What are backlinks and link building?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become an essential part of the business, with a significant amount of firms undertaking in-house or out-sourced SEO. With countless businesses competing for top-ranking spots on search engine result pages (SERPs), it has become increasingly challenging to stand out in the crowd. This is where SEO companies come in, and if you are a business owner in Glasgow, using a local SEO company to build your backlinks is a great investment – if you choose the right SEO company.

Backlinks refer to hyperlinks that point back to your website from other websites on the internet. They are a major factor in determining your website's rank on search engines as they indicate to search engines that other websites consider your content relevant and authoritative – almost like a popularity contest. As such, building high-quality backlinks is an important part of any successful SEO campaign.

One of the main reasons for using an SEO for backlinks is their experience and expertise. A reputable SEO agency should have years of experience and have a track record of ranking high for their clients. They should be knowledgeable in the latest techniques, strategies and communication mediums for link building and they should also know how to identify high-quality websites that will provide powerful backlinks to your site.

In addition to their expertise, any decent SEO company will have access to industry-leading tools and resources that can help them build high-quality backlinks quickly and efficiently, such as Moz, SEMRush and Ahrefs, which we use at XLWEB. They will be able to analyse your competitors' link profiles, identify gaps in your own link profile and then create customised link building strategies that are tailored to your specific business needs.

Another significant advantage of using an SEO company in Glasgow for backlinks is the time and effort they can save you. Building backlinks can suck resources and is often a tedious process, requiring extensive research and outreach to other website owners. Outsourcing this task to an experienced SEO agency will allow you to focus on running your business.

Any good SEO company in Glasgow should provide you with a measurable return on investment, not just a monthly report using whatever statistical package that doesn’t really mean much to anyone. Any ROI should be tangible, such as calls or website form enquiries, and by building high-quality backlinks you are increasing your website's authority and relevance in the eyes of search engines, leading to higher traffic and more conversions. A good SEO agency will be able to track your progress and provide detailed reports on your link building success, allowing you to see a clear return on your investment – and the phone should be ringing with customers too.

Get in touch with XLWEB to find out about our how we go about getting you backlinks.

What is keyword research and why use an SEO Company?

Keyword research is an important aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Identifying the right keywords can make a huge difference in driving traffic to a website and improving its visibility on search engines. Not all businesses have the resources or expertise to conduct effective keyword research, hence using a company like us at XLWEB is a good idea.

Hiring a digital agency or SEO company provides businesses with access to skilled and experienced professionals who have knowledge and knowhow in conducting keyword research to determine what words people are searching online. By using advanced tools and techniques to identify relevant and high-traffic keywords, a good SEO will help your business increase its online visibility.

Using an SEO company for keyword research is that it saves time and effort. Keyword research can be a boring process that requires skills not suited to everyone – being lost in a spreadsheet all day isn’t that fun but a good SEO loves it! Outsourcing this task to a digital agency like XLWEB allows you to focus on your core activities while leaving the research to experts.

A Glasgow SEO company should mine more accurate and effective results than doing it in-house. As time-served professionals, they have a deep understanding of the latest trends and changes in search algorithms meaning they can identify keywords that are more likely to be successful and drive clicks. The correct keywords help you optimise your website content and structure and increase the chances of ranking higher on relevant search engine results pages. Getting keyword research incorrect is a costly exercise.

The best SEO companies provide ongoing support, monitoring and adjustments to keyword research campaigns as time passes by. They track the results of existing keywords while also identifying new opportunities and optimising campaigns for specific goals.

Find out how we go about our keyword research and why hiring us for your SEO campaign is a good choice.

What Is Local SEO?

Local Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and search marketing (SEM) are aimed at helping websites increase their visibility in the local area and reach customers who are looking for local products or services, those that are actively searching for products or services in their local area. It’s always a good idea to rank in your own back yard before trying to dominate the world – especially if your business is a small, local trader.

Local SEO typically involves optimizing various elements of a website as well as optimising local business listings on search engines, online directories and map platforms.

