Using Internal Links to Boost Rankings
Internal linking is an important, but often overlooked step in the search engine optimization process. While having only internal links pointing to a page is not going to earn you a top position ranking for any ultra-competitive keyword, it could be enough to drive you to number one for long-tail keywords and less competitive terms. So let's take a look at the different methods you can use to point internal links to your web pages and boost your rankings.
Navigational (Menus)
Navigational links are included in the menus found at the top of your site, on the left or right hand side, and the footer of each page. These links appear on hundreds or thousands of pages of your site giving you a lot of keyword rich anchor text for a specific page, but you also have to think about the user. Don't stuff links in the menu that they are not going to find relevant.
One of the problems with navigational links are that you are limited in how many you can use. Obviously, you don't want every single page on your site to link to every other one. Unless you have a really small site you would run out of room quickly. Most of your navigational links should point to your category or tier two pages using the keyword anchor text you are really wanting to target for that page.
If you are using relational menus you can change the anchor text used in your navigation on the different menus used for each category. This will give you a boost for any slight variations of the keyword, but you have to be careful when using this technique. You don't want to make a drastic change and confuse the user.
Context (Within the Content)
Contextual links are included in the body of the content that you write. You can use these links to direct the reader to more information about a subject or to anything else that's relevant. I have found a single contextual link is given more weight than an individual menu link.
It's important to make the contextual links appear naturally in your content. You don't want to keyword stuff your content just to give yourself a chance to link to a page using a certain anchor text.
If used the right way contextual links can provide a big boost to your site. Think of Wikipedia. They do a massive amount of internal linking across their site and as a result they rank very highly for a wide variety of keyword terms. They do not stuff these keywords into the text, the author writes naturally and links to relevant pages wherever it fits.
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What is Anchor Text
If you have been optimizing your site for the search engines, you probably already know what anchor text is, but for the complete beginner who sees this term all over SEO articles it can be kind of confusing. Basically anchor text is the clickable text of a link. For example, if I link to my article covering on-page optimization the HTML code looks like this:
<a href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/on-page-website-optimization/">on-page optimization</a>
and the anchor text is "on-page optimization."
Importance
Why is anchor text so important? Because the words used in the anchor text go a very long way towards getting the page being linked to ranked for the keywords used as the anchor text. The example link above will give a slight boost to my page in the rankings for "on-page optimization".
For competitive terms, a single link is not going to give you a big boost. Competitive terms can have hundreds, if not thousands, of links pointing to the top pages for the given keyword.
Internal & External
It's not only important to link to your own pages using the anchor text you want to rank for, but you also need links from other sites. In fact, links from external sites are going to be given more weight, because it is easy for you to create pages and send links to your own page using whatever anchor text you want. In theory, links from other people's sites are tougher to earn and thus deemed more trustworthy.
Use Variations
It is important to mix up the anchor text that you use to point to your pages. If 100% of your external links are pointing to a page with the same anchor text, it looks spammy. I'm not entirely sure if there are filters set up to catch this type of search engine gaming or not. It seems likely to me that there are, but either way it's not a good idea. You want to rank for every possible combination of the anchor text, plus any modifiers that could be used to describe the page so mixing up the anchor text to your page makes a lot of sense.
For example if you have a page that sells "men's hats" you might also want to rank for "hats for men." By driving anchor text to the page with a variety of terms, you can rank for different variations.
What the experts do is drive enough anchor text to rank on the first page for several related keywords, then take a long hard look at their analytics. They check to see what keywords are driving the most traffic and what converts the best. Those are the keywords that take top priority. The answers are not always as obvious as they seem and can lead to a more efficient use of resources going forward.
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Relational Menus
If you are using the same menu on every single page of your site (a global navigational menu) then you are pushing a lot of link juice to the pages you are linking to. However, what if you could instead redirect some of that PageRank to your tier three pages in a user-friendly way? Not only would you see a boost in the rankings of these pages, but it is also a very user friendly way to show related content the visitor might be interested in.
What I do is use relational menus. I call it "relational" because depending on the category of the piece of content the user is currently on, the menu will change.
For example, on this site I use a right-hand menu structure. On the homepage and all of my category pages I list the different categories. However, if a visitor clicks down to read a pice of "Search Engine Marketing" content the right-hand menu changes to show links to my most popular and important posts pertaining to SEO. What this does is increase the PageRank that is pushed to these pages, enabling them to rank higher in the search engine results.
