Top Five Internal Linking Tactics To Get Top Google Rankings

admin    Google     Five, Google, Internal, Linking, Rankings, Tactics

If you’re a website owner and are not following these five tactics for correctly linking your website together then you’re losing Google traffic as you read this. Internal linking is the links on your website that point to other pages within your same website. External linking is when you link to another website.

There are things you can do when developing or re-working your internal linking structure. If you carry out the following tactics, you’re going to achieve two things. First, you’ll make your website better from a user’s perspective. Second, you’ll rank better in Google. And it’s no coincidence that Google rewards you for doing things that make the website user’s experience easier and better. In fact, the most important thing I can recommend is that you create, design and link your website together is a way that benefits the visitor first. Your visitors are most important, not Google rankings.

And remember, links to your site (whether from other sites or from pages within your own site) help your rankings.

1) Add links in your navigation or footer as text links to all your important pages and main sections.

This is a very easy and an extremely effective tactic that not all sites do, and even less do for maximum results. This is the first thing I look for when reviewing a website for a client. Unfortunately, sometimes artsy Web designers add cool buttons, which are images, to all the main sections of the site, but neglect to include text links as well. Or a programmer decides to make the website’s navigation a dynamic drop down menu in DHTML or JavaScript but forget to include text links to the same pages represented in the menus. Search engines cannot follow image links or links created in JavaScript, they can only follow simple text links, so be sure you add them to your site as well.

So if you want search engines to visit and index (or record) ALL your website’s pages, be sure there are text links pointing to all the main sections of your site and to all your important pages.

2) Use of the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag.

This is fairly simple. Google created this tag which tells them NOT to count the link in their search engine ranking algorithm when used on a link. There’s debate that maybe Google does count them a little, or will some day in the future. But for now, this tag does greatly decrease a link’s value in Google’s eyes. Therefore, consider using this tag on some of your links within your site. For example, let’s say you have a homepage and then create two inner pages, and that’s the extent of the site. Let’s further say that you add a link to both pages on your homepage.

If your homepage has some external links pointing to it, then it has some value in regards to Google’s ranking system. When you link to each of your two new pages within your site from your homepage, each page gets only 50% of the value the homepage has. (This is all measured in Page Rank). Let’s then say that your first inner page is the one you want to rank well in the Google, but you don’t care if your second inner page even gets found by Google or ranked. You could add the nofollow tag to the second link on your homepage, thereby giving the first inner page 100% of the homepage’s value.

Think of the implications. Imagine if you had a website with hundreds or thousands of pages and used the nofollow tag throughout. To understand how to implement this tag is, do a search in Google such as “how to add a nofollow tag to link”.

Finally, if you have pages such as a privacy page, terms page, checkout pages or contact pages that you don’t care if they rank well in Google, be sure to use the nofollow tag when creating internal links to these pages.

3) Use descriptive & different phrases to point to the same inner page

The words that are in the text of a link (also known as the anchor text) affect your search engine rankings. For example, the anchor text in the two links above is “Your Website”. If enough of these links that were on quality and valuable sites, including your own website’s inner pages, pointed to the same page, it would eventually rank well in Google when someone searches for the phrase “your website”.

Therefore, be sure to make the anchor text in all your internal links the phrases you want the pages to be found for in Google.

Going back to the number 1 tactic above, you would be far better off making the anchor text in all your footer links as descriptive as possible. If you want to rank well in Google for “affordable Red widgets” then make the anchor text “affordable Red widgets”.

Finally, vary your anchor text when pointing to the same page within your website. For instance, on some of your pages you could link to your Red Widgets page with the anchor text of “Red widgets”, then on other pages link to it using “affordable Red widgets” and then maybe use “widgets that are Red”. This allows you to get the page ranked for multiple terms and helps the user since you’re being descriptive and making your anchor text better match the content of the page it’s on.

4) Make links in your content

If you have text on your site, make some of the words within the text links that point to other pages within your website. For instance, if you have an article about Red widgets, or a page that describes how great your Red widgets are, make the first or second occurrence of the phrase “Red widgets” in the text a link that points to your Red Widgets page.

5) Create breadcrumbs at the top of every page

This looks something like this: Home – Products – Red Widgets

Each of words between the hyphens (which are also often greater-than signs) above should be links to their corresponding pages within the site. This helps your website visitors know where they are in relation to the rest of the site. It helps orientate site visitors. Anything you can do that helps your visitors’ experience is something you ought to consider doing. This also helps search engines spider your website more easily as well. Finally, making breadcrumbs creates more internal links to your pages, thus helping your rankings as well.

