We have written about the benefits of quality over quantity links ad nauseom over here at Creare, but I do still think it is a subject worthy of discussion.

As Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist at Google says in his recent blog post: Quality links to your site, published on Monday – a quality link is always going to be worth much more than a hundred ’spammy’ links. So, how does a person determine which links are ‘quality’ and which are not?

Well, I think a lot of this comes down to experience, when I first started dabbling in SEO a few years ago, (and, my, how the discipline has changed since then!) I know I fell into some pretty easy traps and pitfalls when it came to link building. One thing that I do know about link building is that it isn’t easy. Whichever way you come to look at it, ‘easy’ is not a word I would use to describe it, not that it’s technically very difficult, of course, just that it’s time consuming and requires patience, dedication, and to some extent a certain amount of luck.

So, what pitfalls and traps could a green SEO newbie easily find themselves slipping down?

Lets start with Rubbish Directories – when I started my first SEO Campaign (many moons ago now) I seem to remember spending hours (literally hours) submitting my site to a gazillion directories. Some were ok, and I would even go so far as to say I would use them again today, some, however were absolutely diabolical.

What do you look for in a good directory then? I hear you ask – and because I am feeling generous I’ll let you in to a few little secrets I’ve picked up the hard way…

1. Is the directory relevant? At the very least it should have a relevant category
2. Does the directory provide SEO friendly links (by this I mean, make sure the links aren’t PHP forwarders or other such uselessness)
3. Is the directory active?
4. Look at the page you want to link from, does it have a lot of other links? - The fewer the links the better
5. What is the PageRank of the directory?
6. Are the Links Follow or Nofollow (not that Nofollow links should always be discounted, just if the site asks for an administration fee then bear this in mind)

This seems a good place to add in a comment on Kaspar Szymanski’s blog that caught my eye:

Zack Pike said…
Kaspar - Very relevant artice. I lead the SEO strategy for a Fortune 200 company and I get cold calls on quick turn linkbuilding all of the time, it gets especially frustrating when someone above my pay level catches wind of “linkbuilding” and how this “great” new strategy can get you to the top of Google. It takes a lot of time educating my internal stakeholders that the key to generating quality links, that are going to have any effect, is great content and interaction with our consumers and KOLs online. I’m glad you wrote this post so I can reference it in my presentations… Straight from the source. Thanks!

Kaspar Szymanski goes on to say in  his blog post that your site’s content is extremely important to gain quality backlinks through natural processes. Well, I tend to agree with him, and this is why I say that link building isn’t easy.

To continually come up with unique and interesting content for your site is an ongoing and arduous task. It’s important to weigh up the value a page one listing will have over the time you spend on this task. If you know that the time spent on such things is worthwhile then invest your efforts there.  If it’s not going to make commercial sense then look to other online marketing activities such as email marketing or PPC Advertising and invest your time and money there instead. But, this isn’t the place for such discussions, we’re and SEO blog, and SEO is what we’re all about, so… If you have decided that it’s worth your while developing you content, then look outside the box. There are many forms of content besides plain old text, though text is still extremely important (and will remain so for as long as Google uses text as fodder).

Think about including a web video  to your pages. This will add value to you users, can increase the time spent onsite (I think this is a Ranking Factor), and generally gets you noticed. If you employ Video Optimisation techniques then your videos will even start to appear in the SERPs and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that videos are much more likely to get clicked than text. You’ll also find that your videos will get distributed and linked to by others within your community.

I would say, if it’s lasting effect you are after then humour will have it’s down side – the benefits are often short-lived. You will get a spike in traffic, but it will always remain just this – a spike. For lasting effects add something your users will want to return to regularly and will find useful in the future.

Kaspar also talks about Social Media. I have to confess, this is an area that I feel a little out of my depth in, however, with a strategy behind it I think it can be very powerful. It’s just about leveraging what you want from it (like pretty much everything else in life, eh?). His tip of making sure you provide a link to Twitter or Facebook is a great and simple one to implement. It’s just about making it easy for non-techy folk to share online content.

