how important are links for SEO?

Eurorunner

I have created my own website for a small part time business (which has the potential to go full time in '08 if I go the right way about it).

I have registered the site with google/yahoo/msn/open directory - but from what I've read here, its going to take some time before they will list me. My concern is how long is it going to take me to get up to the top five results.

I have read of various basic steps that can be taken for SEO but wonder how important links are in all of this? I see a competitors site which is presentable but still low budget. However, as he got a web design company to create his site, that company have linked all their sites. It makes me wonder if this is the reason he is ranking so well?

If so, how do I overcome this - seeing as I dont have this advantage? ie. how do I go about getting reciprocal links going?

Arch-Stanton

how important are links for SEO?

about as important breaks on a car ! (but the right kind of links)

You will need to read some stuff about on site and off site optimisation, here is a good ebook to get you started.
http://www.ketec.net/download/seo_made_easy.pdf

.

fintan

Apart from links relevant, unique and regularly updated content is also extremely important.

serotonin_sam

@Arch-Stanton: thanks for the .pdf - I better get reading this evening!

fintan wrote:

unique and regularly updated content is also extremely important.

How often would be defined as 'regularly updated'? Is it accepted that the site has been 'updated' if any change at all has been made to it - or do the bots need to find a certain proportion of 'updated' material?

mneylon

serotonin_sam wrote:

How often would be defined as 'regularly updated'? Is it accepted that the site has been 'updated' if any change at all has been made to it - or do the bots need to find a certain proportion of 'updated' material?

Any change is an update .. but if you have content that changes regularly then it is obviously more "interesting" for a spider

regi

Boards is spidered continually by sometimes hundreds of bots, and I've seen content only 3-4 hours old in the google index, so I guess it depends on how busy and 'important' they consider the site to be.

serotonin_sam

regi wrote:

boards is spidered continually by sometimes hundreds of bots, and I've seen content only 3-4 hours old in the google index, so I guess it depends on how busy and 'important' they consider the site to be.
Yesterday 23:43

Yeah - I did notice recently between this and another irish board ranking very high in search results with threads that were very very recent.

Having started on Arch-Stantons .pdf last night ( a good read for a newbie to the subject like me), It got me thinking that if a website has a link on a post in a discussion forum thread (and i'm not suggesting for a minute that i would do this on boards), could that assist in the ranking of the website?
The reason I have just crunched in a couple of keywords and a forum thread has got a third place listing. However, when I check its google PR rank - its displaying 0/10. Does google disregard discussion forum threads?

RedCardinal

If I could use only one tactic of SEO and no other it would be link building. Links are what really drive results in the SERPs (yes content matters, but I'm assuming you have the content).

If you want to discover the real power of backlinks then Google 'failure' or 'miserable failure'. The #1 result does not contain those keywords anywhere on the page - all down to having the right links

the Guru

http://www.submitawebsite.com/free_tools.html check out this link for more info

Eurorunner

@RedCardinal: Thanks for clarification above - I can see now that I need to concentrate on getting some backlinks in place.
If I compare my site with that of a rival, theirs has numerous backlinks owing to the fact that they got a web designer to create their site. The web designer has created links between all of his clients. So the rivals site has many backlinks but to totally unrelated businesses (other than similar regional location).
Q. How well do search engines deal with the quality of links? ie. If I got 5 good quality links (ie backlinks from sites that dealt with the same subject to some degree) in comparison to a rival with 15 backlinks from sites that were totally unrelated, would I 'in principal' be likely to get a better ranking than theirs...all other things being equal?
@theguru: thanks for the link.

RedCardinal

Eurorunner wrote:

@RedCardinal: Thanks for clarification above - I can see now that I need to concentrate on getting some backlinks in place.
If I compare my site with that of a rival, theirs has numerous backlinks owing to the fact that they got a web designer to create their site. The web designer has created links between all of his clients. So the rivals site has many backlinks but to totally unrelated businesses (other than similar regional location).
Q. How well do search engines deal with the quality of links? ie. If I got 5 good quality links (ie backlinks from sites that dealt with the same subject to some degree) in comparison to a rival with 15 backlinks from sites that were totally unrelated, would I 'in principal' be likely to get a better ranking than theirs...all other things being equal?
@theguru: thanks for the link.

Quality over quantity for sure. The SEs are very capable of ranking links, so your on-theme links *should* be far more valuable than your competitors. But bear in mind that a good link also contains the targeted phrase in the anchor, e.g. my links might contain 'search engine optimisation' as the anchor rather than 'red cardinal' because people search for the former not the latter.

Also worth noting is that reciprocal links do not have the same value they once did. One-way links from on-theme sites with the right anchor text will get you high ranks.