By following these top five internal linking tactics, you’ll be far ahead of the competition, you’ll rank better in Google and other search engines and you’ll be making your website visitors’ lives easier.

Internal Marketing In The New Marketingplace

admin    Facebook     Internal, Marketing, Marketingplace

Understanding products better helps companies to identify target groups. Internal marketing is more than just stating the obvious agenda or the premise of your company. Internal marketing is a practical tool for employees and management to make clear and creative decisions to understand a brand message.

Creating a brand identity around a companies mission will help your product or service stand out in the marketplace. For this to be truly successful the mission needs to be embedded throughout all aspects of your marketing strategy. Your employees also need to live and breath the essence of the company and be able to deliver the right marketing pitch, because clients know when a salesperson does not believe in there product. That sale will go right out the window.

For a brand to be successful the theme needs to have tangible and practical qualities that employees and clients/consumers can relate back to. One way this happens is by expressing tangible and practical aspect through your brand by creating social media campaigns through networking platforms, which emphasis interaction between products/services and clients/customers. A catchy slogan is not enough to truly succeed, a company needs to create a clear PR message that will help create a transparent foundation that everybody in the company can feel good about.

Only after all the employees understand the internal marketing message can the company move on. After building a transparent internal marketing message is when you will see results that companies need to build on brand name and image.

If you need help implementing any of the techniques discussed in this article, please contact us.  We’re also here to help.

How to Easily Check Page Rank for Internal Pages

admin    Google     Check, Easily, Internal, Page, Pages, Rank

Many web site owners do not know that they are sitting on a gold mine. They may own several monster websites, but they only know the page rank for the domain and not the internal pages. But why is the page rank so important and valuable?

The Importance of Page Rank

Page rank is Google’s indicator for the importance of a website (from a scale of one to ten). For example, Yahoo.com has a page rank of 9, and Alexa.com has a page rank of 8. And as we all know, the more important Google “thinks” a website is, the more likely it is to give it higher rankings. So every web site owner who wants to rank well in the search engines are watching the page rank of their own sites.

If the website manages to acquire a high page rank, the website immediately becomes a piece of hot virtual real estate. Other online business owners are willing to pay top dollars for web properties with high page rank, simply because of the organic traffic that comes from the search engines. On top of that, if a website can prove that it can bring in the revenue, others will be fighting over the website should it go up for sale.

There are many ways that a website can monetize the traffic that comes from the search engines. For instance, many web site owners are willing to pay a monthly fee in return for a text link on these websites. They are willing to pay money because they expect the websites to bring them traffic, and they believe that by having their links there, their websites will also look better in the “eyes” of the search engines and rank better.

So you see how important page rank is? The truth is, many web site owners do not scrutinize their own web properties closely enough to realize that they actually own immensely valuable web properties.

Huge web sites with many internal pages that have been indexed by the search engines for at least six months may have acquired page rank. And any web page with page rank is worth money. For example, a link on a web page with page rank three could bring in an extra thirty to fifty dollars month. Imagine what the website is worth if it has a thousand internal web pages with page rank three and above. That is an additional five figure monthly income. So how can a webmaster check the internal page rank of all the internal pages?

Checking internal page rank.

Fortunately, there are page rank tools available of many search engine optimization websites. These tools allow you to enter just the top domain, and the rest of the internal pages will be retrieved. But bear in mind that an operation like this is often resource intensive. So expect your queries to be limited to one or two per day.

But the important thing here is to find out which are the internal pages with page rank. Once you do, save a copy of the information for future reference. You may need it again if you want to sell links on these pages, or if you want to sell the entire website away.

Advanced SEO Techniques: Website Design, Internal Page Rank and Nofollow.

admin    Google     Advanced, Design, Internal, Nofollow., Page, Rank, Techniques, Website

Among the many advanced SEO techniques that most people fail to put into practice on their websites is an internal linking strategy that can be used to improve the way search engine spiders crawl your website, and also to optimize the Google Page Rank (correctly PageRank) for each page. Not only is it important to make sure that spiders are not leaving your home page too quickly, but also that you are not wasting Page Rank on pages such as your Contact or Privacy Policy pages.

Collar the Spiders

You can collar and attach a lead to search engine spiders and make sure that they don’t stray away from your web pages too soon, particularly your home page that is liable to receive the highest search engine listings.

Spiders work from top left to bottom right, and if you have tables on your site, they start with the top left table, and scan its contents first, then go the next table and so on. If your website is designed using tables rather than CSS, and you have a left hand navigation table and then a table containing the bulk of your content, the spider will read your top navigation link first, and leave your home page. It will not return until it hits the home page link.

