Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a very useful method of internet marketing and is being increasingly used on many different websites. It is used to help the website to perform better within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SEO agencies use many different techniques and methods to achieve these results and rankings. This blog will be looking at linking, mainly the different types of links that can be used.

Links are used widely throughout the internet and they are fantastic way of boosting a websites’ credibility within the SERPs. However, it is much more beneficial for a website to have many links, preferably high quality links, leading to it, then having lots of outgoing links.

One Way Linking

One way linking is a technique use by SEOs whereby a a website links to another website but there is no return of the link. Also called incoming links or inbound links, these types of links are considered to appear more ‘natural’ in the eyes of a search engine spider, which would give the website much greater credibility.

Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal links are when two websites contact one another and agree to swap links between their two sites. Reciprocal linking is specifically called so, when two websites link to one another.

Three Way Linking

Three way linking is a fantastic way of creating a link to your website, This is not reciprocal linking as there are more than two websites.. It is also much fairer and so much more popular than one way linking. Three way linking basically works by having a ‘circle’ or ‘triangle’ of websites, all linking to one another. But the links between the websites, do not directly return back to the original website, which is a good thing where the Search Engines are concerned.

Link Bait

Link bait refers to the topic of a websites content and blogs, that may entice (bait) others websites to link to them. Link bait generally refers to current affairs, such as; celebrities, events, disasters, popular culture, and generally anything that may become popular searches within the search engines. By getting quality Link Bait material edited and published quickly, you will have the best chances of ranking well within the search engines and generating links for your website.

Bad Linking

Bad links can be very detrimental to a website and can cause a website many different problems. Bad links may come from a website that has other spammy links, a website that contains spam and black hat techniques and irrelevant links.

In this part of the ‘How to SEO’ manual, Position Gold Ltd will be looking at the Robots.txt file and explaining in full, just what it does., how it can benefit your website and just what can be achieved by using it.

What is it and what does it do?

Robots.txt files are text based files which installed to the root of a websites coding through the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Normally created through notepad or other similar text creating programmes and is saved as ‘robots.txt’. The robots.txt file is basically a file that is read by the search engine spiders. It tells the spiders just exactly what to crawl and index, but more importantly tells the spider what NOT to crawl and index. The spider then follows the robots.txt files instructions and crawls the site accordingly.

Why should a website have a robots.txt file?

This is very simple, the robots.txt file allows you to instruct the website what it can and cannot see and index. There are many different reasons for why you may want to restrict what the the search engine spiders can see; as follows. A website may have content that is repeated throughout the site, by disallowing the spiders from crawling this, you will be able to prevent any aspects of duplicate content issues. Also images are usually put into the robots.txt files, this is because there is no point in spidering images (unless images have been specifically targeted in SEO). When a spider is crawling a site, crawling images just takes too much time and so it is much more efficient to have the spider crawl all text rather than some text and images. Administrative sections of websites are also commonly disallowed from spiders as the information found there is not beneficial to the the user in any way.

To conclude…

The robots.txt file is basically a checklist that the search engine spiders must adhere to. It is a way of controlling and manipulating what the search engine spider sees, indexes and then ranks your website on. You should never disallow everything from being seen as your website will simply not rank for any of your targeted keywords.