Finally – Look at your competitors – where have they got links from? Could you get links from similar industries? If it works for them, it could well work for you too. Don’t copy, obviously, but use your competitors for ideas. You never know where it may lead.

Chris Crum over at Web Pro News has been keeping an eye on the increasing likelihood of Bing becoming more competitive in the SEO game.

With Yahoo and Bing coming together later this year Bing is becoming the main rival to Google.  Bing is the default search engine for the Opera browser and also Verizion’s Blackberry (in the good ol’ US of A). Hewlett–Packard computers will have Bing as the default search engine over the next 3 years.

And, as Nick and James pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Bing is in the start menu of Windows 7 and Vista and IE is the default browser of Windows, which, of course, has Bing as it’s search engine. So with 70% of computers being PCs, and therefore likely to be running Windows, they have potential to wrestle some market share from Google.

Bing is on the right track but it’s going up against Google which has become a brand and is even used in daily speech (‘Oh, yeah, I Googled it’). Google isn’t just a search engine anymore.

Moving onto the technical side of Bing, it’s webmaster tools allows you to see the types of links that are coming into the site and their value. Useful for SEO, if you can identify a particular sector/area where links are coming from.

But Bing has recently made some changes to their tool. They listened to users and implemented the non-crazy ideas.

I’ll give you a brief overview of the changes.

-    Bing wants to now focus on three key areas with their webmaster tools: Crawl, Index, and Traffic.

-    It will allow you to submit individual URLs to Bing that should be prioritized by their robots.

-    You will be able to block cache links, block individual URLs, block whole folders of pages, or even block your entire website from appearing in SERPs.

Bing’s webmaster tools are now more comprehensive than Google’s and that will be attractive to SEO companies. Though will the general public care? They don’t hear about this kind of news; they just want to find the most relevant result from their search.

So, Bing has the potential but will it knock Google off the top-spot?

When you’re the biggest people tend to go after you.

Man U were the best team throughout the 90’s but everyone loved to have a dig at them, Schumacher for Ferrari, Woods, Leicester Tigers…I’m sure I could think of more sporting references but I’ll stop there.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Australian government complaining about Google’s Street-View cars obtaining data about people’s wireless connections.

Now a Spanish organization, the Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications (Apedanica), is taking Google to court over the same issue.

Intercepting telecommunications carries between one and four years prison time in Spain and Miguel Angel Gallardo, the Apedanica president, obviously believes this wasn’t a simple mistake, he said “something which was carefully programmed and has been done in 30 countries can’t be an error”.

Over the last month, the street cars have been banned in Austria and Greece, while the Italians are investigating the cars.

If Google was a smaller company would the countries be as angry?

Does Google’s size stop it from making “genuine” mistakes?

If Google’s power is curtailed will this have any effect on SEO?  Well, people seem to be talking up Bing at the moment but market share wise it’s so far off Google.

Google would probably need to be the cause of a massive oil spill, tsunami and small pox outbreak before Bing overtook its share of the market.

Google is trying to make itself a company that the World needs, that every business needs to be listed and every search needs to go through, but when does anyone ever want the successful, powerful and massive team to win? (I’ve asked too many rhetorical questions, haven’t I? Sorry).

I doubt if anyone from Google Spain will go to prison, maybe they’ll have to pay a fine, it’s just your typical little guy trying to ruin the Man.

So here it is, the inevitable World Cup blog post…someone had to do it.

You’re probably asking yourself what does the World Cup have to do with SEO?

Well, not a lot really. But where there is a quick buck to be made businesses will be sure to take advantage…or so you’d think.

Type ‘World Cup’ into Google the day before the tournament kicks-off and there should be a deluge of football sites, sports sites, sponsors, fans and so on.

Of course the Fifa site is at the top, Wikipedia follows, and there are some news sites. Towards the bottom of page 1 we have the Rugby World Cup and William Hill.

