So far in this series on SEO basics we’ve looked at things on your site that you can directly control, in this final part we’ll look at something you have very little control over, incoming links. These are links to your Web site from other Web sites.

Why are incoming links so important?

The main reason that incoming links are so important is that you have less control than anything you do directly on your site. In the past people used various ways to fool search engines into ranking their sites higher.

To stop this search engines needed a new way to rank sites, that site owners couldn’t cheat at so easily.

In 1998, Google started to use a new system called PageRank. The idea behind PageRank was that every time a site links to another site it votes for that site as being a good source of information. PageRank doesn’t just depend on the number of links though, it also considers the PageRank of the linking site. So the higher the PageRank of the page the more valuable the links from it are.

From the incoming links, Google calculates the PageRank of your site giving it a rating between 1 and 10. Due to the way the formula for calculating PageRank works each step up comes increasingly harder to achieve. Most small business Web sites won’t get a ranking above 3 or 4.

Due to the way the formula works, getting lots of incoming links from low PageRank sites doesn’t make much difference. It is much better to get a single link from a site with a high PageRank.

How do I get a link from a site with a high PageRank?

The best starting place is often getting a link from a big trade organisation. One of my clients is a sculptor and a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, who have a PageRank of 5 and offer links to members. So look for relevant organisations to your business who you can get to link to your site.

Government and higher education Web sites usually have a good PageRank, although they are hard to get links from (part of the reason they are trusted and have good PageRank).

The final place is from other highly respected sites. These sites often link to great content they find, so the first thing you need to do is write some great content and then shout about it to get their attention. Spreading the word via twitter is a great way to do that.

Nofollow, no votes

Right now you’re probably thinking; I bet facebook has a great PageRank, so I’ll post a link on my wall and get a link from facebook. Sorry it won’t work, facebook (plus many other sites, and most links from blog comments) links are nofollow. That means search engines should ignore the link and not count it as a vote.

Just because a site has a high PageRank doesn’t always mean the links from it are worth having. Before paying to join an organisation just to get a link from them always make sure the link isn’t nofollow.

So how do I know what the PageRank of a site is and if the links are nofollow?

There are a number of ways. But I use a Firefox plugin called SeoQuake. This gives you all sorts of information including PageRank and highlighting nofollow links.

Why don’t I get all my friends to give me links?

It sounds like a great idea, I’ll give a link to all my friends and then they can link back to me. Sorry but it won’t work (unless they happen to have related Web sites).

Google knows (or least thinks it knows) what the main subject of a site is, and it ignores any links to a totally unrelated site. So a link from your plumbing site to your friends book shop site won’t help at all.

Here is a great example of what you can do though.

If you were a wedding photographer with a blog, you can write a blog post for every wedding you shoot. That gives you great fresh content regularly. But if you mention other suppliers at the wedding (cake, flowers, reception venue etc.) you can then ask them for links back to your site. As they are a related business (wedding services) Google accepts these as genuine incoming links.

Think about ways you could create a similar blog with links for your own site.

The Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide has this helpful advice:

Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text (for ASCII languages) are best when they’re short, but descriptive.

For more information about alt text, see my previous blog post Alternative text (SEO basics). But today we are talking about file names.

We can be fairly sure that as it’s mentioned in the Google guide that file names do have some effect on search results. Today I’m only going to talk about image file names, although most of the advice will hold true to PDF files and other document files too.

I won’t be talking about the file names of your Web site pages. Although these can have a big affect, changing them can cause a number of problems including broken links and even reducing your search engine ranking. There are ways that the file names can be changed without breaking your links or reducing your search engine ranking and if you’d like to know more please get in touch.

Image file names

The Google guide mentioned above advises that you should avoid:

• using generic filenames like “image1.jpg”, “pic.gif”, “1.jpg” when possible—some sites with thousands of images might consider automating the naming of images
• writing extremely lengthy filenames

I’ve seen many sites where the images are named something like dscn10200.jpg, the file name automatically generated by a digital camera. Like using image1.jpg this doesn’t help search engines to know what your image is about and unless you’ve got an extraordinary memory doesn’t help you remember what it is either.

