Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Lies

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Lies Wordpress SEO ExpertHere’s a pretty typical advert you’ll see online when searching for SEO, “I can create 33 SEO backlink Panda Penguin safe from PR10”.

The trouble is it’s all LIES.

I know I bang on about the trouble with buying backlinks to try to help your SEO. Regular readers will be familiar with my disdain for people selling the impossible—since Google’s Panda algorithm tries very hard to find people buying links, saying any scheme like this is “Panda safe” or even worse, “Panda friendly” is a massive fib.

So at the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to say some things I’ve said before – albeit in a more concise and succinct form.

It is true that Google does like to see links to your site. But they are excellent at discerning real links (where someone liked your site or service enough to link to it) from purchased ones. Those bought ones are usually just low quality directories and profiles. When I say profiles I really mean it, user accounts get created on the Apple website that have your domain in the user description and the scam-sellers have the nerve to say that’s a PR10 link from a high quality domain. As if Google can’t tell the difference between say, a news story on the BBC and a bunch of comment-user accounts.

I generally stand against buying backlinks because of my SEO ethos. My ethos is simple by the way – Google have given us a swag of information regarding what search engines do and do not want – so I say we give them what they’re after. But on the flipside we need to be sure to avoid what they don’t want.

I have about three jobs a week come in from people who bought back links and got caught – and dropped off Google completely. When they penalise you, they really hit you hard.

Technically speaking really awesome backlinks would certainly help your SEO. But 99% of the time buying them is not awesome, and I recommend avoiding it.

I (like Google) see SEO as a long game, if done properly. But also, if done properly, it “sticks”. A site with good SEO that’s risen to the top should stay at the top.

And with that, I shall get down from my well-trodden soap-box.

Buying backlinks

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a.k.a. Why it’s best to follow my advice. 🙂

I talk a lot about the importance of doing SEO properly, and not trying to cheat the search engines.

Of all the tricks out there, the most tempting by far is buying backlinks.

Google wants lots of sites to link to us, right? So let’s just get some and get moving up those rankings!

Terrible, terrible idea.

A client of mine bought some from a seller claiming to be Google safe, Panda safe, Penguin safe, PR10, quality links.

But you can’t be Google-safe. All that will ever mean is they haven’t caught you (or the system being used to generate your links) yet. But they’ve been promising for a decade that they will, and more often than not, they do.

The image above is a bit small, but I’m sure you can pinpoint when they bought the so-called “safe” links.

Their sales fell proportionately.

Do not buy backlinks. Fullstop.

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Following on from this post which answers a question I get asked every day, here is my view on purchasing back links, which I am also asked about regularly.

Backlinks are useful, however I strongly recommend you do not buy any. If you get them “naturally” then that’s great. But Google has always said they will try to penalise any site that buys them. So while you might find a vendor who has some great system for implementing links that they haven’t found yet, if Google does realise that you’re trying to trick them (and they will eventually) you could find your site disappears from their listings entirely.

Just don’t do it. Fullstop.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Links & stuff

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In the final part of my SEO primer series, let’s look at the bit most people think about first. Links.

Back links, social links, white-hat links, black-hat links.

I called this post “Links & stuff” because while the value of links is simple enough to understand, the jargon and terminology can make it seem more confusing than it is.

At its most simplistic—you really want as many links to your site as possible. You want them on blogs, local news sources, forums, social media, even from competitors sites (I’ve got a tip for that later on).

Because the more places on the Internet that link to you, the higher you get ranked in search engines. Google has always been very transparent about this, in fact the idea of indexing websites based on how many other places deem them useful enough to link to was their whole original idea. Which naturally has been replicated by other companies ad nauseum.

In a nutshell, that’s it. But like everything with SEO, it’s the nuances that make a real difference.

A link to your online presence from a popular website dedicated to your industry is better than a little-read blog. Links from Facebook sit somewhere near the lower end of that scale, with Twitter slightly behind. It’s all worth having, but what you really want are high quality links on respected websites.

Sometimes the best way to get high quality links back to your site (backlinks, as they’re known) is to just ask for them. You’d be surprised how many professional blogs relish having guest bloggers—people who write once off entries for them, or perhaps even a short series of posts. It can take the stress of deadlines off them, or help them out when they can’t work owing to illness or preferably, a holiday. And of course they always link back to your site in the byline.