William Hill has done a good job to get there for such a massive phrase but I am surprised there are not more relevant sites on page 1.

Looking at this chart from Google Insights you can see that searches for ‘World Cup’ have shot up over the last two weeks.

Maybe, optimising for ‘World Cup’ would be difficult, and obviously spammy, for most sites as they have nothing to do with football, South Africa or Wayne Rooney’s temper.

Though holiday sites seem to be trying to take advantage and the top result for ‘World Cup Theme’ is Teacher Planet with World Cup Worksheets…good job Teacher Planet.

I am sure someone somewhere on the internet is making a good amount of money from optimising World Cup related keywords.

The sites succeeding will be the sites that have planned some form of strategy, done a little research and finished their optimisation ‘early doors’ rather than trying to ‘bundle in a last minute winner’ (football vernacular ).

P.S. Okay, I can’t write a football related blog post without comparing players and teams to SEO elements.

So here goes:

England – one man band (one great page with fantastic PR), over hyped (undeserved high ranking in Google).

France – disorganised (poor code), skill (some nice design).

Argentina – individual skill (slick design on individual pages), under dogs (low PR but liable to jump up the rankings), mad man (piece of erratic javascript)

Germany – lacking flair (simple design), organised (really nice coding), team work (great internal linking)

Italy – over achieved last time (has high PR), poor results in warm ups (few visitors)

Brazil – good attack (lots of back links), flair (innovative design), all round strength (amazing site with few flaws)

Spain –good team work (good internal linking), skill, can they handle the pressure? (maintaining current strategy?)

My prediction: England lose 1-0 to France in the quarter-finals.

Do you agree with the SEO comparison or my prediction?

P.P.S Thanks to Pete for suggesting this link as being useful

…this is an SEO campaign!

A couple of weeks ago an Australian senator launched a bit of a tirade at Google and its seemingly arrogant attitude.

At a meeting for a controversial national firewall Senator Stephen Conroy attacked Google because their Street Cars had been found to be collecting information regarding people’s wireless connections.

“Google has admitted that their Street View cars…have also been collecting information from people using WiFi connections,” he said.

Conroy referred to this as “probably the single greatest breach in the history of privacy“, though the practice was discontinued once it was discovered.

Conroy may have a chip on his shoulder when it comes to Google (or, maybe he’s just your typical Aussie speaking his mind) as he described Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, as “a bit creepy, frankly”.

“They consider themselves to be above government.”

“This has been worldwide. Google takes the view that they can do anything they want,” Senator Conroy said.

I’m not sure Google believes they are above governments but surely this is the kind of jibe you could fire at any big business, they know that they are vital to countries in some way, either through jobs or services or bringing in the big bucks, so they can throw their weight around.

Google and the Australian government have been on a collision course since Australia announced its desire to introduce a firewall that would filter the sites available to Australians. It’s believed by Google, Yahoo and experts that the filter would be a waste of time, as people would be able to circumvent it whilst it would probably slow down the internet and block benign material.

Conroy counters that ‘the filter would block access to sites that include child pornography, sexual violence and detailed instructions in crime or drug use.’

“The proposed filter is fundamentally flawed, will not achieve its stated purpose and simply will not work. It is fundamentally bad policy,” said Michael Malone, iiNet’s Chief Executive Officer.

The situation is made slightly more awkward by the fact that the Australian Government ‘is a major user of Google’s AdWords search-engine marketing product, spending $5 million to purchase sponsored links to promote its spending programs.’

As well as having organic SEO results for ‘Tax Help’ in the Australian Google it also has an AdWords campaign. This is fair enough and makes sense, as SEO is a way for anybody to advertise on the internet, and most governments try to help their people as much as possible by making information easy to access and find.

But how can the Australian government attack Google when in effect by using its services it’s supporting the actions?

I get the feeling as more businesses move online SEO and search engines will get bigger and stronger, have more influence over governments, and could end-up putting them in rather difficult/hypocritical positions.