Before adding images to your site always try to give them descriptive names like:

• business-logo.jpg (substituting your own business name)
• nickb-photo.jpg (substituting the names of your staff)
• racket-restringing.jpg
• parish-hall.jpg
• map.png

You’ll notice that none of the examples above have spaces in. The World Wide Web doesn’t really like file names with spaces in, although most of the time it works fine. However you’ll sometimes have problems caused by file names with spaces so it’s best to avoid them. Google (and the other search engines) are pretty good at knowing that - represents a space, so always use a dash (-) to replace spaces in file names.

You might also notice that some of the images (like racket-restringing.jpg) also make a good description of the page rather than just the image.

What is alternative text?

The purpose of alternative text (also know as alt text) is to provide an alternative for users who cannot see images. This could be because they had a text only Web browser (like Lynx), had images turned off (usually due to slow Internet connections) or could not see the image due to a visual impairment. All images must have alternative text.

Although I’ve already said that alternative text describes an image, that isn’t actually correct. Alternative text should describe the purpose of an image, which is subtly different.

Take the image on the right. If you were describing the image you may say something like:

Four individual type block letters together, forming the word news

If you describing the purpose of the image, you may just say

News

Depending on how you are using the image will affect what you use as the alternative text. For example take the photo on the left, in a general page about Robin Hood it may simply read:

Robin Hood

On the other hand in a page about Robin’s adventures it might read:

Robin aims his bow towards Nottingham Castle

While in a tourism page about Nottingham, it could be:

Bronze statue of Robin Hood, outside Nottingham Castle

Sometimes images are purely used for decoration and don’t really provide any useful information. In that case we still need to tell the image that the alternative text is empty, this means that text only browsers and screen readers (used by visually impaired people) can ignore the image.

So what does all this have to do with SEO?

Now we know what alternative text is, how can we use it in SEO? We can use the alternative text of images as another way of highlighting the key words and phrases for our page. Don’t just stuff key words into your alternative text, but make sure that along with helping people to understand the page it can help people to find it.

Looking at our Robin Hood examples above, they help people to understand the image purpose while giving information to search engines. The final example gives several different key phrases that we might want in a Nottingham tourism page.

Not only does it help our standard search but it means that your page can be found in image searches. If a standard search finds enough images it will often display images there too, making your page stand out more.

Making sure you add good alternative text is really important if you are selling online as people often search for specific items. Making sure your images have good alternative text with key words or phrases that people are searching for will help your product pages rise to the top of search results.

Anchor text plays a large role in search engine rankings. This is because it usually refers to the content of the page it is linking to and so the search engine takes notice.

Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF) advises writing better anchor text and says:

The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.

Internal links

You have full control over your internal links (links from inside your own site), so make sure they are always descriptive of their destination and maybe even include some of the keywords for that page.

External links

External (or incoming) links are links from other sites. It is even more important to get good anchor text on these, but you are not in control of them. Here are a few tips though to try and get good anchor text from external links:

1. If you are asking for a link from another site, let them know what you’d like the link text to be.
2. Give your pages meaningful and concise titles, people linking to other sites often use the page title.
3. If you find a link to your site that isn’t using great anchor text the send a polite email asking them to change it.

As you don’t have direct control over external anchor text it is actually more important to the search engines. This is because it tells the search engine what other people think your page is about, so you can’t fool it.

Click here

All too often click here is used as the anchor text for a link. Using click here doesn’t help anyone as it doesn’t describe what you are linking to, so it doesn’t help people quickly scanning links and it doesn’t help your search engine rankings.

To see the power of anchor text and click here try visiting your favourite search engine and putting in the search phrase “click here”.

You’ll probably find that the top 2 links are for Adobe reader and Adobe Flash. Now see if you can find any reference to “click here” on those pages.

The reason they rank so highly is the number of Web sites with links like click here to download Adobe Reader/Flash.

