your junk folder and you’re sure to find a promo email from a company selling this service - there’s a very good reason it’s been classed as junk… Using these services results in hundreds (or thousands) of new links being added at once - a great way to set alarm bells ringing when your site is indexed. Once the service is finished, which won’t take long, you’ll be saddled with a load of pointless - and at worst negative - links attached to your website.

Think quality over quantity

Quality, effective link building for SEO is a straight-forward enough process, but it takes a good deal of planning and time to implement correctly.

Building your links steadily and regularly shows search engines that you’re developing organically. Aim for between five and ten quality new links a week, with sites that have relevant themes. Working this way over six months or so will result in a good batch of backlinks that present your website as a reliable and authoritative resource.

Outbound linking

Don’t restrict yourself to inbound links either. Although inbound links are absolutely more important from the mechanics side of SEO, having a good range of useful outbound links can provide a helpful service to your visitors and give them another reason to come back to your site. Think of outbound links simply as good content that enrich the user experience - the ultimate goal of SEO.

We wrote last week about how it was absolutely critical for businesses to continue marketing during the economic downturn in order to keep their message out there in front of prospective customers. Well, exactly the same approach should be applied for website search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO is about getting your weblink in front of people precisely when they’re looking for what you offer. Looking at it from such a brass tacks angle, it’s the ultimate form of web marketing and as such it really shouldn’t be optional for business anymore - it’s nothing less than essential.

Organic SEO is an incredibly rewarding process at the best of times, but the value of a regularly high-ranking position on a prominent keyword during a downturn cannot be underestimated. It’s as effective as any targeted marketing and it’s out there all of the time, 24/7, on the world’s most used medium.

To find out how you can take advantage of SEO during the downturn and beyond, get in touch.

“Click here” is one of the most enduring terms used online, and has been around from the start. In fact, searching for “click here” on Google brings in an incredible 1.3 billion results, demonstrating how ubiquitous the term has become. It’s the second-nature anchor text choice for a lot of web developers and search copywriters, although moving away from it is so easy - and beneficial.

While “click here” still has great relevance in email marketing for obvious reasons, you’re missing an ideal SEO opportunity if you continue to use it indiscriminately on websites. From both a user accessibility and search engine indexing perspective, the term isn’t exactly the most helpful. Thinking about the search engines, if an anchor text and tag uses some of the keywords relating to the page that it’s linking to, then it’s far easier to classify - boosting the relevancy to a given topic. What’s more, your real-world users will know instantly what they’re clicking on, so you’re enhancing their visit as well. “Click here” doesn’t offer any information whatsoever, other than the presence of a link.

It’s another example that usability and creating a positive web experience should always be at the forefront of your web development and copywriting.

So, try to come out of the “click here” safe zone and you’ll soon find that SEO benefits will follow.

Maile Ohye followed up her outbound links article on Google’s Webmaster Blog last week with a succinct explanation on the value of good quality incoming links, and the importance of a well thought-out strategy. It’s another good example of how Google is opening up about its processes, and it also backs up what we’ve said about inbound links for a while now.

Another thing we’ve said over and over on Green Notes is that there’s no secret with this anymore. The whole point of a search engine is to enhance the user’s experience, so if you’re doing something that goes against this then you’re likely to be damaging your SEO potential.

There isn’t any single big secret about SEO - it’s largely a combination of clean up-to-date structural coding, good copy, strategised in-depth link building programmes and regularly refreshed content (all things we’re good at here at Greenmedia.) There are so many myths and misconceptions about what makes good SEO, some based on out-dated web practices, lots based on unethical methods and quite a few based on nothing more than bad guesswork and plain ignorance.

In this article we’re covering two topics that regularly crop up in SEO conversations - meta description tags and meta keyword tags. Neither is particularly important these days, but this doesn’t stop them being the invariable reference points for every amateur SEO expert out there. Perhaps it’s just because they sound a little bit technical… who knows?

Meta description tags

This is the copy that can appear on a search engine results page, and is literally just a description of what’s on the page that’s being referenced. The important thing to know regarding meta descriptions is that they don’t have any bearing whatsoever on your search engine ranking. None at all. Despite this, it’s still worth giving them some attention as they may well be the difference between a click-through and being ignored from a search results page. Write at least one definitive meta description for your website, and if your content is diverse enough then write them for individual pages. Just don’t expect that that they’ll boost your search ranking, they won’t.

Meta keyword tags

SEO would be a far easier practice if it was simply a case of filling up your webpages with meta keywords, but the general experience and usefulness of search engines would also go through the floor as everyone would be doing it - which is why it isn’t so simple now. Meta keyword tags are a legacy of what can be called, in web terms at least, the ‘old days’. Things have moved on. They’re essentially irrelevant now, and the major search engines don’t place any ranking priority on them whatsoever. Google and MSN ignore them completely in this regard. Yahoo and Ask do briefly consider what is in the tag, but they don’t prioritise it over the body content of the website and don’t use it at all for ranking.

Always keep in mind that you’re writing for human users and that the goal of the search engine is to maximise the user experience. The whole idea of a meta keyword tag - loading a line of code with words that the user can’t see - goes against this entirely.

We’ve been busy revamping the Greenmedia homesite recently, and it’s now rapidly approaching launch.

The current site is coming up to three years old, which in today’s web environment makes it something of a heritage piece. In that time, web technologies have moved on apace and we’ve worked on various new presentation effects that simply weren’t possible earlier. We’ve put some of these into the new website, along with examples of our best new client work, creating what we believe to be a perfect demonstration of our services.

As ever though, the Greenmedia website isn’t about bells and whistles, ‘awards’ or other such acts of shameless braggadocio. It’s about what we do and why we do it. It’s a showcase. It doesn’t need over-explanation because it speaks for itself. We think you’ll like it.