About Matt Barby

SEO and social media executive at Wow Internet.

3 Tips For Link Building After Google’s Penguin Update

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Matt Barby

Penguin Update

With the recent ‘Penguin’ update from Google, there have been many webmasters pulling their hair out with frustration. There seems to have been a very large amount of websites affected by the changes and this has caused a lot of panic online. In a recent poll by Search Engine Roundtable, they found that over 65% of people that responded (over 1000 in total) we negatively affected by the recent update.

One of the main reasons that Google had toward punishing websites in the search engine rankings was the use of ‘spammy’ links. These can be links that are sent directed to the website in question from malicious websites, such as black-hat linking networks. Below are our top three tips toward building links that can help get you up the search engine listings and drive traffic to your website, whilst abiding by the tighter regulations that Google have put in place.

1. Check the validity of the linking website

When you are looking for potential linking partners, it is extremely important that you check to see what kind of website is linking to you. In order to do this, you can do a couple of quick checks. The first is to see if the website has been cached by Google. This can be done by searching within Google ‘cache:domain.co.uk’. The second check that you can carry out is by doing a search on Google for something that the website should rank well for; for example, if the website was ‘www.areallygoodwebsitethatwilllinktoyou.com’ then if you searched ‘a really good website that will link to you’, you should expect them to be in the top few listings. If not, then they have probably been blocked by Google or have little domain/page authority.

2. Make sure there aren’t too many outbound links on the webpage

If you single out some potential linking targets, it is worth having a look to sum up the quality of the target website. Even if a website ranks really well in the search engines and has good page/domain authority, if they have a large amount of outbound links on the page then your website is only going to get a small amount of the total link juice. The less outbound links the better.

3. Is the content relevant?

There is a huge emphasis on making sure that when writing content for your blog, all of the blog posts must be relevant and have a consistent theme to them; however, the linking websites’ content is often overlooked. By having relevant content on the linking website, the link will be much more effective toward your SEO, so take a little look and see if the links that you are getting are relevant, and also bear this in mind when you are creating lists of potential linking partners.

By following these three quick steps, you can ensure that your link building is much more effective and will conform with all of the new ‘Penguin’ update regulations.

Google’s New Over-Optimisation Penalty Update

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Matt Barby

Over the past couple of days, Google have implemented some big changes to the way in which they rank webpages within the search engine result pages (SERP) and have started penalising ‘over-optimisation’. Google have said that this change is to promote the use of ‘white-hat’ optimisation practices, as opposed to ‘black-hat’ methods. This essentially means that they will be penalising anyone that is performing their SEO in an unethical way. What has happened, however, is that we have seen some dramatic shifts in the search rankings, and many websites have seen some harsh punishment for what could be seen as pretty legitimate SEO tactics.

Google stated in their recent blog post: “In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be to be ranked.“

What is Google Punishing?

Google is cracking down primarily on ‘webspam’. This can include keyword stuffing, abusive linking tactics, article spinning, and more. One of the other recent updates that Google made has affected a lot of the ‘black-hat’ linking networks and directories. These networks work in a way that you give a link to their site, and then they will reciprocate. This is then done maybe a couple of hundred times in order to increase the total links to the site. Not good. If you do have any links on these websites, make sure you contact them to get them removed as it will seriously affect your SEO.

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Find the ROI of Gaining a Top Ranking Keyword

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Matt Barby

As far as objectives go within an SEO campaign, getting your keyword to rank well in the search engine results is of paramount importance. By gaining the top position on the first page of Google for your chosen keyword, you are going to see an increase in organic web traffic, which could mean more potential sales leads in the process. What can be very hard though, is estimating exactly how much web traffic or leads you are going to get from any given keyword.

Each individual keyword that you use to drive organic search traffic through to your website is going to offer varied results. There are many different factors that can have an effect on this and what we will go through here is some quick ways to get a rough estimate of the kind of return you can get for each of your keywords.

Conversion Rate

Understanding your website’s conversion rate is essential toward being able to understand any return on investment that you are going to get from SEO. This is calculated by the total website visitors divided by the amount of enquiries/sales made through the website. A good conversion rate would be around 2-3%, whereas on average, you would expect around 1-1.5%. This isn’t to say that you cannot achieve more than that, and we have seen with some of our clients that double-figure conversion rates are most-definitely achievable.

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Finding Potential Link Building Targets

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Matt Barby

Link building is arguably one of the hardest aspects of SEO and the level of success that is achieved from this can vary from website to website. As an SEO company, we have many different techniques that we can apply to increase this level of success for each of our clients. We are going to share a couple of these little techniques that can help you out with finding potential link building targets.

Link building itself is essentially the act of gaining backlinks to your website. There are, however, many different factors that come in to play that determine the quality of these links and how they will ultimately have an effect on your webpages within the search engine results pages.

Determining the Quality of a Linking Website

What you want to be doing when searching for a website that you could potentially gain a backlink from, is ask a few simple questions:

Question 1: Is the linking website relevant to my website?
Question 2: Does the linking website have enough credibility to positively affect my website?
Question 3: Could the linking website potentially have a detrimental effect on my website’s SEO?

Is the linking website relevant to my website?

You may be thinking that it doesn’t necessarily matter what relevance the linking domain has to your website, as long as it links back to you then that’s good, right? Not quite. When looking for more general link building targets such as online directories, finding a general business directory to submit your website’s link can be useful across many different types of websites. On the other hand, if you are looking to target specific areas of a website that is related in terms of content to your website, and more importantly to the anchor text of your link, then that link is going to be more powerful.

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What is PageRank and How Can You Use PageRank in Your Link Building?

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Matt Barby

As Wikipedia has probably already told you that PageRank was named after Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. It may also have told you that it is a ranking scale that takes into account the amount of inbound links that a webpage has, as well as the amount of outbound links there are coming from the webpage. From this, a webpage’s PageRank is determined. The PageRank equation can be expressed as shown below:

This equation basically shows that when another webpage links back to the webpage in question (u), that page’s total PageRank is divided by the total number of outbound links on the page. This is then the amount of PageRank that is transferred over to page ‘u’ (often reffered to as ‘link juice’). The equation then gets the sum of all of the PageRank that is being transferred to page ‘u’ from the set of webpages that link to it (B_u). This then makes up the total PageRank for the webpage ‘u’.

Hopefully that hasn’t confused you too much because, in essence, it is a fairly simple idea, however; PageRank isn’t the ‘be all and end all’ of link building. Not only that but Google keeps these figures very closely hidden, so it is extremely hard to find out your exact PageRank. Google does, however, periodically post an inkling into what kind of PageRank a webpage as through the Google Toolbar PageRank (TBPR), which is ranked between 1 and 10 (10 being the best).

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