Canonicalization is a term that most people involved in SEO will be familiar with. It’s important for the efficiency of link building strategies that your pages don’t have more than one URL. It’s one of those finicky technical things that a search engine optimization agency can be helpful in sorting out.

What most companies don’t consider is the human side of canonicalization, and understanding this side of things can actually help. When you canonicalize links, you not only smooth your path in terms of Google and SEO, you help light the way for your customers as well.

*Canonicalization of home pages. Site addresses can easily become confused, with www.site.co.uk/home and www.site.co.uk/index occasionally rearing their ugly heads. It might take a bit of work, but it’s important to weed out the multiple versions of your home page. This will not only make your SEO agency happy, but save your customers some confusion. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about this.

*Canonicalization around the net. Most businesses have multiple directory listings and various profiles around the net, and usually the information is just slightly different. First names are given in some instances, job titles in others, phone numbers and emails alternately represented as the point of contact. Develop a protocol for your business information, and make it easy for your customers to find you.

*Centralization of social media profiles. Again, clear up your target audience’s confusion by keeping your information consistent. This is also helpful in terms of your social media activities helping your SEO.

It’s no secret that social media optimization isn’t just about making friends. Making connections with internet users and people in your industry is more of a side-benefit. The main aims of any SMM work should be to improve the status of the home site, and, by extension, make the internet reputation management for the business a little easier.

For these things to happen for your business, content needs to factor into your plans. Content comes into play in social media in two ways:

1. Content on the social media sites. In order to catch attention, you need to provide interesting content.

2. Bringing users back to your content and encouraging them to share. The second aspect of the social media/content relationship is a little more complicated. Content is wasted if it only sits on pages. Social media can and should be used to attract traffic and to draw links for your content as part of SEO link building.

Content both improves and benefits from a social media campaign. Both elements have to be planned for when embarking on an SMM campaign if you want to reap the full benefits of social media.

Any SEO agency will tell you that no part of website optimization can exist as an island. That is, everything done as part of your SEO plan inevitably interconnects. With adequate planning, this interconnectivity can be used to boost the effectiveness of any one part of your online strategy. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about making full use of your online plans.

The words ‘article marketing is a scam’ have been used by various search engine optimization experts around the traps. For every expert that is against article marketing, you’ll find two or three that defend it. So who is right?

The answer is both. When article marketing is used as an effort-free method of planting links, it tends to lean toward the spammy side of things. However, when articles are part of well-thought-out internet reputation management or link building strategies, they can not only help your site but make the internet a marginally better place.

Option 1: the quick-and-easy approach

Traditionally, article marketing has featured a lot of low-quality content. When site owners latched on to article marketing as a quick link building scheme, the end result was mostly bad. Articles written solely for easy links tended to be poor quality, and the sites that hosted them barely more than link farms.

Google’s focus on content quality this year has pretty much put an end to this approach. Links from article hosting sites have lost value, making low-quality article marketing an exercise in frustration.

Option 2: the genuine and thoughtful approach

On the other hand, other article marketing options continue to thrive. Guest blogging and reciprocal arrangements are still producing results. Both of these require quality content, though, which puts a lot of site owners off.

The best way to think of it is as a bargain for links. Investing in quality content for off-site purposes can be well worth it. Talk to our team at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about this aspect of website optimization.

In an ideal world, all of your links would be powerful, giving your link profile a powerful punch. Unfortunately, SEO link building involves a lot of uncertainty. When you have to rely on others to provide the most valuable links for your organic search engine optimization, you have to make do. The good news is, there are a lot of little things about inbound link that are starting to count for a lot.

*Partial keyword mentions. Although it was once thought that keywords had to be exactly right in the anchor text of an inbound link to be valuable, it is now thought that even a partial match will count. This is because the search engines are becoming more sophisticated about reading relevance signals. Basically, Google knows that ‘organic flower growers’ won’t naturally appear in every link to your page on organic flower growers. Anything related to that concept could add value to your link.

*Placement. Placement is possibly the most difficult thing to organise for inbound links. However, if you can, you should aim to get your link featured on a page with keywords in the right places. Talk to us at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about this.

*Content. This is by far the easiest factor to control for inbound link building. The good news is that it’s becoming more important for the search engines. Supplying guest posts and embedding links in topically relevant comments will enrich the value of your link. This factor also makes it more important to target pages that are relevant to your own during link building.

The choice of navigation for your site could have a huge effect on rankings. It not only affects crawlability, but also the flow of link juice from page to page and even your conversion rate. With so much on the line, it’s important to consider just what kind of navigation is suitable for your site.

There are a number of types of navigation, such as breadcrumb, drop-down, or header, and these each work well for some sites and not others. Here are some things to consider:

*Can users get lost? If your site is large, users might need the navigational paths provided by breadcrumb navigation.

*Will users be drawn in? If you want internet users to stay on your site, it’s a good idea to create a structure and navigation that draw them inexorably inwards. This can have SEO consequences, though, so it’s important to talk to your search engine optimization agency about ways to boost main page rankings.

*Do you need link juice to spread? Retail sites can sometimes have trouble with SEO link building, as product pages aren’t link magnets. If this is the case, a clearly delineated navigation may not work as navigation and structure need to spread link juice around the site.

Structure before navigation

Navigation is secondary to site structure, and you can discuss the restructuring of a site for organic SEO with us at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. The restructuring of a site is a major undertaking, but it is often necessary. Be sure to devote sufficient time for your structure in your SEO plan.

