My SEO e-Guide by Nicolas Gremion - HTML preview

4. Link Based Criteria

Google looks at the number of links to a document (back links) and the growth or disappearance of these links over time. A downward trend in the number of links to a document, decline in the rate of link growth or disappearance of links may indicate that a document is getting stale whilst an upward trend in links and rate of link growth may indicate that a document is fresh. In addition, detailed graphs of link growth over time can be used to show particular patterns for fresh documents, stale documents, those that may no longer be updated or that have been superseded. This software will help you analyze your links: Link Analyzer. Also, a weight may be given to every link based on the freshness of the overall document in which it is contained. Links from authoritative sources, like Government pages are weighted higher.

• The dates that links appear can be used to detect if links are SPAM. A 'legitimate' document attracts back links slowly whilst a sudden growth in links particularly from documents without editorial discretion, like guest books, referrer logs, 'free for all' pages could indicate SPAM.
• Using a link generating program in the beginning could be beneficial. Services such as Link-Submission.com are worth examining. This to great way to get your incoming link ball rolling. Then once your site gains popularity you’ll see a lot more natural links coming your way.
• Make sure that you have a link building program in place that lets you grow your links organically by for example:

1. Asking suppliers, customers and partners to link to you.

2. Submitting to online discussion forums.

3. Creating a blog.

4. Submitting to shopping portals and industry sites.

5. Offering something great like a free gift or service so other sites value linking to you.

6. Creating your own affiliate program where all the links are direct to you.

Remember, you can always analyze your competitors to see who links to them. You can then contact these sites to see if you can get the same links to you, too. Normally, you just type into a search engine 'link:Site URL' to get a list of the links, where Site URL is your competitor's full URL (e.g. www.competitiorwebsite.com).

So, developing a link structure that works for both visitors and search engines is a skill.

Internal Linking Strategy

Navigation is of utmost importance to the "crawlability" of your site. Search engine spiders need to be able to crawl your site as easily as your visitors find their way around. Sometimes, what will work for your visitors, will not work for search engine spiders. The best advice we can give in this area is to keep your link structure as simple as possible. Simplicity may involve giving up certain ideas that you might have for the design of your site.

Flash, frames, CGI, or any dynamic pages (pages that bring in content on the fly) are some types of programming that may hinder the crawlability of your site. Although, workarounds can be made.

However, if you're a beginner, we recommend sticking to simpler programming methods for the navigation of your site. Plain old HTML text and image links are the best method.

Also, keep as much code off your pages as you can. Use relative links to your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and put your JavaScript in a separate js file. (It is not the intent of this guide to teach you these techniques, but you can learn about them through most HTML books or web tutorials.) Linking each page out to your scripts and styles will speed up the loading of each page. It will also allow the spider to get to your real text faster.

If you do plan on keeping your navigation fairly simple, here