Other webmasters who use this trick also try to block the links to other category pages, thus preserving and pushing more PageRank to the tier three pages. However, I leave the links to my other category pages as well. For me, these pages serve as landing pages for highly competitive keywords so I still want to push as much link juice as I can to them.
If you try to block link juice from passing through your links you have to use javascript or other technical tricks of the trade. It's easy to screw up. If you do mess something up, you will be doing yourself more harm than good.
In WordPress I use this simple trick to display relational menus. On the template that shows your posts find the call to include your menu. It will look something like this:
<?php
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");
?>
You want to replace that code with something like:
<?php
if ( in_category('keyword-strategy') ) { include(TEMPLATEPATH."/keywordsidebar.php");}
else if ( in_category('search-engine-marketing') ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/seosidebar.php");
} else if ( in_category('social-media-marketing') ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/socialsidebar.php");
}
else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");
}
?>
In place of "keyword-strategy" you will want to include the slug of a category on your site. Obviously name the sidebar something specific for each category of menus you want to include. You can do this with as many categories as you have on your site, just keep adding "else if" statements to include them.
If the category related to your post is not in your list, the default is used. If you select more than one category, the one that shows up first in your if statement is displayed.
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Homepage Linking & Navigation
Once you have learned how to organize the content on your site you need know a little bit about how to internally link your pages together. Above all else, you want to make things easy on your users so set up your navigation to make it easy for them to get where they want to go.
With this article I am going to focus on linking for the search engine spiders. You will be designing your link structure to get more of your pages indexed and to focus more link juice on your main pages.
When you are trying to build up your important pages there are two things to consider: limit the number of outgoing links on that page and increase the number of pages linking in to that page. Here are four ways to do that.
1. Combine Your Overhead Pages
Every site has some standard fluff pages that they need to include but do not need to show up in the search engine rankings. These can include a privacy policy, terms of service, contact us, earnings disclaimer, etc. Instead of wasting valuable link juice pointing to an individual page for each, create a single page with all of this information and use named anchors to point users directly to the specific section they are looking for. In my PageRank sculpting article I describe in detail how this is done.
2. Control Your Outbound Links
The last thing I want you to do is create a site that is a "black hole." These are sites that link juice enters but can never, ever escape because the site will never link to anyone else. You should freely link to other sites that provide valuable information to your readers.
What I am suggesting is that you avoid linking to other sites from your homepage, category, tag, and archive pages (the pages you are driving a lot of link juice to). It's easy to take the links out of your summaries (the short versions of your post that display on these pages). This will keep your PageRank flowing to your own internal content while also allowing you to link out freely from inside of your articles.
3. Use a SiteMap Wisely
I use an archive page that links to all of my categories and sub-categories. If your category archives are large enough where you have several pages of archives, you want to link to each of these pages from your sitemap. This ensures that every piece of content on your site is only three clicks away from the hompage. By linking to the sitemap from my homepage it increases the chances that the spiders will crawl every single page of my site, leaving no piece of content so far from the homepage that it is forgotten by the spiders.
You should limit the number of links on this page to 100. The search engines don't crawl an infinite number of outgoing links on a page, they normally cut it off around 100 so if you have a large number of categories, create additional sitemap pages.
4. Limit Global Navigation Links
Most sites have some sort of global navigation menu. This menu is the same on every single page of the site. If you are going to have one of these, you want to limit the number of links in the menu as much as possible. This conserves pagerank on every page of the site and pushes more to the few pages you link to from the menu.
Another tactic you can use is to change the navigation as users dive deeper into the site. For example, on this site if someone clicks on the "Search Engine Marketing" category and then clicks through to a piece of content, the menu changes from what's on the homepage to my "SEO" menu listing the important pieces of SEO content I have written.
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Organizing Your Content
The number one goal of structuring your site should to allow your visitors to easily navigate from the home page to the exact information they want to find. Proper site structure is important because you want your users to be happy and satisfied. Happy, satisfied visitors convert. Frustrated visitors leave your site, never to return.
So, what is the best way to organize your content? You want to create a funnel that takes them from a general area and narrows it down to a highly targeted, specific page on your site. Each click a visitor makes needs to take them to a page that exactly matches what they expected to find when clicking that link. Each click should narrow their options until they reach their final destination.
Home Page (Tier 1)
Most users will visit your homepage at some point. What your homepage should do is tell the visitor what your site is about and serve as a starting point to finding more specific information. You need to make it extremely easy for people to find what they are looking for from your homepage and you do this with your main navigational links (or main menu).
