Thursday, November 14, 2013

Top off site SEO Factors

Number of quality backlinks
When it comes to optimising your website and obtaining backlinks, quality by far outweighs quantity.  Every page that Google indexes is given a Page Rank from 0 to 9 based on how authoritatitve the webpage and website are deemed to be, for example, the BBC homepage has a Page Rank of 9.  This information can be useful when developing your SEO campaign as you want to obtain backlinks from websites which have high page ranks as the search engines will perceive your website to have something of value on it.

Number of relevant backlinks
Similarly to the previous point, it is best to obtain backlinks from websites that are relevant to your own.  This will increase your relevancy to a particular subject and consequently the search engines will reflect this in your positioning.

Anchor text used for backlinks
The anchor text is the clickable text that opens a link to your website.  For the greatest SEO impact this should be one of your keywords and ideally featured within relevant content, as opposed to added at the bottom of the page.  For example, TFH Gazebos would receive a greater SEO benefit from us linking using the anchor text Gazebos than linking their domain name.

Source of backlinks
Search engines hate spam, automatically generated backlinks and anything that they perceive not to be an organic backlink.  Therefore if your backlinks are predominantly from spammy websites or paid sources then Google and the other search engines will hold this against your website.

Diversity of backlink sources
For the most effective SEO results your website have backlinks from a diversity of sources, such as directories, websites, blogs, social media and so on.  This diversity makes search engines believe that unique websites are linking to you which they presume means that your website is authoritative on that particular topic.

Total number of backlinks on the webpage that links to your website
With the exception of directories, if the website that you have a backlink from has a whole range of backlinks on the page then search engines will reduce the SEO weighting that these links carry, if any at all.

Number of deep links
Deep links are the links which go to other pages on your website other than the homepage.  If you have a high number of backlinks to these pages, search engines see this as there being relevant information throughout the website.

Speed of building backlinks
Search engines are seeking an organic and steady development of backlinks.  If your website instantly have hundreds of backlinks then the search engines will suspect that something isn’t right and so your website will not receive the SEO benefit that it should from these links.  This is partly why we recommend spreading an SEO campaign over a period of months and gradually increase the number of links, as opposed to performing a slap dash approach.

There are many other off site factors that effect your search engine position, but these are some to take into consideration.