Good Practice SEO and Internet Marketing Blog

Perform a quick search on an engine of your choice and you’ll find thousands of references to ‘link building’.

Now before we get too deep into this post, I want to point out that I am all in favour of “getting the word out” on the Internet, and I am equally in favour of earning links where they are due. I’m also in favour of exchanging relevent links for traffic purposes (note: if you think link exchanges are any use for search engine promotion, you need to do some serious reading).

Deliberately seeking links for the purpose of ‘link building’, however, has a serious number of flaws. Read on and you’ll discover why.

Link building is a superb money spinner because the demand is enormously high, but it’s unfortunate too many people are willing to fall for the sales pitch: “you need links, loads and loads of links from all over the place”. It’s true, you do need links, but rather you need good links (that’s one-way links from high quality sites). ‘Link building’ in the spammy sense can rarely provide this.

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There is a big difference between how sites are ranked on google.co.uk and google.com. When most people in the UK visit Google, they are automatically forwarded to google.co.uk. The listings on Google UK have more of a UK slant, whilst .com Google tries to be all-inclusive, with varying degrees of success!

Google wants to deliver the most relevant results as possible, especially when it comes to geographical location. Therefore, if you access the Internet in the United States your results will likely differ still. If you are sat at your computer in the UK, even google.com listings will be tailored - at least to some extent. In the future we will no doubt see more of this.

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Directory submission is something you will certainly hear a lot about if you are promoting a Web business. Directories come in various shapes and sizes: some are purely for business listings, some are generalised, some operate in a niche, and some require payment for a review. There are also varying degrees of quality: some are ‘fly by night’, some are neither hopeless nor great, whilst others are what we call ‘quality directories’. A quality directory is a worthwhile place to submit your site.

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A question I am frequently asked is: “How can I see which sites have added my link?”.

Quality inbound links are a major factor in search engine optimisation, so you’ll obviously want to keea tabs on this. However, not all search engines will disclose the full extent of your link popularity.

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If you opt to use highly suspect SEO tactics thinking you’re unlikely to get caught, this post might just change your mind. Many webmasters participate in dodgy SEO and (unfortunately) get away with it, but thankfully the tides are changing. An increasing number of sites are being penalised, and some even find themselves banned completely.

I am aware of numerous sites that have been penalised for practices such as buying links, duplicate content and link schemes. One site I am aware of, which is a perfectly respectable site in all intensive purposes, was punished after the webmaster used the same content on his other (more popular) site. It spent the best part of 3 years out of the Google index!

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85% of SEOs just don’t have a clue. If you are not shocked by this figure, you should be. SEO is an industry plagued by misinformation. With this in mind, I have put together a brief, 10-point check list to help you spot an “SEO wannabe”. Watch out for these folk, their advice could get you penalised!

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