SEO Tip #1 – Turning URL References into Live Links

28th July 2009 · Paddy · No Comments »

I tweeted a brief SEO Tip yesterday, given the 140 characters I had to work with I wasn’t sure if I’d get the message through – my concerns were well placed after my mate Paul Forcey asked me to write a blog post expanding on my Tweet.

Well here it is..!

SEO Tip #1 – Turn a reference to your website into a live link

I want to keep it as simple as possible so I’ll put the tip into a step by step process -

Go to Google and search for your URL, eg – www.patrickmoogan.com
Click on “Show Options”
Select “Past Week”
Now go through each of the results, you will probably find that there are references to your URL which are not clickable links. See my URL in step 1 above for an example of this.
When you find these references, contact the website owner and ask them to make the link clickable. They will be more willing to do this as they have already gone to the trouble of writing your URL so there is something about it they like.
Thats it! You can change the date range to whatever you want but the great thing about choosing the last week is that the content will be pretty fresh and still fresh in the mind of the website owner. So again they are more likely to take notice and link to you.

Yes this can take time and will only work for sites that are already pretty well established – brand new sites may not have many references unless they had a lot of PR work and promotion prior to launch.