Local SEO and SEM include:

1. Identifying relevant local keywords (using deep-dive keyword research) that are commonly used by regional customers when searching for products or service. This may include location-specific keywords such as city names, neighbourhoods or landmarks. Often it’s like a normal search + location.


2. Optimising website content for local searches includes adding high-quality, localised content that includes the identified keywords as well as providing valuable information about the business, products and services offered by your firm or organisation.


3. Google My Business (GMB) or just “Google Business” as it’s known now, is Google’s local platform for listings in the maps and search results. Optimising your Google Business profile is an essential part of local SEO as it can quickly get you noticed. Creating and optimising a GMB listing including providing accurate and up-to-date information about the business name, address, phone number (NAP), hours of operation, website URL and uploading images.


4. Reviews and ratings are a good way of promoting your business locally. It’s a good idea to encourage customers to leave reviews on platforms such as Google, Yelp, Bing etc or other relevant review websites.


5. NAP consistency: Ensuring that the company or organisation name, address and phone number (NAP) are consistent across all online platforms, including the website, Google Business listing and online directories brings trust to potential customers and search engines.
6. Local citation and link building: Creating and optimizing business listings on relevant online directories such as Yell, Scoot and Yelp (see here for a decent list of UK directories) improves local search visibility and increase backlinks to the website.


7. Building high-quality local backlinks using a sustained link building campaign from reputable local websites (small businesses), local and regional news websites, mummy blogs, community websites and social media profiles help improve local search rankings.

Local SEO is super important for bricks and mortar businesses that have a physical presence and rely on local customers including SEO companies (!), restaurants, healthcare providers, and service-based businesses. Businesses that operate in other locales, or have potential customers living there, but have no physical shop or office there also benefit from local SEO.

What is it and do I need it?

Technical SEO is sometimes called on-page SEO, although we think that can be a bit misleading, as on-page SEO can often just mean optimising a page or post to rank. We believe technical SEO is the processing of ensuring that the website, it’s technology, all of its pages, the server and all other possible factors that can influence a website’s performance in search engines is technical SEO.

There’s not many experienced or top-level technical SEOs around, however at XLWEB we are technical SEO experts and have been consulting on technical SEO to all kinds of companies and organisations for two decades.

In general, it involves implementing various technical inspections and protocols to make a website more search engine friendly, resulting in improved crawling, indexing and ranking.

The main parts of technical SEO are:

Website speed and performance: Ensuring that websites load quickly and efficiently on desktop and mobile devices. Slow loading websites aren’t good for user experience (especially on mobile data) so search engines demerit this in their ranking factors.

Mobile-friendliness: Ensuring that a website is mobile-friendly and responsive as more users access the internet through mobile devices - search engines usually prioritise mobile-friendly websites in their rankings.

Website structure and architecture: Optimising the structure and organisation of your website content including URLs, headings, and navigation menus makes it easy for search engines to crawl and understand the content, meaning and classification of your website.

XML sitemaps and robots.txt: All websites should have XML sitemaps and these should be submitted to the search engines and be crawlable. It helps them understand the website's structure and content and when to find new pages, posts or products on your website or any other changes or updates. The robots.txt file is usually the first thing search engine spiders visit on your site which tells them which pages or sections of the website they should or should not crawl.

Canonicalisation and duplicate content: Often websites can hold themselves back if they don’t have correct Canonicalisation – this is when you have multiple versions of the same page or site (for example www and non-www versions displayed, or the same page on different URLs) and it gets flagged as duplicate content in Google or Bing.

URL structure and optimization: Creating and optimising friendly URLs that are descriptive, short, meaningful to users and, hopefully, keyword-rich.

SSL and website security: Implementing SSL is very important for high rankings these days. It indicates your website encrypts data transmitted between the website and users, ensuring the security and privacy of user data. This allows search engines to trust websites that have SSL more than those that don’t. You can tell it’s secure if it has HTTPS (note the S) instead of HTTP at the start of the URL.

