Normally, hiding your backlink isn’t something that you should really have the need to do – or want to do – but if you have competitors that relentlessly scour your backlinks month on month to pick up the best links on the back of your hard work.

If you find them compulsively cheating instead of doing their own research and utilising their own knowledge of the industry you both work in then you may find the need to give them a hard time. How? By hiding your little nuggets of gold in piles of dirt. Or, in English, hiding your great links in a list of lesser quality links.

Hiding backlinks isn’t something I tend to make a habit of… In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever built links to disguise others from lazy rivals but it does happen. In all honestly I try to build links in a variety of different areas of varying quality to ensure that my backlink profile remains as natural as possible and not ‘forced’ – if that’s the right word to use… probably not.

Directories

Online directories are a good place to start. You can get some really good quality directory links while others don’t offer much value at all and the SEO value isn’t always relative to price. A lot of directories offer a free review and are easy to complete. Many have long waiting lists so you can ensure that the links will go live over a period of months so will appear natural and can be used to build links to internals pages of your site as well as long-tail variations of your keywords to help things look natural.

Blog Comments

Again, these are quick and easy and you can link to internal pages of your site to help push variations of your keywords to help with your SEO campaign while also muddying up your link profile.

Nofollowed Links

Although links with the nofollow attribute will not help you in terms of SEO or ranking, they do get listed regularly by sites that list inbound links to a site, meaning that your competitors will have to sift through a load of links to get any real gold out of your hard work.

I can’t say that it’s massively important for anyone to go to these lengths, as it isn’t really what real SEO is about in my opinion, but if you do feel the need to hide or disguise your backlink profile it can help slow down your competition. At the same time you can sift through their backlink profile as well as some of your other competitors and other industry sites and grab the best from their worlds while covering your own tracks, helping you to speed ahead and win the race to the top of Google.

In SEO, internal linking is connecting two website pages, it’s all about usability. Not only from a human perspective, but also for the search engine robots. If we start off looking at it from a users perspective and leave you pondering what the heck search engine robots are?

A website should allow the user to fulfill their need quickly and easily. If they can find what they are looking for, they are more likely to make a purchase or contact you about your services, if they cant they will hit the back button and you have lost yourself a sale! Looking at it objectively the best place to start is the home page you have two perfect opportunities; your navigation and your footer. Both should have keyword rich page names relevant to what you are optimising that page for. A sitemap is often over looked, however a good website should never be without an easily navigated list that can quickly point a user to the products/services they want. If you are optimsing for milk chocolate, white chocolate and dark chocolate, and you decided you want a whole page on each (and who could blame you) if you happen to mention dark chocolate on the milk chocolate page link it back to the milk chocolate page. But why….? This is where the search engine robots come in to the equation!

You may have heard of a search engine robot or spider that “crawls” your site and takes the information back to the search engines database. Everyone seems to have their own way for describing how these robots work. The metaphor that struck a chord with me was when they were described as an explorer ant, leaving their colony with one thought on their mind: Food. Except it is not actually ‘food’ they are looking for it is HTML text, and to get to it they need to travel along well planned out, obstacle free paths, these obstacle free paths just so happen to be your links. The happy ant then returns home with all its food (text) after a successful mission and stores it in the anthill (search engine database). If the path is not clear, the ant gives up and goes somewhere else as there is no food and returns with nothing.

Next time you sit down to carry out a search, remember in that few seconds you have sat their impatiently tapping your fingers, that the search engine has sifted through its database, sorted the millions of results into a list of the most relevant sites hopefully containing a match to your exact search criteria. Keeping those robots happy and well fed, and channeling your potential clients in the right direction will not only help your SEO listings but it will increase your revenue.

Anyone involved with SEO knows that Link Building is essential for maintaining good listings. But, you may or may not be aware that not all links are equal.

I often get clients tell me they ‘don’t have enough links’ because they’ve spoken to someone ‘who knows about SEO, who says they need more links’. Now, they may have a point, their backlinks may seem slight on first looks, but what they may not be aware of is that it is quality, not quantity that we look for in link building.

Anyone can buy hundreds of links but in my experience this is often a pointless and costly exercise. There is no point building links for the sake of it. You need to look at each link for it’s own individual merit and how it will benefit the site in question.

How do you know which links are best?

1. Relevancy
   I put relevancy high up on my list of attributes I believe links should have. This is because a link from a relevant source is much more powerful than a link from somewhere unrelated.
2. High PageRank Source
   If the page you link from has a high PageRank (PR) then some of that PR will ‘leak’ out to your site.
3. How many other links are on the page?
   I often have to ask myself this question, because the fewer the links out the stronger the link will be. PR gets divided up amongst all the links on the page, so a page with a PR 4, but with only one other link will be much more powerful than a link from a PR 6 page with 40 links out.
4. To ‘Follow’ or ‘Not to Follow’
   That is the question… A ‘follow’ link is more powerful than a ‘no follow’ link. ‘No Follow’ was originally created as a backlash against spam commenting on blogs (which still goes on, unfortunately). That isn’t to say that ‘no follow’ links are useless, they do have their place, and I think show that your link building activities are ‘natural’.

