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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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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Landing Pages
When you talk about search engine optimization (SEO) or Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising the term "landing pages" comes up quite a bit. So what exactly is a landing page? Technically, it is any page on your site that a visitor arrives at after clicking through on a link.
However, landing pages normally are targeted by the site owner as a place where you want your traffic to be sent in the hopes of either earning a purchase or capturing the visitor's information. Here are a few examples:
- PPC ads - The traffic you are buying is sent to a specific landing page depending on the keywords the user searched for.
- SEO - you are targeting your landing pages with your link building campaigns using the specific anchor text you want the page to rank for.
- Email Blasts - You send newsletters to your email list driving them to landing pages that are designed to encourage purchases.
- Organization - A landing page can be used on your site as a navigation tool to organize specific posts around a central topic.
If a user clicks through to your site then you have their attention, but only for a short period of time. Your landing page then needs to get them interested quickly in what you have to offer, build a desire in that offer, and then get the visitor to take your desired action.
The best way to use landing pages is to tailor them specifically to the visitor's desire. You need to know what the searchers issue, problem, or question is and why there are searching for it at this time. What do they expect to find when they click through to your page? You need to show them how you can provide the answer or solution. A quality landing page is very targeted and tailored to what the visitor wanted to find.
Homepages are not good for this. Only small niche sites are targeted enough to have a homepage tailored to specific requests. Generally your index page should be built to allow visitors to easily navigate to different sections of your site and will appeal to a more general audience.
Your landing page copy should drive the user to a specific action. Ask yourself "what do you want them to do?" This can mean a purchase but it doesn't necessarily have to be. You could also drive the reader to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your RSS feed, like your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter. It is VERY important that you get some kind of response out of them so you can contact them for follow ups in the future. Buying traffic only to have it bounce off the page is wasteful and will have you leaving money on the table. If you can gain an email address from the visitor it is very easy to build a relationship with that person and continue to send them quality offers that you can make additional money off of over and over again.
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Effective Landing Pages
You have heard how great landing pages can be for capturing leads and increasing the amount of money you make online so you are ready to start writing. If you want to get the most out of your landing page then follow these best practices:
Testing
The single most important thing that you will learn is to test everything. If you read about a new trick online that increases conversions, DO NOT put it into place immediately. Instead, test it against what you are already doing. Some changes that you make will work out great, some need tweaked a bit, and others will leave you worse off than before. You know the only way you can be sure? Test everything.
Limit Navigation
You want your users to take your desired action. Visitors are easily distracted so you must keep them focused on your copy, visuals, and the offer. Menus and links give them a chance to leave your landing page never to come back again. Hide your site navigation on landing pages and increase the number of leads that you capture.
Deliver Value
Your landing page has to match up well with your visitor's desire. You should write in the second person (you) to make it clear how you can solve their problem, answer their questions, or benefit them in some way. The more you can demonstrate that you can do that, the better your landing page will convert.
Provide a Clear Call to Action
Tell the visitor what exactly you are expecting them to do. Do you want them to submit their email address in order to download a free ebook? Do you want them to purchase your product for x amount of dollars? Let them know, over and over again.
Keep it Short & Simple (KISS)
The form that you use to capture leads needs to be as simple as possible. You only want to ask for relevant information. If you ask a visitor for a phone number, they are going to worry that you are going to call them. If you ask them for their address, they will suspect you are going to send them junk. Generally speaking, the more information that you require from them the less likely they are to give it to you.
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How to Speed Up Your Blog
WordPress sites can tend to run a bit slow, especially if you are getting a lot of traffic to your site. The problem is that page loading time matters quite a bit to your visitors. They don't want to wait around for 10 seconds for your page to load or else they will just go somewhere else to try and find the information they were looking for. With that in mind there are probably some things that you can do right now to speed up your site.
Review Your Hosting
A shared host can be great because they cost less than $100 per year, but if you start drawing heavy traffic to your site and make a decent amount of money this is the first thing you are going to want to upgrade. A VPS or dedicated server can cost quite a bit more per month, but not having to share resources with other sites will allow more computer power to be used towards your site. See How to Move Your Blog to Another Host for more information.
Remove Unused Widgets and Plugins
The more plugins you have onyour site the more code that your server has to compile, eating up more resources. Remove any plugin that you do not feel is absolutely necessary.
Install WordPress W3 Total Cache
This plug generates static files for all of your posts and pages. This means the server loads without having to process any PHP code and will quickly speed up your blog. You can also use this plugin to eliminate the white space from your html, CSS, and javascript code.
