Links

You're reputable when other people link to you from relevant, related and reputable websites.

Writing for the web

Quality content means a higher chance of getting decent links, which is the most important step in SEO. Even more important than everything we’ve already discussed. You can find out more about writing quality content for the web here.

Link building is a big subject and there are numerous tactics you can use, but the idea is to get an inbound link to your page.

Google and other search engines will see a link from another website to your page as a vote by that website for you. If another website thinks your page is worth linking to then Google will notice it too and then come and crawl your site.

Link building tactics

Here are a couple of quick simple tactics you can use for any page to get your first link

First, social bookmark your page on social networks like Twitter, Digg etc where your valuable content should attract some initial links from a few interested parties. That takes just a couple of minutes.

A second useful tactic is to add value to someone else’s related content e.g., a forum post or a blog post.

Read the post and the comments. Then add your own comment that adds to the discussion. Remember, you must always add value, even in comments!

Link farms – no go area

One thing that you should never be tempted to do is use a link farm to build links. You may be approached by companies who will offer you the chance to boost the number of inbound links to your site. Google and other search engines view this as very negative and can put a black mark against the whole site, not just the pages you are linking to.

No follow

Whenever you add an external link to the University website (i.e. a link that does not point to an address that begins with www.hud.ac.uk) you must add a bit of code to the link that instructs the search engines not to follow the link. This ensures that the University site retains all the SEO benefit of linking to an external site and we don’t give away of our ‘link juice’.

The code is added through T4 and you can find further instructions in our ‘How to guide’.