I thought I would write a post about how to evaluate links when link building. In other words, what due diligence can you perform when researching links?

1. Check the domain with McAfee SiteAdivsor. McAfee SiteAdvisor rates sites based on testing for spyware and other malicious items. They also have a strong community of site reviewers.
2. Check the page rank of the domain. SEOmoz has a powerful historical page rank checker tool that will allow you to see if the site has had any drastic changes in page rank recently. The historical data is not always there, but it is in a lot of cases. (I think you can get access to the tool from a free membership)
3. Search Google for a unique text string or full sentence appearing on the website, and see if the website pulls up. Hopefully they will show up.
4. What is the title tag on the homepage? Do they rank for any phrases from their homepage title tag?
5. Perform a whois search on the domain. I typically use godaddy, enter the domain, and then click "get info." If it's a site about "Utah web design" and the whois information points to a country far far away, you probably want to look elsewhere.
6. Lastly search yahoo for links pointing to the site in question. Go to yahoo.com and enter "link:www.thewebsiteinquestionyaddayadda.com." This will often uncover secondary sites the site owner *may* own. If you find a lot of spammy sites pointing to the website in question this could possibly raise some flags. Check the whois information on the spammy sites (see #5). Do any of them have the same whois information as the site offering the link?

These are some of the things I check when evaluating links. If you have any tips or suggestions, please comment below.

Tips courtesy of the Utah SEO team via @ Red Olive Design

1.       Must be using current FireFox. (Note I've recently found a much easier and more accurate way to track rankings.  I would advise doing research and watching Youtube reviews of various keyword tracking services).

2.       Set Google search results to top 100 and then save.

3.       Search Term

4.       Hit “Ctrl” “F”

5.       Enter site URL

6.       Select and highlight from your site up. (Stop before PPC at the top.  (Sometimes the first 3)).

7.       Paste into notepad. (Should be a “#” before each site - Excel counts the position based on the number of #s).

8.       Copy notepad contents and paste into supplied excel doc (Paste into A1 or the top left cell).      Excel Doc (right click "Save Target As")

9.       ** In the top right of the excel doc you’ll see a field with a dotted background.  This is used to subtract the sites that get more than one listing (when sorted by 100).  These are the secondary “indented” results, typically to a website’s interior pages.

Post if you have any questions.  As far as I understand, this is a non-automated Google friendly way to count keyword rankings.  Please let me know if it’s not the case. Please Visit and Link to www.redolivedesign.com. Also, you may or may not want to turn off the google settings for "Enable customizations based on search activity."  I suspect you'll probably want this disabled.  To do so, search something in google, then click "Web History" in the top right corner. Then simply disable or able customized search results.

(download)

Click here to download:

Google_Friendly_Rank_Checking.zip (352 KB)

Here is a short list of things you want to see in an SEO company.

• Experience
• A medium to large portfolio of websites - for trend monitoring. When you make regular changes and perform site maintenance on a large portfolio of websites, you learn things.
• Knowledge of html. You don't want to hand over FTP access to someone who doesn't know html.
• How strong is the overall team?... Do they have a strong technical side to help with execution of SEO creative concepts? Do they have have a strong creative team?
• Do they offer copywriting to help with blog posts and pr related material?
• Do they have experience with off-site link building? Ask for a few ideas / suggestions to ensure it's white hat.

For more information about web design or SEO, visit our site

A few of the top items that Google Webmaster Tools tracks that you should be aware of:
1. Duplicate Title Tags
2. Percentage of keywords (a literal count of how many times a keyword appears).
3. Top pages linked to from within the site. (ie which page is getting the most links from within your site).
4. Top pages linked to from out on the web.

With these few data points, a search engine could determine what pages are most important to the site owner, what pages are most important to the web community, and what pages have the most relevant content for a keyword match.

One strategy might be to make sure that all of these categories are congruent for each keyword. For example, the page that everybody else links to the most = the page you link to the most = the page that has the highest number of keyword appearances.

For more SEO stuff, visit redolivedesign.com

I recently posted about the aviva directory and how long it took from sumbission to Google returning my actual aviva directory listing in search results. I also recently submitted a few websites to the botw.org directory. And amazingly it also took about 18 days.

So it looks like these directories are being crawled and indexed by some search engines. And you are looking at about 18 days for the submission, review, crawled, and indexed process. So for tracking purposes I would say check your stats on the day you submit, 7 days out, 18 days out, and 30 days out.

The next question is will these somewhat expensive listings make any difference in rankings?

I'll let you know if I see anything significant.

There are many ways to evaluate a directory. One quick way that I will share with you, is to determine if Google is crawling the snippets that the directory has been creating for listings. How may you ask? Simple - search the snippet in Google and see if the directory listing shows up.

You will probably find that some directories show up and some don't. Also, I wouldn't stop at this, you'll want to do additional research on the directory before you go ahead and submit your site.

Matt covers a lot of topics over the 26 minutes.  For the possible future of site speed and rankings in 2010, jump to 8:40 to 10:00.

Top SEO related people that I follow on twitter:

• http://twitter.com/problogger
• http://twitter.com/mattcutts
• http://twitter.com/googlewmc
• http://twitter.com/leeodden
• http://twitter.com/garyvee
• http://twitter.com/chrisbrogan

I am sure there are tons more, but I like these for social media ideas, blogging tips, SEO, and overall web knowledge.

Please comment and leave any that you feel should be added.

Red Olive SEO
Utah SEO
Utah Web Design

I submitted a website to the Aviva Directory recently and I wanted to share the experience. It was fast and easy. And they were very responsive over email.

One of our SEO clients is a large equipment manufacturing company. They have a really good new web design, more content than their competition, some decent history, and some quality links from national retailers. However, they are still lagging for a few keywords, so I will be submitting their site to a select few reputable general directories.... and I will report the results right here.

Red Olive SEO