Organizing Your Link Portfolio

It is very important that site owners conduct a full link audit once a year. A link audit will show you how many links you have coming into your site and what kind of links they are. You’ll get a good overview of how your SEO has been working by seeing which links went through from your link building strategy and which did not. Conducting a link audit will also help you identify any “bad” links pointing towards your site (those coming from pornography, gambling or any other site that the search engines don’t like to see.) Site owners who’ve signed up for a Google Webmaster Tools account (and if you haven’t you should!) can run a link audit through that. LinkDiagnosis is another free tool that does a good job of running link audits. Read more

Tips for Improving an Internal Linking Structure

Building a large supply of quality, one-way links is critical for a site’s long term success.  Search engines look at how many links a site has, and what kind of site is being linked from, to help determine a website’s position in the SERP. The goal is a good mix of quantity and quality. 10,000 links don’t mean anything to the search engines if they are all from splogs or porn sites. In fact, having that many “bad” links can actually end up hurting your site more than helping it. Building quality links from articles, online press releases, blog posts and more takes time, but it is an essential part of SEO. The link juice that comes from those sites gets passed along to your site, helping build trust with the search engines and boost your ranking position.

However, the internal linking of structure of your site is just as important, yet is oftentimes overlooked.

Internal linking helps flatten out your site structure. That means it takes less clicks to get from your homepage to deep, internal pages of content. A good rule of thumb is a max of three clicks between your homepage and any other page on your site. Internal linking greatly affects the user-experience. The easier it is for someone to navigate through your site, the more likely they are to stay and do business with you.

Internal linking also helps carry link juice through your site. Since a link only passes on part of its juice to every page it links to, the closer you keep them the more value the links have. Internal linking creates a horizontal structure so your internal pages get more of the link juice. Since search engines rank individual pages, not websites as a whole, it is important that these internal pages do as well as your homepage.

Here are a few ways to build your site’s internal linking structure:

Include a footer

Why make your visitor go all the back to the top of the page, or backtrack through you site to get to a different page. A footer is a great way to help visitors navigate through your site. You can include the important links from your top level navigation bar, as well as other important links like the Privacy Policy page that have to be included, but you don’t want cluttering your high level navigation. It’s also a great place to link to any social networking profiles and a company blog.

Use anchor text to link internal pages

A great way to link your internal pages is to hyperlink keywords on Page A that are related to Page D. By turning naturally occurring keywords into anchor text, you draw the readers’ attention to that word. This can help move traffic within your website and draw visitors to different pages. Obviously some pages are going to bring in more traffic than others, so anchor text can help spread the wealth.

Linking from/to your blog

A blog is a great place to build a strong internal linking structure. Connecting related posts together provides the reader with more information and helps keep them engaged longer. You can also link from your blog posts to various pages of your website to help drive targeted traffic. Blog posts can rank on their own in the search engines and provide valuable one-way links to you site, especially if the blog is hosted as its own site (exampleblog.com and not examplecomany.com/companyblog).

The most important thing to remember with internal linking is to not go overboard with it. Too much anchor text can distract the reader and clutters the page. You want to link the pages that are related to each other. Linking to irrelevant pages/posts can make a reader feel like they’ve been tricked once they’ve arrived. The anchor text is a promise of more information, make sure you deliver on that promise.

About the Author

Nick Stamouls is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing (http://www.brickmarketing.com), an Internet marketing and SEO services company. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis share his knowledge by posting daily SEO tips to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal, or SEO Journal.

Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-350-4365 or nick@brickmarketing.com

Link Building Blunder – Online Directory Abuse!

Link building and website rankings can be achieved in many different ways. Call ten different search engine marketing firms and you will likely get ten different answers on how rankings can be acquired. Like any other industry bad apples weasel their way in like wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing and ruin it for all of us looking build on solid footing.

It is no surprise that submitting your website and company into directories is a great way to kick start your SEO and relevant one way link building efforts. When are too many directories too much? When is it not enough? It is important to sometimes take a step back and make sure you are taking a quality approach as well. Whatever happened to putting out honest quality work? Is buying a service from a hole in the wall company offering five thousand directory submissions a good thing? I don’t’ think it is. There are lots of directories out there. Some good and many bad. Sometimes you don’t need to be in every directory possible. I would rather submit a website into the Yahoo directory and Best of Web than find a few hundred offshore directories that could hurt me in the long run. Manipulating the search engines to thinking you are performing hard earned rankings only ruins this industry for all the white hat SEO people. I’m not going to sit here and complain but these types of practices will only lead to the fall of the entire industry. The search engines are constantly tweaking and changing to keep these wild banshees from ruing these amazing tools for us. Shoving your company information into a few thousand directories and getting rankings certainly doesn’t deserve a pat on the back. It’s an easy way out by exploiting the search engines loop holes.

If everyone took this path quality online marketing techniques would go out the window. Yes taking time and executing a well thought out link building plan takes a great deal effort. Nobody wants to wait 12 months before they see their website climbing for their competitive keywords but once it is done you have a great foundation to build from. What are you going to do if Google someday implements a quote for how many directories you can be listed in before you are penalized? Allowing you only a certain number of submission therefore only choosing the most relevant and industry related directories. If you are trying to come off like you have a solid company but you have chose less than stellar means to get those high rankings than what kind of work do you plan on doing for your clients? What do you do if you pass this type of effort onto your client and all of a sudden their website is gone or on page 325?

Let’s talk about what this does for credibility for the ones looking to take a more quality path. What happens when your client sees that a competitor that has a website 1/3 their age all of sudden surpass them on the ladder to the top because that website has taken a loophole of an approach? All of a sudden your client calls you kicking and screaming telling you how to do your job. Directory submissions are good, don’t get me wrong but when used appropriately and targeted they are even better. If you choose a hundred or so of the top directories and then find some really targeted niche directories for your industry or business you could virtually receive the same amount of link love. A quality approach will build you a better foundation for your business long term. Sooner or later the search engines will tweak the algorithm so that the easy path will not be so easy anymore and you will find your way at the bottom of the ladder. It really isn’t a matter of if but more so when.

This article is written by Nick Stamoulis, who is the President of Boston Internet Marketing Company, Brick Marketing and Blogger of the Search Engine Optimization Journal.