Search Engine Optimization Tip #17: Review Your Links and Reputation

Seo Tip Chain  Vizion Interactive Reading Time: 3 minutes

This is search engine optimization tip number seventeen in our continuing series of tips from SEO company Vizion Interactive. All of our search engine optimization tips are very specific, shouldn’t take much time to fix or review (to check to see if you are following the search engine optimization best practices), and will be rather “short and sweet” and directly to the point.

Not following along with our Search Engine Optimization Tips? Our last SEO tip was about creating a breadcrumb trail on your site. To find the previous search engine optimization tips, take a look at one of my previous SEO tips; you should find some links there. All of these “search engine optimization tips” are things I look at when analyzing a site or optimizing it for the search engines. Keep in mind, though, that this is only the beginning. There are a lot more search engine optimization tips coming.

For search engine optimization tip number seventeen, let’s talk about the current links to your site and the overall reputation that you have already built up. For example, go to Google and search for your company name. In the screen capture below, I did a search for our company name, Vizion Interactive.

Vizion Interactive

I usually monitor the first 10 or 20 search results. But, let’s start digging deeper into the search results, perhaps on the third or fourth, fifth, or even the sixth page of search results. If you start digging this deep you will most likely see pages that mention your company or your company name but don’t have an actual link to your company’s web site. You might actually see some profiles (perhaps a social media profile) or even another type of site that mentions your company by name but doesn’t have a link.

Search Engine Optimization Tip: start contacting some of these sites’ owners to see if you can get the link changed to your preferred link text (e.g., search engine optimization firm or search engine optimization company links to vizion.flywheelsites.com) or if there is no link then ask for a link.
Also, keep in mind that you will probably get different results for “Vizion Interactive” than searching for Vizion Interactive without the quotes.

And most likely if you spend some time cleaning the mentions of your company and paying attention to your company name (and even perhaps your own name) then you will help the search engine optimization of your site: and you will help your reputation at the same time. The next thing you will want to do is to look at the list of current links to your site.

Looking at Your Current Links

To look at the current links to your site, there are several ways. At the time of this post, the best way I know of to check links to a web site (that you currently do not own) is to look at the list of links in Yahoo!. I prefer to perform a linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com search at Yahoo!. If you look at this search result at Yahoo! you will see that I searched for: linkdomain:google.com -site:google.com and got the following search result:
seo-tip-17-yahoo-search.jpg

You’ll see that the number one search result is a link from Adobe. On that page there is a link to Google. If Google wanted the link text changed to something like “Google Search” then they might ask the owner of that page to change it. That’s the general idea of this search engine optimization tip, SEO tip number 17.

If you take the time to look at the current web sites that are linking to you then you may be able to make some changes to how those other web sites link to you: you may also find some sites that are mentioning your company’s name but are not linking to you (perhaps they forgot?). In many cases, simply asking someone will go a long way towards getting something done.

At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our SEO Audits, Local Listing Management, Website Redesign Consulting, and B2B digital marketing services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.