What are people going to want to do on your site? What are the most common questions they will want answered? When you know the answers to these questions you can look at your homepage and see how easy it is for a visitor to find what they are looking for.
Categories (Tier 2)
Your homepage should link to each category you have on your site. I prefer to create a landing page of general information covering each category, but if you are using a WordPress site you can use links to your category archives that list every post you have created under that category.
Obviously create as many categories for your site as you need, but you will want at least three links in your main menu. If you get too many categories that you are linking to you might want to see if there are any opportunities to consolidate.
Content Pages (Tier 3)
Your important content resides in this tier three section and is linked to from your category pages. Using my site as an example a user can easily go from the homepage to the "Search Engine Marketing" category and then from that category page to this article on organizing content. For content sites like mine their third tier will be the actual articles, but in an ecommerce store this tier would contain the product pages.
Deep Content (Tier 4 & Beyond)
If you site grows large you may add tiers. Using the example of an ecommerce store, a product page may link to reviews, color choices, different styles, etc.
Tailor This Structure to Your Needs
As you organize your content keep the user's navigation in mind and go from general to specific. Use this as a basic guide, but if you are in a targeted niche your site might essentially be a "category" of a larger site. You may only need to go two levels deep.
If on the other hand you run a large site you might need categories within categories and can get a very deeply tiered site going.
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On-Page Website Optimization
After you choose your keywords and map them to pages it's time to go to work to make sure those pages are optimized for the terms you want to rank for. You want to design and structure your site with your visitors in mind, but there are a few things you need to do to keep the search engines happy and ranking your pages.
Title
Page titles are the most important part of on-page SEO. They tell the spiders and your visitors what the page is about. Titles are the text you see at the top of a browser window when you are looking at a page. They are the clearly displayed, links to your page in the results given by the search engines.
You can edit your page's title in the <title> tag of the HTML code. If you are using WordPress or another content management system the title will be easily editable in the backend.
Some tips for writing an effective page title:
- Use your keywords near the beginning of your title - these words will be highlighted on the results page by the search engine.
- Use less than 70 characters - this is all a browser and a results page will display. Use that space effectively and avoid running your title over the edge.
- Entice a click through - great headlines encourage user's to click through by getting them interested. Stuffing keywords in the title doesn't get the user excited to see what's on the page.
- Use different titles on each page - you are mapping each keyword to a single page so this shouldn't be a problem. Don't create several pages that rehash the same idea as this is seen as spammy and doesn't add anything to your site. If you have more to say just create a longer page.
Headings
If a piece of text appears larger than the rest of the text on the page, it's more than likely included inside a heading. These are the <h1> (or 2,3,4 or 5) tags included on the page. Search engines look at headings for another clue as to what the page is about and give them more weight. Use the <h1> tag only once per page, and include <h2> tags if you have a couple of sub-headings in your post that you want to stand out.
URL Structure
A URL gives an exact location of a page, for instance this page is located at http://www.jamiefaidley.com/on-page-website-optimization/ . You want to name your page after the keyword you are targeting. With WordPress you change the permalink structure under settings to "%postname%". Here are some more tips on quality URL structures:
- Keep them short and sweet. Longer URLs are no good. Don't create a lot of directories and sub-directories extending out the URL.
- Separate words with dashes (-). Don't just run words together. Some people use the underscore (_) instead but stick with what's common.
- You don't want to have your URL's be numbers or a date. Instead use your keywords.
Load Time
Users want their information fast. If your page is taking too long to load then it's likely the visitor will just hit the back button and look for another site. I wrote an article on how to speed up your WordPress blog if you want a few tips on increasing your site's speed. Basically, the less code, images, widgets, and plugins you use the better. Think simple. Also, go with a quality hosting provider as that alone can show significant improvements in your site's speed.
Keyword Stuffing
Don't stuff your keywords in the body of your text! This might seem counter intuitive since we have talked about the importance of having your keywords located on the page, but trust me it won't work.
Write the body of your article with the end user in mind. You want your content to be readable and to solve the user's problems. Even if you were to rank for a page that is stuffed with keywords, the visitor would quickly bounce off of the page if it didn't answer their question.
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Why Site Structure is Important
A lot of people think SEO boils down to creating the right content, optimizing that content for the keywords you want to rank for, and then driving links with keyword rich anchor text to that page. If you do those three things and do it well then you are going to have a lot of success getting high rankings. However, there is another aspect that you can't ignore: the structure of your site.
