Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. (A quote from Google Webmaster Guidelines.)

Often it is very obvious which link is good and which link is not good. If the links points to some bad site or a site that is doing something fishy, you are doomed if you link there. Also sites that use questionable techniques are not recommenced as online friends.

But sometimes the badness of a link can be nicely hidden. Here is an example:

The other day I found a comment on this post High PR Web 2.0 Properties for Link Building in SEO :

Looked to me like a relevant comment. I checked the URL and it looked fine too, so I went ahead and approved the comment.

Fast forward to today. I found this little tool on www.davidairey, to check good and bad link neighborhoods:
Text Link Checker Tool. I keyed in my domain and wham -  it spit out all my links and gives some data on it. To my surprise I learned that I was linking to a bad neighborhood:

I thought “that is strange”, I am not aware that I ever linked to that domain. “Was my blog hacked? Did I use an infected plugin?” Well, nothing that serious. I scrolled up and found this:

As the comments on this blog are nofollow anyhow and this particular page (fwisp.com) is only a bookmarking page, that can be used by anyone, there is no real danger in it. But I added bad neighborhood link checking to my routines for all my sites and all my customers sites.

If you hire an SEO company, remember to ask them to also check your links according to this.

photo credit: Christopher Jeschke Stock Photo Blog

Google Top Ranking - Soar Above Your Competition

First you start with you own web site. You create a page on your site and make sure that the keyword in in the name of that page. If you ant to rank for “blue widgets”, your site should already be about “widgets” and the domain would ideally contain the term “widgets”. The full URL of your page would then be something like widgets.com/buy-blue-widgets.html.

On the page itself you would make sure that the title tag would be something like “buy blue widgets” and that the Meta description tag would contain a nice and concise description, also containing the words “buy blue widgets”.

Then you would write a nice article on “buy blue widgets” that would contain the phrase “buy blue widgets” and natural variation thereof sprinkled nicely into the text (naturally, no stuffing please). The title of your article would have “buy blue widgets” in h1 or h2 tags.

In the navigation you would link to other documents on your site about widgets and you would also link to industry or history resources on “buy blue widgets” on other sites.

Then you would build links from other pages on your site pointing to the “buy blue widgets” page, using the anchor text “buy blue widgets” and natural variations thereof. You would also build a nice video on how to use blue widgets and put it on your “blue widgets” page.

This are the main on page SEO factors and should be sufficient in most cases ( I assume that you make sure the page loads fast and the html code is readable by ‘dem’ stupid browsers).

Now you go into the off page SEO. First you check your competition. You can do that directly on Google or you can use something like nichewatch.com for example (It’s a free tool that shows you the competion for any given keyword).

Then you get a link from every (or as close to every) page that ranks well for “buy blue widgets”. With some pages it will be easy, as they might be articles on a public article directory, or on dmoz.org or other directories. If you can’t get a direct link from a particular page, you can either out-create the link or knock the page out of its place.

By out-create the link I mean that you create more links from other pages that also rank for that keyword or get links from pages that at least rank well in that niche or industry.

You might be wondering how to knock out a page from its Google listing. In short: you duplicate their link profile and then add a few more. Stay tuned for a detailed article on how to de-throne a Google listing.

Once you are par with your competition, you can throw in some additional dofollow links with your anchor text and you’re all set. If you need to find dofollow blogs, I can recommend the DoFollow Blog Directory & Compendium.

As Nick from seoconsult writes:

Internal linking is an important part of SEO which can often be overlooked. This is a shame, as it’s far easier to solidify your internal links than it is to nurture links from external sites. A site with the right internal structure can score a higher ranking than a badly structured site with external links. Also, internal links are guaranteed to come from the page with the most authority on your business – your own.

If you have Blog that is powered by WordPress, you are lucky: There are several plugins that can help you build more internal links on the fly. It is called SEO Smart Links .

How does it Work?

SEO Smart Links scans your blog for keywords or phrases that match the titles of your posts and pages by default (and you can enable categories and tags matching too). These phrases are then turned into the links. The matching is case insensitive and the original case is preserved.

So If I mention “What Do I Have To Do For SEO With Bing?”, which is the title of one of my posts, it will be automatically converted into a link. This plugin improves your site’s interlinking markedly.

If you do not use wordpress, you still should consider building internal links. Just go over some of your older pages and add some internal links. While doing this you may also want to just add some updates here and there, which will be very favorably noticed by Search Engines.

Actually keeping your site up to date and adding new content on a regular basis is one of the most important SEO factors. If this seems too time consuming for your team, you can easily outsource this using services like odesk.com.

Search Engine Optimization is actually a lot easier than some people want to make you believe. There are basicallly two areas of SEO: On page SEO and off page SEO.

On page SEO deal with all the things that happen on your own page. The main things are:

- Navigation

- Title Tags

- Meta Tags

- Content

- Web Site Structure

You can read up on Positive ON-Page SEO Factors and Negative ON-Page SEO Factors . The Positive OFF-Page SEO Factors and Negative OFF-Page SEO Factors are the factors that are on happening on other sites, linking to yours.

These are things like

- PageRank (PR)

- Age of links

- Numebr of links

- Context of links

Most of the Search Engine Optimization factors come naturally if you build your web site with the visitor in mind:

If you deliver excellent, unique content that is keept up to date you have already built a good foundation. If you the structure the content in a way that is easy to navigate you are well on your way to get good rankings.

You can not really trick the search engines, at least not for a long time. All you can do is put some emphasis on certain things and improve certain aspects.

SEO boils down to knowing what to do and doing it on a regular basis.