Within SEO circles we increasingly speak about E-A-T, and why websites that have or display expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are going to get preferential treatment from Google when it comes to ranking.

With the ever-increasing ranking power that these high authority sites have, it means that the backlinks from them will pass some of that power to the websites they link to. That provides an excellent opportunity for website owners to harness that power by getting the authority sites to link to their own website.

Before everyone goes rushing off to write emails asking for a backlink from a huge website, it does not work like, although admittedly SEO would be a lot easier if it did. Instead, we need to take a more subtle approach, because otherwise, we are just going to look like spammers, trying to ride on their coattails.

That is not to say large website will not entertain backlinks to smaller websites. In fact, that helps their SEO too, given that linking out is a ranking signal to Google. So, we can get backlinks from them, and here are some ideas on how.

Give Them A Testimonial

Even the biggest of companies cannot resist receiving positive reviews and testimonials. You can take advantage of this by researching larger websites to see where they allow reviews or testimonials, and if they also permit a link within them. Obviously, you do not just copy and paste the same testimonial on each website, and even if you only can get one or two posted with backlinks, it is still worth it.

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Lots of website owners trying to improve its SEO heed the advice that backlinks are important, and then put 100% of their efforts into creating those links from every website and social media platform they can find. What they overlook, is that the links that they have within their website, and how they are structured, are also important for SEO, and they play a role in helping visitors who visit that site too.

An internal link acts in much the same way an external link does in that when it is clicked, it will take the person who clicked it to a different location.

Whereas an external link will take them to a different website, an internal link will either take them to another page within the website, to another part of the page, or it could be used to allow the visitor to download something, such as a document file.

These are some of the practical applications of internal links, and it is important that the navigation that they can provide makes the task easier for visitors, rather than more difficult. Easy navigation means visitors are liable to stay longer on a website, and more likely to take action, which in many cases means they become a customer or become a subscriber to your email list.

From an SEO perspective, good internal links are desirable for many reasons. We know that when Google’s spiders crawl the internet, they do so using links that go to and from the hundreds of millions of websites that exist. If that is how they do it externally, then within a website it is the internal links that they crawl.

It follows that if your linking structure is optimised and provides a logical path throughout it, then Goggle will be able to crawl and index every page and all content that exists within your website. If so, then all those SEO factors such as titles, descriptions and meta tags contribute to the site’s ranking. Compare that to a website with poor linking where 50% of the pages are missed and therefore add nothing in respect of SEO.

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If you having been following developments in SEO, and in particular what direction Google has been heading in terms of determining the rankings of websites, you will have seen that ‘user experience’ has become one of the primary factors they apply.

For Google, it is no longer enough for a website just to have good information, it also needs to meet the needs of, and provide a better experience for, those who have searched, and then landed, on that website.

There are lots of complex solutions as to how a website might achieve these aims, however, there is one simple, and highly effective, method you can try, and that is to answer questions.

Questions, Questions, Questions

When we say answer questions, we mean the questions that get typed into Google’s search bar. When searching, what many people do is, instead of simply typing in a search like ‘SEO Melbourne‘, they will instead type ‘what is the best way to get SEO done on my Melbourne website?’, or ‘how can I do SEO on my Melbourne website?’.

Within your niche or business sector, you will hopefully have ideas as to what questions your potential customers might ask on Google, and if you do, you are even closer to taking advantage of this.

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As soon as they sense a drop in their ranking many business owners panic and think that they are on the slippery slope to page 5 of Google. Thankfully, in most cases the situation is temporary, and even if the drop is sustained, there will be an explanation for it.

What it will mean is carrying out some simple checks to determine why the ranking drop happened. Some of those checks will involve using SEO research tools so it might mean you need to employ an SEO consultant or agency to carry them out.

Here is a guide to 4 of those checks that can be made in order to find the culprit and reverse the drop.

#1 Is Your Website In Full Working Order?

It is astonishing that many business owners do not look in on their website on a regular basis, and so if anything happens to go wrong on it, they do not become aware of this until their rankings start going south.

There are some really basic things you need to check such as the expiry dates of your domain registration or your hosting. Yes, it does happen that a website disappears from rankings because the business owner forgot to renew their hosting service or their domain.

Also, check if your hosting company is having any problems or outages. While most hosting services will be up well over 99.5% of the time, it could be that 0.5% downtime that is the issue.

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