Schema markup: Implementing schema markup - also known as structured data - to help search engines understand the content and context of a webpage and potentially display rich snippets in search results – these are the large chunks of information text you see sometimes near the top of the results. They are great for visibility and traffic.

Crawling and indexing: On launch and over time, the housekeeping of a website can get a bit lax. Broken links and empty pages and various other issues can take up resources and cause confusion to search engines. Analysing how search engine bots (or spiders) crawl and index (record information) a website, as well as ensuring good housekeeping of your site, means that these bots or spiders don’t get blocked from properly visiting and recording all the information on your site and its resources.

Site architecture and internal linking: Optimizing the internal linking structure of a website to facilitate search engine crawling and indexing, and to help users navigate between different pages and sections of the website.

There are literally thousands of technical SEO tools and software programs out there that are helpful to SEOs and website owners alike. However, nothing beats an experienced technical SEO (who normally is a qualified website designer too) when it comes to ensuring the technical aspects of your SEO are as healthy as they can be.

We understand the importance of content marketing in driving traffic, generating lead, and ultimately increasing revenue. If you’re looking for great content, then XLWEB can help. Creating high-quality content consistently isn’t easy, especially if you don't have an inhouse team or time. This is where XLWEB can help out.

What is Content and Content Marketing?

Content refers to the information, data or any other media that’s created and shared through the internet on websites and social media (and email). It includes articles, images, videos and audio recordings usually. And, it can be in various formats including blog posts, social media posts, infographics, PDFs, word docs etc. In the context of SEO and digital marketing, content often refers to the creation and distribution of specific content to attract an audience – usually to obtain backlinks and/or attract business.

Content is an important element of modern marketing strategies and is used to build brand awareness and promo, drive traffic, generate leads and nurture customer relationships (as well as backlinks!).

The Role of Quality Writing

Good quality writing is at the heart of all good content and therefore content marketing. Content should be informative, engaging and relevant to the target market. It should also be optimised for search engines so that it ranks high in search results. This is where our writing service can be beneficial.

We have professional writers who are experienced in creating different types of content for different purposes. Our writers speak to you to get your requirements, research topics and make content that speaks to you and your customers. We will ensure that your content is optimised for search engines.

The Main Purposes of Content

We know that there are many reasons for content strategies and lots of different requirements. We offer different types of content writing services including:

SEO Content Writing

SEO content writing creates content that is optimised for search engines. This type of content includes keywords and phrases that are relevant to your firm. By writing SEO content, it improves your website's search engine ranking/visibility, generating more visitors and, hopefully, customers to your business.. We can research the keywords as well as taking direction on the types of phrases you wish to rank for.

Blog and Article Writing

Blogs and articles are a great form of content marketing. They can be shorter or longer pieces of content and the length of text (or word count) means they can be general information or provide in-depth focus on a particular topic. Blog writing can help you establish your business as an authority in your industry and drive traffic to your website. It is amazing for SEO, and combined with backlinking building is one the main ways to increase your SEO rankings and visibility.

Website Content

This content is different from blogs or articles as these tend to be the main pages of your site and offer information on your products, services and business. Your website is your online shop front or brochure. It's a good idea to have website content is informative, engaging (answering questions of potential customers) and optimised for search engines. Website content normally includes your homepage, product/service pages, about us page and a contact page.

Social Media Content

In general, social media content is typically created and shared with the aim of attracting and engaging target audiences, building brand awareness and driving traffic to the website, promoting products and services.

We find that this is the tough part of any marketing strategy for our clients – they often find it difficult to generate content for social media and regularly and consistently post. Very often, clients run out of ideas on what to post. Or, they start off eager and then run out of steam when posting to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and other platforms.

Types of Content

Website, social media and email campaign content can take various forms, such as:

Text posts (words): These are blogs, articles, stories, messages, resources or updates that are primarily composed of text or copy. They can be short or long-form and may include status updates, announcements, news, questions or just thoughts and wittering.

Images: All pictures and graphics that can be shared on your website or social media. They can be photos, infographics, memes, gifs etc.

