The first part to this article can be found here
SEO Advice + Linking For SEO
Many people have heard it, tried it, but most people are not so sure about how to do it, or the right way to do it in order to increase conversions. When it comes to SEO Advice, having advice that is actually actionable is very important!
If you are a marketer or a blogger, then chances are that you have heard of SEO before. There are numerous techniques, but the effort you put in last month may not work as effectively next month or even at the end of this month. It sounds risky, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, even the guys who call themselves SEO advice maestros can’t say that they know everything about their craft, because it changes constantly! Yet, it remains a very important part of digital marketing.
A quick lesson for those who don’t know, SEO, meaning search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your online content in a way that search engines want to show your content as a top result when searches of particular keywords are performed.
Do you know many blogs get published online daily? More than 2 million! With your content as one in the mix, and just one among thousands in your niche, how do you make sure that your post appears on top of search engine result pages?
Note that over 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine and 81% of the searches take place through Google.
And, out of all the results returned by Google, the top 5 results get about 67% of clicks.
If your article doesn’t appear on the first page, consider that article not ranked – no one visits page two. When page one results are off, people change the words they use in their search.
See what we are driving at? The appearance of your content on Page 2 of the SERPs spells doom, and it is worse than searching for a needle in the haystack.
So, can we all agree that your SEO strategy must make a difference without you having to try too hard?
No, it won’t be easy but, knowing what will place your page on top will make your SEO strategy so much more effective. You have to seek SEO advice from the best, and even more importantly, you need actionable SEO advice.
So, what does this mean? Which SEO technique will make your website and pages stand out?
Forget Black Hat strategies
This is one of the most important pieces of SEO advice that I can tell you today. If you’d like to be on Google’s (or any search engine for that matter) good side, you need to optimize your website for humans and not the search engine. Black Hat SEO stunts like crappy pages, duplicated content, using irrelevant content, stuffing keywords and using spammy links will only work for a short time and, as a marketer, the search engine will ban your site and any attempts at digital marketing in future.
Instead, be the good guy, embrace White Hat SEO tactics and your bank will thank you. White Hat strategies focus on your human audience that you’ll be selling your product to, instead of trying to trick the search engines into ranking you.
The acceptable strategies include
- sharing relevant content and using relevant links and references
- having unique and relevant titles
- good spelling and grammar and standards-compliant HTML
On-page and Off-page Optimization
On-page SEO – deals with all of Google’s ranking factors, like the quality of your content (quality, keyword research, uniqueness, and the use of keywords) optimized headlines, and the pages’ structure.
Off-page SEO – has everything to do with the variables looks at when ranking pages. They may be out of your hands. These include related blogs in your niche, social networks, and the searcher’s search history.
It is crucial to remember that SEO is determined by the design of the website, the content and the links, but you already knew this, didn’t you?
Well then, let’s move on to more important matters.
Why are some websites and blogs ALWAYS ranked highly? Which SEO tricks do they employ?
Pssst! It’s got something to do with links – one of the building blocks for SEO.
Ranking Internal Pages Higher than the Homepage
It is not as complicated as you’ve been made to believe!
In the SEO world, we all lack immunity from mistakes; it’s unavoidable! One of the biggest mistakes we make is linking everything to the homepage. Doesn’t it feel almost natural to link products/ services directly to your homepage? Even when your client asks you to, this isn’t the best way to make your site into your cash cow.
While everyone else seems to do this, it will only push you to the 15th page of search engine result pages.
What should you do instead? Create links deep within your website. Do you see all of that great content that you have located within your site? Instead of linking back to your homepage, use internal links (links to other articles that you have on your website). Google loves when you do this!
In Neil Patel’s view, Wikipedia ranks highly for just about every word known, and it is, therefore, the 6th most popular website worldwide.
Majestic SEO shows that Wikipedia has more than 600 million backlinks, yet its homepage has about 6 million backlinks. This means that one percent of Wikipedia’s backlinks, link out to the homepage. The rest of the 99% gets directed to its internal pages.
This means that you have to spread your link equity across your site rather than concentrating it on your homepage.
Why is this important?