A quick way to generate backlinks that are from well known sites related to your field of expertise is to comment on posts that are already there. It’s quick and effective. In my case, I go to Google, search for “SEO”, and click on a recent high profile blog result. After quickly reading the article, I’ll post my thoughts in the comments, and link back to a related post on my own site. If I don’t have a related post, I make sure I do very quickly. It never hurts to have published my own ideas on a recent hot topic anyway.

And that brings us to the cheeky competitors site tip. Go to their site, and comment on their blogs. If possible, find an article there that relates to something you’ve already written about, and say so. “Interesting to see you finally catching up with this one, I’ve been thinking about it for ages”. Cheeky. But include a link to your post, and not only do you get the SEO benefits, but you can hijack part of their readership.

Make sure you have Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin profiles that can be publicly accessed, and link to your posts from there.

Make sure other people can share your posts socially easily too; sharing buttons beneath each post on your website can make a real difference.

I maintain a separate blog, peter.mahoneywebmarketing.co, which has the sole purpose of containing links to my own work. But (importantly) it has other short content there too, after all if it was nothing but links to my own work Google would see right through me.

And that brings us to the whitehat/blackhat concepts. In computer jargon whitehat is most simply defined as “not doing anything dodgy”. Blackhat is the opposite.

There are all manner of techniques for building backlinks to up your search engine ratings. Anything you pay for is usually blackhat. Not illegal, but not exactly cricket either.

Here’s an example. Link pyramids. These used to be very popular, and at times quite costly. You’d pay someone to create an army of low-level links on social networks and lesser known blogs. Then those would link to more popular sites, but again these were all manufactured by the vendor. Then they’d point to a few really highly ranked site, and in turn they would point to your pages.

You were at the top of the pyramid, enjoying the view from the top of search engines rankings.

Then the search engines realised what was happening, and wrote highly intelligent algorithms to find these pyramids, and penalise them. A lot. I’m managing SEO for a client who had to move domain names just to get away from their previous ill-gotten reputation (earned before my involvement, I hasten to add). They had thousands of links, felt at the top of their game, then woke up one morning to find in the eyes of the world wide web, they barely existed anymore.

And then the link building industry moved to a link wheels, and again the cycle began, only to fall later.

And this is a very important lesson I can’t impart strongly enough. SEO is a long game, because it should be organic.

Yes, you can optimise your code, your site speed, your images, etc. Yes, you can spread the word by sharing links to your site on other related blogs, but that’s all real people doing real things. Have great content that people will want to engage with, and share.

But if you try to cheat the system, you’ll be slapped for it. And for many of us, with so much of our business conducted online, a slap can send us under.

Organic growth. Humans interacting. It’s what the Internet was supposed to be about. Search engines make unexpected guardians of that dream, but when it comes to being found online, they hold all the keys.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Social integration

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Social networking is much more than an SEO technique. And while the point of this series is to focus on improving your search engine ranking and visibility, it would be reductionist (and actually really difficult) to talk about social media and it’s relationship to your business without discussing community.

After all, as important as SEO is, its purpose is to build your community of clients, and therefore that tribe of people is the most important thing.

While previous posts in this series focussed on a number of different things you can do, with this topic it all runs together and is a more conceptual dialogue.

Backlinks

At its simplest, the explanation of a backlink is, well, simple. Search engines scan social networks and basically count all the links to articles and content on other sites. If you have 50 links back to one article you wrote, you’ll be seen as having more authority than a site which only gets five.

It’s worth noting that social backlinks are given a fairly low importance by the big search engines, so unsurprisingly a link to your post from an article on The Guardian website carries a lot more gravitas. More on that in the next point.

They are however very useful, because they do offer some weight to your content, and it’s very easy to share content on social media. You’ll notice at the end of all my blog posts is a share feature—I click all those buttons myself to share my content. It’s the easiest way.

Photos/graphics/images

Before you share your article, make sure it has an image as part of it. Facebook and Linkedin both include a graphic from your content next to the link, and links with images get more clicks. Simple.

