Small businesses require a lot of work to keep alive; it’s rare that you find a small business owner that has the time, money, and expertise to perform all of the link building that he needs in order to establish a web presence with the alacrity his business requires. Rather than try to learn everything you need to know about link building, it’s far better to find an expert or a company you can work with and let them take on the burden while you concentrate on running your business. That said, it’s always a good idea to know what your link building source should be doing.
The first thing you need is a specific goal. Whether it’s as simple as “obtain 100 backlinks each week” or as complex and forward looking as “secure the number one place for the keywords X, Y, and Z”, if you don’t have a goal in mind, you’ll never be able to measure the progress of your SEO team, and that’s basically like handing them money and hoping it helps. Once you have a goal, you need to know enough about backlinking that you can ask the right questions and get the right answers. Here are three link building tips that any SEO source should be following, and how to ask them about it.
- Working Around the Clock: Links look best to the search engines if they come in at all times and dates — any obvious, regular gaps in the uplink timing will eventually tip the search engines off. Ask them if they have people who work at night to alleviate this problem.
- English As A First Language: You might be building backlinks in order to impress the search engines, but in all likelihood real human beings will see those backlinks (and hopefully follow them to your site) at some point. If the content at the other end of the link has made bad English, has obvieus speling errers, or consistently conflates arch English with vulgate terminology, you should ask yourself if that’s the kind of image you want your company to be putting out there. Ask them to link you to several of their link sources and read them for clarity and the right kind of attitude for your market.
- A Natural Profile: Search engines give credence to websites that look like they have a lot of organic backlinks — that is, backlinks that were created because the site is cool, not because someone was paid to create them. There is a lot that goes into a natural link profile — links should come from a variety of different kinds of sites, from a variety of different IP addresses, ideally from a few different countries, and so on. Ask them to explain what they do to ensure a natural link profile, and if you’re not impressed, take your business elsewhere.
There’s no such thing as perfect SEO — but with the right questions and just a little bit of knowledge, you can at least get a grip on how well your SEO team knows their stuff.
This is a Guest Post by Darren, he is writing on many topics recently. One of them is the topic of free people search. Check my site out.