Organic SEO for Small Businesses – Part V

Intended Audience: Small Business Owners/webmasters and anyone new to the world of web design and search engine optimization (SEO) particularly those working with small businesses, organizations and sole traders.Note: Part IV of this series of articles was published on July 22nd, 2009 and can be viewed at http://www.istech.ie/blog/?p=127The fourth article in this series focused on trusted links and we will continue the link theme in this article and take a look at relevant links and their significance in improving your website’s position on search engine results pages.Let’s take a look at the concept of a relevant link. Consider the following examples:1. A website about motor bikes linking to a website about fishing.2. A dental care website linking to a dental association websiteObviously example 1 is not a relevant link while example 2 is a relevant link. A search engine will attach more value to link illustrated in example 2. A large number of non-relevant links can also be detrimental to your website’s rankings on search engines and should be avoided.The golden rule of relevant links is that links are from websites with content that is relevant to the content of your website. It is preferable to have relevant backlinks from a number of different websites but if you are able to acquire a number of backlinks from a particular website then it is important to have them point to different pages on your website i.e. not all backlinks should go to your home page.It may be possible to have an SEO company unearth a list of relevant backlinks but remember that you are the best judge of which websites are relevant to your website so it’s worth doing some research to establish your own personal criteria for a relevant backlinks. Sources of relevant backlinks include:* Your Suppliers* Industry Specific Websites and Blogs* Industry Specific ForumsIf you do decide to outsource the placing of relevant links to an external company it is important to retain control over the link approval process i.e. approve links before they are established not after as it can often take time to remove a link especially after it’s been indexed by the search engines.Your competitors are often a good source of information about where you should look for relevant websites to get a link. You can use Yahoo Search’s linkdomain function to display a list of all websites that link to a competitor website.   The next article in this series will expand on the topic of free and paid web directories, social media, local directory services etc.