A word of advice here from personal experience—make sure you have an image in place before you even try to share your content via Facebook once, even if it’s just a test. Facebook caches the content on links, so if you post once without a graphic and then you remember that you really should have included one so you go back and edit your post then share again—Facebook is probably not going to bother looking for any changes. And you’re stuck with a text-only link.

Social networks

You have a bunch of options for places to post to:

  • Facebook is a no-brainer. Have a page on it, and post your content to it. Make sure the privacy for your posts is “public”, and even if you have very few “likes”, at least the backlinks are there.
  • Twitter is a no-brainer. It’s short, simple, scanned by Google in near real-time, and again, even if you have very few interactions on that network the links to your content exist.
  • Linkedin is, for almost every professional business, a no-brainer. It’s where professionals find each other, discuss their industries, and again, if nothing else you’ve got links back to your content.
  • Blogs should be a no-brainer. Their potential as social networking is often overlooked, but those comments sections are valuable. Read an article, a few of the comments, then post your own reply with a link to your site. Backlinks ahoy. I include online newspapers and the link as blogs for this purpose; they’re very widely read. Here’s a top tip. Once a week, read a really popular blog about your industry. Take 10 minutes to write your own thoughts on the subject, and post that to your blog. Then comment on the industry blog saying, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, and here’s my recent blog post that might help enlighten things.” Boom. Your traffic goes up, and you have original content linked to on a popular site—it doesn’t matter that you did it yourself.
  • Tumblr is a great one too. We’re now in the realm of the networks I call “time-allowing”, because while it’d be nice to hit up every network out there, I also hope you’re busy making money. But this is worth having a presence on, and sharing your ideas through.
  • Google+ (a.k.a. Google Plus). I use it because funnily enough, Google search knows what’s happening on its own social network. I haven’t made much of setting up my Google+ presence yet simply because there are so many hours in the week. However, I still think this network shows promise for really taking off, and if it does, I want to be established there while other people are playing catch up.
  • Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. They’re all worth a go, and are essentially social bookmarking services. People share bookmarks, rate them up or down, that kind of thing. The one to be slightly wary of is Reddit though—while it can drive some serious traffic to your site, they have a very close-knit community of users; and if they grab hold of content they don’t like for one reason or another they will tear it to shreds. And with it your ego.

Community

This is really important, because it’s not just backlinks that you want, it’s to have people taking about them, interacting, and ultimately sharing themselves. That in turn brings other people in, and before you know it you have a community of people to sell to. And this is of course the desirable ultimate result.

But people won’t share content unless it’s right in their faces, and of interest to them. And also importantly, of perceived interest to their friends. People don’t share content on social networks because they think it’s awesome, they share it because they think their friends will think it’s awesome. It’s an important distinction.

Part of this community building is for you to interact with your followers and subscribers. If someone looks like they want to get into a debate, then engage with that. If they retweet something you’ve written, thank them for it. Make them feel included and valued by you. Don’t leave other people’s comments hanging out at the tail end of your posts, reply.

Also consider the nature of a community. If all you ever post is backlinks, people will start to overlook your social content. Twitter is a great example, it’s a very social, social network. Because it’s so quick to post to, and users expect a fair quantity of tweets to be made by other users, ideally you’ll post a couple of times a day with something humorous, or clever, or an original inspiring thought, and perhaps post backlinks three times a week. With this sort of ratio you’re building your community and adding weight to your links.

Find opinion leaders

Within any grouping of people, there are those who the rest look up to, and value their opinions. These are the people who naturally settled into a position at the top of the pack, and set the tone for how people interact, what sorts of things they share, but most importantly decide what will be valued by the group. Marketers are always trying to find these people and to get them onside. Have you ever seen those giveaways on Facebook where if you share an advert, and get the most “likes” for it, you win something? Well those campaigns aren’t just about getting brands shared about, they also allow the marketers to see who gets the most likes—and these are the opinion leaders they know to target their advertising towards in future.

My wife is an opinion leader amongst her peers. Whenever she comments on one of my Facebook page’s posts, or shares it with her friends, that post reaches about five times as many people as a normal one.

Opinion leaders make your shares, backlinks, and social communities much more effective. And bear in mind you want to be one of these people yourself. The go-to-person for a section of your industry. Experts and gurus are opinion leaders.

So start acting like one. 🙂

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