It sounds like a no-brainer. Linking to competitor sites is simply a bad idea. Or is it? Regardless of whether your industry has a large or a small circle of sites, it can be valuable to provide links to your competitors for both your search engine optimization and marketing plans.

There are two schools of thought on linking to competitor sites, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. The first is that it’s a bad idea. This is a valid position to take. If you’ve expended blood, sweat and tears getting an internet user to your pages, the last thing you want to do is hand them over to another site. The other school of thought, and one that’s been gaining in strength over the last couple of years, is that linking won’t do you any harm and may do you good.

How can linking to competitors be one of the helpful link building strategies? Basically, it comes from the interconnectedness of the internet. In linking to others, you’re providing more information for your customers and in a small degree supporting your keyword relevance to Google. You’re also attracting voluntary links back.

There was once a theory that external links leaked link juice, although in recent years the evidence has not supported this idea. In today’s SEO environment, the choice whether or not to use external links is up to you. If it fits in with your business philosophy and the image you’re trying to project, there’s really no reason not to.

One of the more difficult things about link building is knowing exactly what sorts of links do what. In terms of influence with Google and search engine optimization, links can generally be looked at in the following hierarchy, from most influential to least:

1. External links from high-ranking sites pointing to your site
2. External links from medium or low-ranking sites pointing to your site
3. Internal links.

The three major types of links are easy to spot in the initial stages of link building. Knowing what links do for your site is important, but the concept of ‘valuable links’ confuses the plans of thousands of sites. When it comes down to it, all links are valuable links.

Take internal links, for example. Not only do they siphon link juice from one page to another, they help direct Google’s spiders to important areas of your site. This is without mentioning the marketing value internal links deliver in terms of conversion funnels. Links from sites on the lower end of the ladder provide value as well, in that they give your site the general coverage that can be used as a bouncing board for your other marketing efforts. Many businesses, blinded by the thought that high-quality links equal rankings, ignore these easier-to-get links.

It’s important not to confuse links lower on the hierarchy with links that are worthless. If your link building plans aren’t going as smoothly as planned, getting a link building company in can be a huge help. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about link building services.

Link building isn’t helped by optimism. Site owners who hope all will go as they plan inevitably end up spending much more time and money on their search engine optimization link building than they planned. The best way to a good link profile is to examine your options, realistically assess your chances, and approach those other sites you truly have a chance with.

1. Know your place.

This is by far the most difficult part of planning a link building strategy. While it’s important not to overestimate your site’s appeal, it’s important not to underestimate it either. It can be difficult for site owners just starting out with website optimization to know whether they have a chance at big links or not, and it’s a good idea to talk to a professional. You can discuss your concerns with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. To start with, assess the links you currently have, and aim only a level or two higher as a realistic goal.

2. Weed out the irrelevancies.

When you begin looking, you’ll have a long list of options. Sort out genuine options by removing sites that are below your interest, and others, such as big businesses and government sites that are going to take a lot of work.

3. Find a way to quantify.

Your link building campaign will be easier to manage if you can separate links into groups, then develop approaches. What do your link potentials have in common? Separate out into fellow businesses, blogs, media, low-grade links, high-grade links and so on.

There are many link building strategies to try but looking at competitor backlinks can sometime get overlooked. In search engine optimization understanding your competition thoroughly can provide many advantages and when building high quality links competitor intelligence is invaluable.

Export your top three rival’s backlinks into an excel spreadsheet including the URL, the Domain Authority and Page Authority. Add in columns so you can note ‘Action’, ‘Category’ and any extra notes. For each competitor identify 100 individual domains and then sort by page authority. Now visit each domain you have listed.

In the action column you can note the action taken such as ‘unobtainable’; ‘sent email’ etc. Then categorise each site. Here are some ideas as to how you may label them:

• Blog – content that is company specific
• News – high quality news website
• Twitter – to be followed on Twitter account
• Reference – content that uses company name as a resource or reference
• Owned Other site – another site owned by the company
• Time based Event – industry specific
• Student site – industry specific

You’ll find that many links are time based events from previous conferences as well as student sites so it’s best to put these in their own category.

When emailing a webmaster regarding a potential link make a note of the date you sent it, the webmaster’s name and the email address. Also note telephone numbers if you have them and keep a copy of your replies.

At www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk we are experts in all aspects of search engine optimization and can help you develop winning link building strategies.

Well-rounded link building strategies will ensure that your website optimization is a success. This involves looking at a wide menu of methods for attracting links and traffic. The key to success is to keep all your sources relevant to your products and industry. Here are more ways to boost your high quality link building:

Expert interviews

A big traffic driver is when an expert or industry leader is interviewed. Everyone wants to know what the experts think. You can make it even more accessible to your target audience by using a Twitter feed via your website. When preparing for the interview, do your research and plan your questions well. Talk through your topics with the expert before the interview and stick to an allocated duration. You don’t want people to lose interest because the interview is too lengthy. For SEO link building this type of activity is invaluable as the expert is likely to link in to the site adding a much needed high quality link.

Tutorials and How to guides

The internet offers a wealth of information and most web users use it to carry out research. They may look at information articles or link into videos. By writing about a topic you have in-depth knowledge of you can provide interesting and engaging content. Using short videos to communicate your tips and guidance on a topic are also effective. People like this type of reassurance and will often link into this type of resource.

At www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk we offer link building services and other SEO solutions across the UK.