According to Neil Patel, the future of search engine optimization revolves around your users. His SEO advice is this: if you have many high-quality links on your page, your page is guaranteed to rank higher on search engines compared to using that same article with no links.
The absence of links to internal pages equals to lack of user activity.
Homepages have everything about your products but, it offers scanty information. Online users are impatient, and they don’t have the time to look through your homepage looking for helpful or interesting articles. You have to direct your users to your content.
The results of your website become unstable whenever your homepage ranks higher than your internal page, and truth be told, Google, the biggest search engine in the world, is more concerned with your websites engine than the content your homepage holds.
Kissmetrics summarizes what internal links do to your SEO strategy – an internal link connects one page of your website to a different page on the same website such that, in an internal link, the target domain and the source domain are the same.
Internal linking has three roles:
⦁ Defining the architecture and the hierarchy of a website
⦁ Aiding in website navigation
⦁ Distributing ranking power and page authority throughout your site
How to Rank Internal Pages Higher Than Your Homepage
⦁ Create deep links
How does this make a difference? Well, search engines and your customers do not benefit from inactive pages. As mentioned above, your SEO strategies, especially the On-page SEO, should be targeting users.
Therefore, when creating internal links to your pages, you have to make sure that the content you are linking to is visible to users and of importance to your users as well. Once your users can connect to your internal pages, you will meet your secondary goal – your Google rankings will go up.
To make this possible, your internal pages should be easily crawlable. Deep linking makes crawling possible through the use of hyperlinks and appropriate anchor texts. These two link to a specific and a relevant page on your site.
For anchor texts, you have to avoid using linked images. You should use natural and unoptimized sentence fragments as anchor texts. Just make sure you don’t optimize your anchor texts.
In deep linking, there are two mistakes you should avoid – avoid linking to the Homepage and the Contact Us Page.
Throughout linking, you have to keep the anchor text and the referred pages relevant because Google’s ranking algorithm looks into the relevance of the data.
What does internal linking say about your site? To Google, internal linking to internal pages shows that you trust the authority of your content. And, consistent linking of relevant data portrays credibility of your page. This is On-page credibility, which is often referred to as the Link Juice.
Link juice or credibility strengthens internal pages. To boost your search engine rankings, you should link to trustworthy, authoritative and relevant pages.
Where is your homepage in all this?
Your homepage will still receive a substantial number of external links but, that doesn’t mean sending your customers to your homepage all the time will contribute to your ranking.
So, for your internal pages to catch up with the high homepage ranking and for a stable ranking, you should spread out the link value to the internal pages. Do this by linking to specific categories or content that often goes unnoticed.
Where do internal links go?
Research by Orbit Media gives the following recommendations:
⦁ Include links where they will be helpful to readers but don’t link to irrelevant and unrelated pages
⦁ Always link between pages and posts within the article’s body keeping the content and the anchor texts in context
⦁ Link from new to old and from old to new content. Keep in mind that your post is incomplete without an internal link if you are trying to optimize the page for search engines.
Regarding numbers, there is no definite maximum or a minimum number of links you can have on your site meaning that you can have a hundred or more links.
⦁ Use Social Signals to Pass SEO Juice to your Internal Pages
Social media is and will be the greatest SEO strategy if you are looking to make money. Traffic from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or Pinterest will boost your rankings so, you must leverage the power of social media. These social media sites make up nearly a third of traffic statistics according to Search Engine Journal.
To leverage social signals, keep the links relevant. The links on your social media platforms should be related to your niche.
Brian Dean, a digital marketing expert renowned for BackLinko has the following SEO advice on social signals and Google rankings:
“Google probably uses relevant information from the social account that shared your content and linked to you, together with the text surrounding the link, to make further decisions about your page’s value.”
The shareability of your content matters to search engines too
⦁ Use branded keywords
To rank your internal pages higher than your homepage, you should interlink your pages using branded keywords. These are simple search/keywords with all or part of your company’s name. The use of branded keywords when interlinking pages improves your on-page SEO structure leading to high organic search traffic.
Keep in mind that non-branded keyword searches are important KPIs too. When your content is good, a random internet search can easily make your site their favorite.
Branded keywords protect your pages against over-optimization.