Where do you find ‘good’ links?

I think one of the best places to start for link building is your competitors backlink profile. Check Yahoo Site Explorer, and drill down the list of links. There must be some places amongst the list that you can approach for links.

You could also start to ‘think outside the box’ at this point and think of similar industries to your own where you could get links from – remember relevancy is important.

Another place to look for links is from your suppliers, do they have a website? If so, could you ask them for a link?

What keyword do I need in my link?

This question has a simple answer… ‘The Keyword you are optimising for, of course?’ But I would elaborate a bit further here, don’t link everything back to the homepage, make sure you link to your internal pages where possible as well. This will strengthen your domain and help support your website.

I would also add that if you only optimise for one keyword, then it would be a good idea to create a few keyword combinations with that one keyword in and link build using variety. This is because a large amount of keywords with the same anchor (link) text going to the same site will trigger ‘alarm bells‘ at Google HQ, so avoid this by maintaining a healthy amount of variety in your link building activities.

So there you are, next time ‘someone who knows about SEO‘ tells you that ‘you don’t have enough links’ tell them: ‘it’s quality over quantity’. And remember, one quality link can be worth a lot more than a hundred ‘bad’ (useless) links.

Script:

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we are going to take a quick look at link building and in particular what to look out for when asked to pay for links on other webmasters sites.

Firstly tho, a bit of news. You might have seen the count down on Google when you clicked ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, well after all the talk about it counting down to a new Google release or something exciting within the industry, it turned out to be a bit of a gimmick.

- video -

Very festive!

When thinking about buying links, it is important that you are very careful. Google can easily identify paid links, potentially leading to negative effects towards your SEO campaign.

So a few things to look out for when buying links are as follows:

Firstly, domain authority. Page Rank (PR) is a good way of seeing what sort of authority the domain has in the eyes of Google, it may also be worth looking at domain age and site performance.

Secondly, related content. When link building it is important that the sites content reflects your businesses keywords and SEO campaign, this will look more natural to Google.

Third, outbound links. If the site you are considering is littered with links already and covered in advertisements, it is probable that Google is already aware of this and it will have potentially lost some authority.

Fourth, quality content. Content is king, Good quality content is vital, so take some time to read through the text and make sure it isn’t full of spammy text and internal links.

Fifth, index depth. Small sites can only hold so much information, so a site with a larger search index can hold more related content, which can help to build the authority of a domain and increase the value of a link from this site.

I hope this mini list has been of some help, remember that when building backward links you should always consider quality over quantity.

Thanks for watching, please leave any questions or comments on the youtube channel or supporting blog post.

Every SEO knows the importance of links. Links are the ‘currancy’ of the web. External links are great to get your site found, spidered and indexed by the Search Engines, but can be difficult to obtain, manage and control. So, your site should have two types of links, some pointing to it ie external and some pointing to other pages on your site ie internal links. The best thing about internal links is that you have control over them, you get to decide the anchor text, you get to decide the placement of them and you get to decide how many you’re going to have on a page, or pointing to a page.

Internal links don’t cost anything. They can be targeted, from within relevant text, to relevant pages, making them stronger and more valid. You can increase the PageRank of a page with internal links. You homepage usually has the highest PageRank of your site, so create an internal link from your homepage to the page that you want to pass the PageRank on to (ie a page where you’re optimising a competitive keyword that doesn’t fit on the homepage). Use descriptive anchor text. Use the keywords that the linked-to page is about, this will help the search engines and your users to know what the link goes to. You can use this technique to help your internal pages attain higher rankings

You should have several different types of internal links on your site.

1. Navigation Links – Always ensure that if you use JavaScript or image based navigation that you provide a html version as well to help the search engines spider your site effectively.
2. Footer Navigation – this is different to the main navigation, and should always be written in a list format. Use your most competitive keywords as the anchor text.
3. Inline Text Links – These are some of the most important links on the page. Why? Because you can surround them with relevant text to increase their ‘worth’ to the search engines. You can also use them to direct users around your site, and hopefully eventually towards a conversion.
4. Sitemap links – by providing a sitemap you are giving the search engines a valuable list or ‘contents page’ of all the page’s within your website. This is useful for both the search engines and your visitors, especially if you have a large site with a lot of pages to visit.

You should use internal linking as part of your SEO campaign. You may well find that by creating a few targeted inline text links that your site starts to climb the listings. Obviously this isn’t the only SEO technique that will make a difference to your campaign, but when integrated with well written copy, good site architecture, and of course a great external linking strategy, you will find your listings are higher, your pages stronger and your visitor numbers increase.