Videos: Ideal to embed on our website, add to YouTube and share on social media. They can be short or long-form and may include promotional videos, tutorials, testimonials, vlogs (video logs) or other types of video content.

Audio: They can be podcasts, music, voice or other types of audio content such as audiobooks and are perfect for websites and to be shared on social media platforms.

Links: These are web links or hyperlink URLs that are shared on social media platforms. They can lead to articles, blog posts, websites, landing pages or other online resources.

Interactive content: These are content types that allow users to actively engage with the content. Examples include polls, surveys, quizzes, contests and interactive stories.

You’ll Be Content With XLWEB

We have some ideas and tips to help get the right content and content strategy:

At XLWEB, we’ll help you determine your content needs. What type of content do you need? How often do you need it? What is your budget? Answering these questions will help you plan your strategy. What types of content do you need? Lots of long-form writing or short social media-style paragraphs for posts. Is it photography or video too?

Repurposing content you already have is a great idea people rarely think of. Do you have content existing somewhere? Can you repurpose this? Maybe old handbooks, sales brochures or white papers?

Once you have determined your content needs and any resources you might already have, it’s a good idea to split up where you can get this content or create it. Perhaps in-house staff can write some, maybe you have interns or subcontractors who can contribute.

Horses For Content Courses

Are you looking for a content provider that has experience in your industry and can provide references or case studies? A journalist perhaps? Are you happy to bring in someone new and inexperienced or outsource to a freelancer website such as Fiverr? It’s a good call to read reviews and testimonials from other customers to get an idea of their service quality.

Before you hire anyone (including us), ask to evaluate their writing. Simply ask for writing samples or a portfolio. Read through their content to see if it is engaging, informative, and error-free. A quality writing service should be professional writers who are experienced in creating different types of content. They should have excellent writing skills and be able to write in different tones and styles, depending on the audience.

Your content should be optimised for search engines so that it ranks high in search results. A quality writing service should understand SEO best practices and be able to optimise your content accordingly. At XLWEB, we’re specialised SEOs, ask us to help, even if we don’t write your content, we can still optimise it.

Any good content writing service should be able to deliver your content on time, without compromising on quality. They should also be able to meet your deadlines and provide updates throughout the writing process if need be.

Contact Us

Contact us today for an informal chat on content and strategies for content. We offer free advice, and can also help you create a successful content marketing campaign that drives traffic, generate leads and increase in business.

Is SEO affected by Social Media?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and social media are two different online marketing tools but they are connected when it comes to online visibility – especially relating to SEO to drive traffic to websites (and apps, if that’s what you need promoted) that can increase your rankings.

SEO and social media complement and affect each other in a few ways.

Content Sharing

Sharing your content on social media about your business and industry includes things like blog posts, articles, videos, infographics and updates - by creating and sharing such content on your social channels you can attract engagement or attention, shares and, importantly links (backlinks) which helps your website's SEO. When your content is shared on social media, it becomes more visible, and this can lead traffic to your website which has a direct impact your website's rankings.

Brand Awareness

The days of build it, and they will come are finished. Promoting your business is a must, and social media is an effective way to build brand awareness and bost your online presence. Consistency is key to successful social media, and by sharing your content on social media, you can create brand recognition, loyalty, influence and trust among your potential customers. When people know your brand and engage with your social media, they are more likely to search for you and your brand on search engines, which, like above, drive traffic which positively affects your SEO.

Link Building

Links from other good websites are simply the meat or fish in your SEO recipe in SEO. They bring about the biggest change in rankings. Your social media tools are a great link building tool - by sharing your website's content and engaging with “influencers”, bloggers, potential customer, current customers and the rest of the world. This relationship building WILL lead to earning rank-changing high-quality backlinks to your site.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first and most important beginnings of any SEO plan or strategy. If this is wrong, the rest of the campaign is out, because all of your backlinks and content will be targeting the wrong search terms. The same goes for your social media campaigns. Understanding the keywords and phrases that are pertinent to your business and industry means you can optimise your social media profiles, posts, hashtags and advertising to match the keywords or phrases you want to get from your website SEO. It simply helps you target the same audience and searches, and brings the correct relevance to your online campaign.