There you have it, internal linking as a way to increase your internal page rank and your overall ranking on search engines.
Just remember to keep anchor texts trustworthy, relevant and unique. Don’t overstuff footnotes and sidebars with links because your site may appear spammy.
Tips for Link Building for SEO
As mentioned above, linking is important because it determines how search engines perceive your website and your pages. So, you have to do it right. Above, we have delved into internal page linking, and there are some important points that we left out.
Let’s take a look at how you can build links that boost rankings
Build high-quality links
For high-quality links, look at the following:
⦁ Authority of the page – the authority of the page you are linking to matters more than all of the other SEO factors. Authoritative pages will always pass high authority to your site. This is called PageRank and Google doesn’t share your PageRank publicly because it is the foundation of their algorithm used in ranking pages and sites.
⦁ Authority of the site – this is a link quality determined by the domain’s site-wide authority. They are hard to come by, but when they do, you will remain on Google’s good side.
⦁ Site relevance – you want the links directed to website to come from authority sites with content closely related to the content on your site.
⦁ Consider the link’s placement – the positioning of the link determines its effectiveness. Links to sidebars and footnotes aren’t as effective as the links found in the middle of an article’s body. The link should also be editorially placed.
From the experts at Google, you will be in violation of their guidelines if your links are unnatural, meaning, that they are placed in a manner that isn’t editorial or if the owner of the site doesn’t vouch for the links.
⦁ Use an anchor text – Anchor texts are ranking signals.
⦁ Link co-citations – because Google considers them baby anchor texts.
⦁ No-Follow .Vs. Do-Follow Links – If you include a link to your content and you want to tell Google that the link doesn’t count as an endorsement, you add the rel=”nofollow” tag.
⦁ Sharpen your content marketing skills – From the linking experts at Backlinko, the quality of your content will unlock relevant, authoritative and trustworthy backlinks. So, publishing crappy content won’t do. For link building content, do the following:
- Incorporate visual assets like images, infographics, diagrams, and charts.
- Create lists, also called listicles. These work because they make your content easy to read and in the process, generate many backlinks
- Use original/ unique data and research because data and statistics from surveys, studies, and original data are highly linkable
- Comprehensive guides and resources that cover everything you know about a topic, this makes your site the go-to source of information for that specific topic.
Mistake to avoid for the success of your SEO strategy
⦁ Stopping link building soon after building
Despite all the resources you put into search engine optimization, your efforts won’t last too long. So, don’t expect to sleep and let your work for you, forever. This happens because Google and other search engine change their ranking techniques every few weeks and you have to catch up with them if you’d like to appear on top or at least on page one of search engine result pages.
To wrap your head around this,
look at it this way, after months of being stagnant, your site is suddenly alive but then, the excitement is short-lived, and your site goes back into stagnation. When this happens, Google takes that you have had a quick hit then ran out of your Mojo. You can prevent that from happening by continually building links to keep your site alive.
So, bask in your moment of glory for a few seconds, take screen shots of the high rank and get back to the grind.
⦁ Underestimating the importance of relevant content
According to SearchEngineLand, the main reason why your SEO strategy makes you bankrupt is that you assume that people and search engines are dumb.
This is because contrary to your marketer’s mind people are brilliant and they are looking for products to be sold to them creatively, and factually. So , the content you share needs to make sense, and it should have authoritative backing.
For search engines, irrelevant content results in the highest bounce rates. So, ensure that the content is relevant in that it adds value to the readers and that the content makes sense for any backlinks that point to it. Content should also contribute to the overall quality of your site.
⦁ Failure to use Brand Anchor Texts
As mentioned above, brand anchor texts are important in internal linking. To make your anchor texts more effective and that your SEO campaign is successful, consider adding your brand name as a whole, or in part. You have put in effort researching for a relevant anchor text. Adding your brand should be easy. Branded anchor texts are the links on your name, brand name, and your URL.
Conclusion
The best SEO strategies boost your ranking on search engines and always keep you on the top page. Improving ranking on your internal pages so that they are higher than your homepage is important.
Contextual linking passes more juice to your internal pages.
Resource page link building, and broken link building are some of the greatest strategies for link building.