Even without as many inbound links as a competitor, the internal linking structure of a site can push it higher in the rankings. A solid site structure magnifies your link building efforts, giving you more "bang for your buck." There are two audiences you are trying to serve with your site structure:
Human Visitors
Always focus on your human users. Your most important goal should be to make the site easy to use for your "real" visitors. The user should be able to get to where they want to go in just a few clicks with each click getting them closer to their goal and final destination.
Every goal you have with your site has to do with the end user, whether it's to get them to buy something from you, support your cause, or whatever else. A positive experience will leave your visitors happy and happy visitors sign up for your newsletter, purchase products, and link to your site.
Search Engine Spiders
You optimize your site structure for search engine spiders in three ways: funneling link juice to your most important pages, firing keyword-rich anchor text to pages on your site, and linking to your deep content to make sure those pages get indexed.
Link juice is important because each page has to have a certain amount of pagerank in order to be shown in the results. The more pages that link to the page, the more pagerank gets sent to that page.
Anchor text tells the spiders what the page the link is pointing to is about. Keyword-rich anchor text is the holy grail of SEO marketers, but too many ignore the opportunities presented on their own sites. If you are looking to get a boost for a certain keyword, change the anchor texts of your internal links to that page and more than likely it will help.
Getting every page on your site indexed is important. This gives you more pages to work with for firing anchor text and it gives you more landing pages in the search engine results. The more landing pages you have in the index the more long tail keyword terms you are going to rank for without even trying. Don't discount this traffic because over time it will make up the majority of your new visitors.
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Bad Content for Your Site
One thing that I try to emphasize as much as possible is the need for quality content. Quality content gets readers to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your RSS feed, and link to your site. If you write something useful that provides excellent value and information to your readers you are going to benefit a lot more than if you write content that is low-quality. What exactly do we mean by low-quality? Here are a few examples.
1. Duplicate Content - Some site owners out there fill up their site with articles written for the article directories. These articles can be found using the exact same wording on several different sites, so why would someone link to the content on your site over someone else's? Why should Google rank you higher than another source? What's even worse is when you copy content from other site's WITHOUT the owner's permission or an attribution link. Not only are you giving off low-quality signals about your site, but you are violating international copyright law and could face some hefty fines.
2. Writing Content For Keywords - Most sites that know about SEO create content with the search engines in mind, but taking this to the extreme can cause problems. The Panda Update hurt sites that wrote content centered around specific keywords. These sites would pay writers to post quick, low-quality articles based on a specific keyword term with the hopes of achieving a high ranking. The search engine users would click on this high-ranking article, see it's junk, and back out to find a quality source of the information they were looking for. Finally, Google responded and harmed the rankings of sites that posted this kind of shallow content.
3. Fake Reviews - This kind of garbage got to be so egregious that the FCC had to step in and require sites to post affiliate disclaimers. Do not lie to or mislead your readers. People are smart enough these days to spot fake testimonials and frown upon sites that use them. Do not post reviews on products or services that you haven't personally used or know absolutely nothing about. It's going to come off as weak.
4. Unrelated to Your Product or Service - Google News can be a great way to drive traffic to your site, but a problem I have ran into when being listed in Google News is getting irrelevant traffic. You start seeing a flood of traffic come in from a keyword that is on the fringe of what your site is about and it drives you to write content that is further and further away from your core in order to get more visitors. The problem is that these visitors are going to be very low-value. You don't get paid for visitors and pageviews. You only get paid when people take action on your site. Post relevant content with a clear call to action on what you want the reader to do next. Posting an article about Charlie Sheen might get a lot of traffic, but won't get you many leads.
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Link Building Schemes
Yesterday we touched a little bit on link building schemes in our article on black hat SEO techniques, but since most webmasters no longer participate in spamming their own site I thought it would be best to elaborate on some link building practices that could get you into trouble.
The reason link spam is so popular is Google requires a lot of quality inbound links to your site in order for them to list you high in the rankings for any sort of competitive keyword. However, not all links are going to give you the same boost and some will even cause you to be penalized in the rankings. Let's take a look at the practices that I recommend you avoid.
1. Reciprocal Link Pages - Having a "resources" or a "links" page probably won't hurt you in the SERPs, but it's not the best way to exchange links. Google is going to stop looking at outbound links when you get past somewhere around 100 so on a single page. If you have a huge, long list of links on your page it isn't going to encourage quality sites to exchange with you. One solution is to create a resources page with a menu to additional links pages organized by subject. The problem with doing this navigational trick is it pushes all of the outgoing links to a page deeper within your site, lowering their value. This is not something "quality" sites are going to really look for.