Minimize PHP Calls
Each time a page on your site loads the browser executes all of the PHP and database queries that it finds. This adds to your load time. Here are some examples of what you can replace:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
An example of minimized queries & requests:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/wp-content/themes/lightword/style.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/wp-content/themes/lightword/original.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/feed/" />
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PageRank Sculpting
After my article on how many pages does your site have indexed there was some interest generated in how to actually go about getting more pages included in the index. The easy answer to that is to get a few links pointing to pages on your site that aren't in the index, but another problem could be your site design. PageRank sculpting is a trick that is used by webmasters to try and flow as much pagerank as possible to important pages, and to keep pages like privacy, login, register, terms of service, and contact us out of the index.
Nofollow
Back in 2009, Google changed how they view the nofollow attribute and posted this information on the Matt Cutts blog. It used to be that if you wanted to keep the search engines from indexing a page you could use nofollow. So if you had 10 links on a page and five of them were nofollowed, the other five links would get twice as much juice. Now it seems that Google still divides the pagerank by all outgoing links, but it just doesn't pass Pagerank to those links with the nofollow attribute, that pagerank just disappears.
Consolidating Links
Why not put similar information all on one page? If you link to the same page more than once, Google only passes the pagerank one time. So why not combine your login/register forms to a single page, the terms of service, privacy, and disclaimer to one legal page, and the about, bio, contact, and press information all on one?
To do this you have to be able to place an anchor in those pages. So when the user clicks privacy, they get taken to the privacy section of your legal page. Here is how to do it:
The anchor placed in your code where you want the link to jump to: <a name="yourNamedAnchor"></a>
Then in your menu the link should be: <a href="yourpage.html#yourNamedAnchor">TEXT HERE</a>
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How to Choose a Domain Name
When you are staring a new site the first thing that you are going to want to do is choose a domain name. The key is to go with something simple that describes what you do, yet stands out from the crowd. You do want to put some time into figuring out your domain name because while it may be easy to 301 redirect to something else down the line, you'll be better off for branding purposes to find a quality domain and stick to it from the start.
Here are some of the important rules that I try to follow when picking a domain name for a new site:
- Shorter is Better - It is easier to type and easier to remember.
- Go with the .com - It's almost instinctive now for people to just put .com in when they go directly to a site. Some great sites have different extensions, but you are better off going with the flow here. You may want to also purchase other extensions and redirect them to your .com site. This prevents other people from buying a similar domain.
- Go with One Word - People are not in the habit of entering hyphens with the domain names, so if this site was jamie-faidley.com it would lost traffic to jamiefaidley.com.
- Easy to Spell - Why is it Flickr.com instead of Flicker.com? If you told your parents you posted the photos to Flickr what are the chances you don't have to spell it out for them?
- No Homonyms - You also don't want homonyms to confuse people either.
- No Numbers - Is it 4loco.com or fourloco.com?
- Keywords - It helps to have the keyword of whatever your site is about or selling in the domain, but it's not something to lose sleep over. There are some SEO benefits, plus clickthrough rates in the SERPs should be higher.
- Avoid Copyrights - I remember a guy who had the site MikeRoweSoft.com and was sued by Microsoft. Why take the chance of getting sued and losing your domain (and thousands of dollars)?
If you are wanting to know if a domain name is already taken, or if you want to purchase a domain to use then I prefer GoDaddy. They are cheap, reliable, and send reminders whenever your domain is coming up for renewal. Of course, I recommend signing up for the long-term so you don't have to worry about your domain expiring.
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Exit Pop Up Code
Did you know that 98% of people visit a website and then leave without taking any action at all? They don't place an order, they don't sign up for your RSS feed, nor do they sign up for your newsletter.
I know there isn't a lot of love for pop ups anymore, but you have probably lost these visitors anyway so why not take a chance to give them another opportunity to take action. Most have already decided to leave your site anyway! You can use the exit pop up code to do any of the following:
- Give the visitor a special offer (a discount to the product or a free trial)
- Remind them of the free giveaway you are offering to all subscribers to your list (you are building your list with incentives right?!)
- Show them related products
- And much more!
With the Exit Catcher Pro an unblockable exit pop up is triggered when your visitors click on the back button or when they try to close their browser. This gives the user a second chance to see your offer that is right in front of their eyes. Turn lost visitors into paying customers or subscribers the easy way!
Exit Catcher Pro is very easy to use and customize. You just enter the message you want the visitor to see, what target page you want them sent to, and what piece of audio you want to play. There are 10 audio files already loaded into the software for you to choose from.
I will be using this unblockable exit pop code to give my visitors discounts, downsell products, offer incentives for joining my list, showing related affiliate offers, and more.
This script can recapture 20% or more of your exiting traffic, so think about how much more money your site can make by using this exit pop up code!