Social Signal

Social signals refer to the information that social media engagement such as likes, shares, comments, followers etc give out to search engines as they crawl the web. While there is plenty of debate on whether social signals have a direct ranking factor in SEO, they do impact your website's SEO performance, if only indirectly via traffic boosts, brand searches and people linking to good content.

At XLWEB, we understand how all your online activities intertwine to help your marketing. The fact that SEO and social media are now so interconnected and complementary means that both should be conducted as professionally as possible as they do offer a win-win situation. SEO and social media in your digital marketing strategy improves your online visibility, drives visitors to your website, and simply increases your chances of engagement with a potential client. Contact us and ask us how we can help you get more customers online.

How To Clean Poor SEO & Fix Bad Backlinks

We're often hired to look at why an in-house SEO team’s efforts aren’t working, or to help out when previous SEO companies have hit a road block.

Among many reasons this could be, it is often that the website has a lot of low quality or poor backlinks. The way google has changed in recent years, it’s often a case that a few bad backlinks can hold back an entire website, despite how good the rest of the SEO is.

If you're looking to remove backlinks as part of your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, here are the steps to follow:

Identify The Poor Backlinks You Want to Remove

Conduct a thorough backlink audit using SEO tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs to identify the backlinks that you want to remove. Look for low-quality or spammy backlinks that may be hurting your website's SEO. Using Search Console data is the most sensible, as it's the links that Google knows about or takes into account.

Informally Contact Website Owners or Webmasters

Once you've identified the backlinks you want to remove, it’s a good idea to try and contact the website owner or webmaster and simply ask them to remove it. Being nice helps, most people will respond and remove it. We know that this is a time-consuming process, but it’s worth it.

Send a Formal Removal Request

If you're unable to contact the website owner or webmaster with ease and informally, you can send a formal removal request via email or contact form on their website. We find it helpful to be specific in details about the backlink you want removed, so include the URL (s) where it's located, and the anchor text used.

Disavow The Backlinks

If you're unable to get the backlinks removed, this is where Google's Disavow Tool is priceless. Created by Google in 2012, it’s used to let Google know that you don't want those backlinks considered when evaluating your website's SEO. In effect, disavowing links is just asking Google to disregard any suspicious or poor-quality links pointing to your site. Not a tool to be treated lightly, but it's simple enough to create once you know what links or domains (we recommend disavowing at domain level where possible) and you’re sure you want those removed. Try and not remove any decent links by mistake!

Monitor Progress

Keep track of the backlinks you've requested to be removed/disavowed and check their status. Follow up with website owners or webmasters if needed and ensure that the backlinks are eventually removed or disavowed. Persistence is key, so try website owners again, if the backlink remains after contacting them initially.

Build Some Good Backlinks

As you work on removing low-quality backlinks it’s a good idea to continue to build good links. This will help to improve your overall backlink profile and help your site’s SEO.

Removing backlinks can be a time-consuming process, and it's important to approach it carefully and follow best practices. It's also a good idea to seek guidance from an experienced SEO company if you're unsure about the process or its impact on your website.

Bonus Tip: 410 Internal pages that have toxic links!

A “410” is a server status code which means the page is gone. If you have any really low quality backlinks that you think are harming your site and the link is to an internal page, then you can 410 that page, but take the advice of a real SEO consultant before you do. Naturally, you can’t 410 your home page otherwise your website will be down! So, this only applies to pages other than your home page.

410-ing a page tells the internet (and search engines) that the page that used to be there is gone. Once it’s crawled a couple of times, then search engines like Google will assume that it’s gone forever and disregard it.

Here’s the beauty of this as an SEO technique: Google will also DISREGARD any backlinks pointing to that page. Meaning, the negative effects of a link pointing to your site will be removed. You’re welcome.