In the early days of search engines (the 1990s), this was a major factor in the pages they returned. However like many other things it was often abused by Web site owners and so now plays a much smaller part. In fact search engines now penalise sites where the keyword density is too high as they are more likely to be spam.

The basic way of finding your keyword density is to divide the number of times the key word appears by the total number of words, multiplied by 100 to get the percentage. So if you’ve got 120 words and your key word appears 3 times you would do (3÷120)×100, to get a keyword density of 2.5%.

Many SEO experts believe the optimum keyword density to be between 1 and 3%. You can use a keyword density checker to test your site.

It’s important to remember that keyword density plays a very small part in the search results. It’s much more important to have good quality, well written content than to stuff your content full of key words and make it unreadable. Just remember being at the top of the search results is great, but if your visitors are turned away by poorly written content stuffed with too many keywords it’s a waste of time.

My advice is to write your content naturally while thinking about what your key words are, but not forcing them in at every opportunity.

What are headings?

Headings on Web pages are defined by using heading tags, these range from H1 (the main heading) down to H6 (the least important heading). Most pages will only go as far as H2 or H3. Headings are usually displayed larger (and often more bold) than body text, but should not be used just for display purposes. Headings should be used to give your page structure, so the main page title would be H1 (or heading 1) and each sub-section of the page would be H2. If you then further break up content under the H2 section, you would use H3 and so on.

You can use headings to help you plan your page content by starting with the heading structure and then adding the detailed content under each heading. Don’t use too many headings though as this can stop the flow of your text.

Most content managers should include formatting options to add headings, often labelled Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 etc. If you don’t have these options then ask your Web designer about how you can use headings.

Making your content findable

People very rarely read the whole of your page from beginning to end. Usually they are looking for a specific piece of information. Headings are a great way to break up the content on your page and act as sign posts to help people find what they are looking for.

Search engine benefits

Search engines know that headings should give structure to your content and so they take more notice of them than the standard body text. Good headings not only act as good sign posts for readers but also provide the important key words and phrases to search engines.

Don’t overuse headings though as each heading dilutes the effect of the other headings.

What is a page title?

The page title is used in a number of places like:

• Search engine results pages,
• Browser window title bar,
• Default name of bookmarks and favourites

Too often you find sites which have a single title for every page (usually the site name), simple but meaningless titles like home or about, or worst of all untitled.

How important is a page title?

Some experts believe that it may be the single most important part of a page to Google (although no one really knows how Google works things out). However in the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide the first piece of advice is “Create unique, accurate page titles” and it later says:

Page titles are an important aspect of search engine optimization.

So this seems to confirm that Google certainly do value page titles.

How do I add/change my page title?

Using HTML

If you are using html then your page title should look something like this:

<title>Miniature Sculptures by Miniaturist Penny Thomson</title>

It will be between the <head> and </head> tags.

Using software (like Dreamweaver or FrontPage) on your computer

At the top of the screen usually near the tool bar should be a box labeled name or title. This is where you type your page title.

If you use an online editor or Content Management System (CMS)

Whatever name you give your page when creating or saving it is usually used as the title.

What makes a good page title?

Now you know what a page title is, how important it is and how to change it. Let’s look at what makes a good page title, here are a few guidelines:

• Accurately describe the content of the page
• Each page should have a unique title
• Be brief but descriptive
• Use key words or phrases you’ve identified for your page
• Start with the most relevant words

It’s worth mentioning that you might want to include your site name in all your page titles. This is not a problem, it helps people know they are still on your site (although it does make the title longer than it needs to be). Keep your site name to the end of the title though e.g. Design process (TwoLittleFishes Web Design) instead of TwoLittleFishes Web Design Process. This keeps your unique and keyword heavy text at the beginning of the title.

Bad page titles are often single generic words, good page titles give an accurate description of the page using key words and phrases.

That is just a few examples, please leave any suggestions of good and bad page titles in the comments.

