DIY SEO in 5 minutes

By Lee

Does your website have any external links?  An external link is a link to another site.

Why is this important? Google values your site on how many links it has incoming as positive votes, and outgoing links as negative votes. So the more sites that link in to you, the better. The less sites that you link out to, the better.  Easier than it sounds because you must get people to link to you without a link back in return.  (Methods of obtaining links is a subject for another post)

Most small sites I see have at least 3-5 external links. Most of these links are to associations they are members of, link directories, or sometimes external links just to be helpful to their visitors. (However, this has a negative effect on the site’s position in Google).

By adding a ‘no follow’ tag to these links, Google will not cast these outgoing links as negative votes, therefore making an improvement to your positioning with them.  The ‘no follow’ tag is very easy to implement and can make huge difference on your placement in Google.

The ‘no follow’ link  strategy is employed by most of the major websites including Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. There’s no reason why small businesses shouldn’t employ the same inexpensive, yet highly effective tactics.

The majority of my sites I build are powered by WordPress. This allows the use of plug-ins (sorts of upgrades). I always include the SEO Smart Links plugin, this automatically adds the ‘no follow’ tag to any external links on my customers’ sites.

If you are not yet one of my customers and have any external links on your website. I can add the ‘no follow’ tags at a very reasonable price. Please use this contact form to get in touch.

Example:

<a href="http://www.example.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

• For more information, click here: nofollow wiki