Hope that helps. I have quite a few pieces on my blog that might be relevant - http://www.redcardinal.ie. I have a post on link building in my draft folder that I must publish

Rgds
Richard

Eurorunner

I'm beginnning to rank well on yahoo now. The site has been visited by the following bots;

Regular visitors:
googlebot
inkomi slurp

1 Visit:
msn
askjeeves

Is there any other bot I should insure is calling to the site?
Msn has only called once - when the site was first uploaded at the beginning of the month. How long does it take for at the very least an msn search result listing (even if far out)?
I've been using google rankings dot com for checking SE results position. For google, it comes back with "Valid google API key not found!". Is there another online checker I can use?

RedCardinal

In my view, if you are targeting Ireland the most important SE is Google. I reckkon up to 800% of all searches are executed by G.

seo-ireland

If you concentrate on Google (and to be fair you have to these days with their market share) then links are the #1 factor. While I agree 100% about quality links over quantity of links there is no real thing as a bad link with Google. Ever see spam rising to the top of results? Guess what got it there. I definitely wasn't quality content that's for sure.

In response to the OP's mention of reciprocal links, they are great for direct traffic but will IMO do virtually zero for you in regards of SEO.

Best of luck.

RedCardinal

RedCardinal wrote:

I reckkon up to 800% of all searches are executed by G.

Just to clean that up: I reckon up to 80% of all searches are executed by Google

comer_97

I have developed and host around 40 sites. And each of those sites links back to my site. The problem is that I host all these sites as a reseller so they are all on the same IP address. So they links to and from aren't showing up.

Is there any way around this?

seo-ireland

comer_97 wrote:

I have developed and host around 40 sites. And each of those sites links back to my site. The problem is that I host all these sites as a reseller so they are all on the same IP address. So they links to and from aren't showing up.

I would be careful here as Google has been known to frown upon mass interlinking between sites on the same IP address. The sites affected would be the linked-to sites. Having said that though I have seen examples of this with even more than 40 sites that remain unaffected.

comer_97

What I have done to get around it is to set up a directory site for all the sites i have done on another IP.

RedCardinal

comer_97 wrote:

I have developed and host around 40 sites. And each of those sites links back to my site. The problem is that I host all these sites as a reseller so they are all on the same IP address. So they links to and from aren't showing up.

Is there any way around this?

Google is also using WHOIS info to track down networks like yours.

It's not easy to achieve what your trying. Even with different hosts, different IPs and different WHOIS you have to try to make the sites trusted by Google. Of course if the domains are older than 2005 then you might have more 'slack' to play with

comer_97

darn it, the whois will be the same.

It's not like I am trying to scam google, I am just trying to get the credit for the sites I have developed if you know what I mean.

seo-ireland

If I were a spammer it would be much too easy to create 100s of crap sites designed to inflate PageRank of one 'quality' site, all residing on the one IP/server. Distributing this effort across multiple servers would require additional effort. So I see why they penalise this.

There is one type of credit you can get without risking any penalties and that is direct traffic. Just place a 'nofollow' attribute on the links to your main site so these links will not be factored into Google algorithm.

comer_97

should i ask for any tips to improve my situation or would that be giving it away for free?

RedCardinal

comer_97 wrote:

should i ask for any tips to improve my situation or would that be giving it away for free?

What exactly do you want to do?

comer_97

Hi Red Cardinal.

My situation is that i have developed about 40 sites and I have these sites linking back to my site, unfortunately they are on the same IP so on google it is showing that i have no incoming links.

These are the only incoming links I have. Is there anyway i can get benefit from the sites I have developed.

I want to improve my search rankings. (I'm in the process of putting a lot more content on my sites to aid this too.)

RedCardinal

That probably isn't likely the only reason they're not showing in a Google link: query. Google only shows a small percentage of your backlinks, and they tend to be the higher quality links that Google has found.

A link from a hari dressers site to a web design site is not going to have much relevance for Google (just an example).

But why not try to diversify your links? Submit to some quality human-edited directories, sign up for some webmaster forums and place links in your signature (cant do it here but try over on irishwebmasterforum - they allow links in your sig), or maybe just ask people nicely for some backlinks?

comer_97

i've tried adding myself to dmoz.org, are there any other ones i should consider.

2 of the sites have google Page rank or 2 and 3 that's all....

RedCardinal

comer_97 wrote:

i've tried adding myself to dmoz.org, are there any other ones i should consider.

2 of the sites have google Page rank or 2 and 3 that's all....

Try Digitalpoint forum - they have a directory announcement board.

seo-ireland

Are your using the link: operator to check your backlinks in Google? If so bear in mind that they only show a small inaccurate example of what sites are linking to you. Use Yahoo and Live to check backlinks (they show everything they have indexed)
- http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.yoursite.com
- http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=link:www.yoursite.com

comer_97

i was using link: i have taken a look at the Yahoo one and it seems to have a lot more links. I will just keep improving my content and try and get links in and see how i improve over the months.

is there anyway i can find my search position in google for a certain term. say i type in web design dublin and i get 1 million results, is it possible to find the position of my site in those results?

seo-ireland

Indeed there is:
http://www.mcdar.net/Q-Check/datatool.asp

An essential tool.

comer_97

excellent thanks!