For some more advice see Writing useful page titles on 456 Berea Street.

There are generally 2 sets of factors that effect your search engine ranking, on-page and off-page. On-page factors are things that you can directly affect yourself because they are on your Web page. Off-page factors are things you have less control over because they appear on other peoples pages.

On-page SEO

There are many things on your page that search engines use to rank your Web site for a particular search. These are things like:

• Page title,
• Headings,
• Keyword density,
• Anchor text,
• Alternative text,
• File names,

These are all things that you can directly effect by changing your pages, I’ll talk about them in detail another time.

Off-page SEO

Search engines use information from other sites to rank your site too. This is like giving your pages a recommendation.

If I tell you that I’m a great Web designer it doesn’t really give you any confidence in my claims. But if Bob, or even better your best friend Wendy, says that I’m good then you’ll take notice.

Search engines work the same way, each link to your site acts as a recommendation. But if the search engine already trusts that site then the recommendation becomes even more powerful.

Here are some of the things that search engines take into account:

• Page rank of the site linking to you,
• Anchor text of the link,
• Relevancy of the page linking to yours

I’ll look at these in more detail another time, but at least now you know the very basics.

Conclusion

Most SEO involves a lot of time, so if you pay someone that is what you are really paying them for. Make sure that if you pay someone then you can measure the success of their work.

The most important thing though is that no-one can guarantee to get you the top of Google and keep you there.

If you use titles and headings that are not obvious then people have to think about what they mean. Usability expert Steve Krug‘s first law of usability is:

“Don’t make me think!”

To help people find the information they are looking for, we need to provide good information scent. If we make our titles and headings too clever and full of plays of words, then we don’t provide good information scent.

Helping people find your page

Page titles and headings are both considered important by search engines.

If you use meaningful titles and headings these will quite often contain the words that people will be searching for. Using relevent key words and phrases in your titles and headings help make your page appear more important to search engines, so your page will appear closer to the top.

Not only do search engines place importance on titles, they also use page titles to display search results.

How many times have you clicked on a link in a list of serach engine results only to find that the page has nothing to do with what you were searching for? If you make sure that your title describes the content of the page well then people will find what they are looking for and build confidence in trusting you. If they click on a link and the content does not match the content then instead they will lose confidence, beacause they were fooled into visiting your site.

Signposts for people reading the page

Providing good titles helps people to know they are reading the right page for the information they want. Good headings help people to find that information on the page.

Remember in Why is writing for the Web different?, we looked at how people read Web pages. Providing meaningful headings as signposts helps people to scan the page and find the section of the page with specific information they are looking for.

Valuable content

The most valuable thing on most small business Web sites is to give customers and potential customers information about the business and what it does. Probably the most valuable pieces of content you can include are:

• What do you do (e.g. Web site design, selling flowers),
• Information about your product/s or service/s,
• How to contact you.

You could also use your Web site to add value for your customers providing them with additional support. If you included an FAQ section, it gives your customers answers to common questions when they want them. It also stops you from answering the same question time and again.

Another way of adding valuable content is by including useful articles and information for your customers related to your products and services. This blog is here to help promote my services, but also to provide useful content to keep people coming back and to tell their friends about.

Valuable content can also help your position in search engines. Creating useful content encourages other people to link to your site, making it look more important to search engines.

Keep adding fresh content

Just creating a site with valuable content that never changes will not keep people coming back.

Think for about TV, if your favourite program was on you would probably watch it. Now what if all it ever showed was the same episode over and over and never showed anything else? How many times can you watch the same episode of Top Gear on Dave?

The same is true of a Web site, no matter how good the information. If it never changes people will get bored and stop visiting it.

Some of the fresh content you can add to your site are:

• Articles and features,
• News (e.g. new products or services),
• Special offers (e.g. deal of the week),

Without valuable content people have no reason to visit your site again or recommend it to their friends. So whether you update your site everyday or just once in a blue moon make sure you have valuable content.

The best content is information about your products and/or services, after all that is what your Web site is there to promote.