You may have heard that the trick of SEO is getting as many links as you can to your website. But is that true? What else should you know about links?

What is a (good) link?

A link is a vote from another website to yours. Its someone else saying; ‘Hey this content is pretty good’. Rankings is ultimately a popularity contest, so arguably, the more people say you are pretty good, the better, right?

Well, no.  Because not all links are created equal. A link from an unrelated website to yours, or from a site that is somehow engaging in unethical activities, is not worth much.

Ideally, all your links should come from relevant and trustworthy websites. This will have the most positive effect on your rankings in Google.

When you try and get links from a particular site, you have to also ask yourself, “am I in good company on this website?” If all the other links on the site are going to poor websites, you are “poor” by association.

How many inbound links?

How many links should I try and get to my website? A question I get asked all the time.

The number of links is secondary to the quality of the links you get. But to give you some sort of benchmark, I’d say you should try and aim for 250 to 750 UNIQUE links.(unique means you count a URL only once)

Remember to not build your links too quickly. Google WILL give you call.

Happy link building

Setting up an RSS feed for your site is an easy and effective way to offer new and dynamic content to your site. If you can control the content of the feed, you could even target your chosen keywords to increase the relevance to your site.

However, for the purposes of SEO, an RSS feed will not help you much in your rankings as essentially, RSS Feeds are duplicate content.

So, whilst RSS feeds are a great tool to gather relevant content to a single location, you should not use them thinking it will radically boost your rankings.

What is Search Engine Saturation?

Should I care?
When I conduct an audit of a client’s website I still include a Search Engine Saturation graph. I do this because Search engine saturation refers to the total number of pages of your website that have been indexed by the various search engines. A page that is not indexed is pretty difficult to find, so search engine saturation is still a good way to measure how effective your pages are in getting a listing on Google, Yahoo or Bing.

For example, if you have a website with a total of 50 pages, you’d like most, or all, of them to be indexed on each search engine, so people can find them. If only 10 of those pages are indexed you have a bit of an issue on your hands.

Simplistically speaking, if out of 50 total pages, you found you had 60 pages indexed on one search engine, you could ask yourself if you had a duplicate content issue perhaps.

There are many free web tools available to gauge the effectiveness of your pages. Generally, the total number of pages indexed is a number that combines the pages indexed on, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

Which SES tools do you use yourself? I’d love to hear which ones you rate the highest.