Remedy: try exchanging links within articles and get rid of straight links page to links page exchanges.
2. Irrelevant Sites - If sites in bad neighborhoods are linking to you, it probably won't hurt your rankings. Google doesn't want to punish you for things you can't control and they don't want to give competitors a way to trash your rankings. However, if YOU are linking to irrelevant sites that's a low-quality signal in Google's eyes.
Remedy: Eliminate links pointed to sites that no longer exist. Do not link to sites that are out of your niche. Think of your user ad ask yourself "would they find a link to that site useful?"
3. Rapid Link Building - The pace at which new links point to your site can be an indicator of quality. Sites tend to add links at a natural rate. The fact that you get a whole bunch of links to your site in a short period of time isn't necessarily going to be bad for you, but it might warrant a closer look. If those incoming links are sitewide or from low-quality sites, that's a low-quality signal. If you had an article listed on the front page of Digg, you might get a lot of quality links from inside the content of big sites. Those types of links are going to give you a huge boost.
Remedy: If you are trying to build your link profile up, do so at a constant, steady pace. Getting a huge influx of links every 3-4 months and not seeing any next incoming links in between is a bad sign for your profile.
4. Not Mixing Up Your Incoming Link Anchor Text or Landing Page - If you build links naturally to your site, you will have links with different anchor text pointing to different areas of your site. People will use your site name, the actual URL, and keyword anchor text that isn't quite what you would hope for. If you build 100 links to your site all with the same keyword rich anchor text and all pointing to the home page that looks unnatural and the search engines will discount them.
Remedy: Mix up the keywords you use for your anchor text and link deep into your site.
Other tactics are not necessarily going to hurt your rankings, but could be a giant waste of your time.
1. Mass Emailing Link Partners - If you are sending off hundreds of link exchange requests to webmasters every day you are probably not going to get a great response. It's kind of like cold calling and telemarketers, nobody wants to be hassled unexpectedly like that.
If you want more natural links then do what Google recommends, "create unique, relevant content." This will give other webmasters a reason to link back to you.
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Black Hat SEO Techniques
The search engines are in a constant fight against spam. Spam makes users unhappy. If users are unhappy they will stop using that search engine for their queries and the site will lose advertising dollars. That is why Google issued their webmaster guidelines to make it real clear what was considered to be "black hat" or spammy in terms of getting your site to rank high in the results.
If you use black hat SEO techniques then you taking a gamble. You might get some short term benefit by seeing your site rocket up the rankings, but once the search engines catch on to what you are doing you risk getting your site banned and losing all of your rankings as a result. So, what exactly can get you into trouble? Let's take a look.
1. Keyword Stuffing - Do not try to use your keyword over and over again inside the content of your articles. For this page I use the title "black hat SEO techniques" where it fits into the text. I don't repeat the phrase over and over again in sentences that make little to no sense. Keyword density is one of those factors that went out of the algorithms a long time ago. You want to write your pages with the user in mind, using language that is as clear and concise for them to understand as possible. Do not include a list of keywords at the bottom of your site or any of your pages. I saw this a lot around five years ago but those sites are normally no longer to be found.
2. Invisible Text - This practice is similar to stuffing because the invisible text is normally the keywords the writer wants the page to rank for. What you will see happen here is if a site has a white background, they will make add text to the bottom of the page that is white as well. This way it's invisible to the user but the spider's will still see it. The programmers at Google are smart enough to detect this kind of nonsense, so if you are using invisible text on your site then you will be caught and your rankings will suffer.
3. Linking Schemes - There are a ton of linking schemes out there and whether the tactic is classified as black hat or white hat isn't always clear cut, but is defined on more of a sliding scale. You aren't supposed to buy links, but there is a big difference between buying through a network where your site gets linked to buy hundreds of different unrelated sites and paying someone to include a mention in a relevant article. Do not build new sites full of thin content just so you can link back to your main site. Reciprocal linking is supposedly frowned upon, but only if you are including hundreds of links on one page, linking to bad neighborhoods, or exchanging with irrelevant niches. I haven't seen any problems related to reciprocal linking with sites in my own niche.
What tactics you employ to try and rank higher in the search engines is your own decision, but just remember they can and will penalize you if what you are doing appears to be spammy.