It will therefore miss most of your content. The answer is either to place your navigation table to the left of your content, so it is visited after your content, or to use an empty table top left, then a content table, then a left aligned navigation table. That way the spider will visit the empty table, then your content and then your navigation table, which is still showing to the left of your content, but comes after it in your HTML.

You then receive the full benefit of your great keyword and semantically optimized content, rather than waste it by the spiders looking elsewhere for your main content. When relevance to a search term is calculated, (keyword), spiders give most weight to what is contained within your H heading tags, the first 100 or so characters in the body of the text, and your final paragraph. Your Title Tag is also very important, and you could put your company name and the main keywords there. That helps your branding and the calculation of your listing from the keyword.

Internal Linking Strategy

Now that you know where your links to appear to spiders, where should they point to? If your site is silo structured, then your home page should link to each of the main silos. Do not link to every page in your website, but to Level 2 pages that provide further links to your level 3 pages. That is because but Google’s Page Rank is calculated on internal links as well as external links. Only link your Home Page to every other page if you want the maximum possible share of your site PR for your Home Page.

Your total site Page Rank is equal to 1 vote for every page on your site. So if you have 20 pages, you have a 20 PR votes to distribute. That does not mean that you have a Google PageRank of 20 – far from it. Nobody but Google know how many links or PageRank points/votes are needed for each Page Rank vote. It could be 10 for a PR of 1, 100 for 2, 1000 for 3 and so on, or something completely different.

The internal Page Rank for each page in your site can be calculated since it is a function of both the page rank of pages it is linked to and the number of other links leaving that page. You can use this to maximize the PR votes for any page on your site, or spread them around pages you want listed highest. This calculation involves both internal links and external links.

In fact, you can make an appreciable difference to your SEO and Page Rank if you use a sensible internal linking strategy. With a 10 page website, if every page is linked to every other page, then your internal PR votes are one for every page. However, if you link Page A to page B and then Page B to every other page, and all pages back to Page A, you can give Page A 3.42 PR votes, page B 3.06 and the rest 0.44, thus optimizing the PR of your first two pages (note how these figures add up to 10: 1 for each page).

If you want to give your Home Page maximum votes, link it to every page in your site, and every page back only to the Home Page. For the same 10 page site, Page A then gets 4.67 Pr votes, and the rest 0.59.

However, for a silo site, it is best to have the main silo pages with a reasonable share of the votes, so link the Home Page to the main silos, and then each main silo to the sub-pages in their silo. Everything links back to A. This gives your Home Page 3.60 and your silo pages 1.17, the rest 0.40. There are several options in between these, but the point is that you can use linking strategy to maximise the PR for any page on your site.

No Follow: Beat the Spiders

The nofollow attribute was devise by Matt Cutts of Google. Its intention is to enable you to link to a page without giving that page a share of your PR. This can be used when you are linking to pages that have no outbound links, and for which a PR would not be meaningful. Google claim that it uses the term literally and does not follow the link at all, but test results have been conflicting, and it appears to follow it, but not index it.

Different search engines interpret ‘nofollow’ differently: Yahoo do not include pages linked by use of the attribute in their rankings but does follow it, MSN does not count links with ‘nofollow’ in their ranking and Ask ignores the attribute and follows everything!

It therefore appears that you can use the attribute to prevent spiders from leaving your site by following every link. From my own experience, I seem to get few spider visits to pages attainable by means of a ‘nofollow’ link, and so can use this to prevent spiders going where I want them to go.

The easiest way to do this, though , is by means of the Robots Exclusion code in the HTML for each page. You should use that on pages such as your Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and About page, and also on pages with a good amount of duplication such as pages where products are sorted by name, price, application and so on with a different page for each sorting method. The same for the same page written in different languages and duplicates where only the keyword is changed. All of these can get you in trouble and you should use the Robots.txt exclusion or a specific exclusion for each page involved.

Summary

Advanced SEO techniques can be used to lead search engine spiders where you want them, and prevent them from being sidetracked by poorly positioned links to other pages on your site. You can use your internal linking strategy to optimize the Page Rang votes for each page in website, and can also prevent some pages receiving a share of your sites page rank.

It is important that Google should be able to spider or list all of your pages, since that can not only dilute your overall PageRank but affect your listing position, but if you have too may low value pages being navigated and indexed by search engines, they may put you on a reduced crawling status. Try not to have lower value pages put on a crawling par with your higher value pages that you want listed higher in the SERPS.