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Using Internal Links to Improve Rank

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to other pages on the same domain. In other words, internal links help guide a visitor through a website. Best SEO practices for internal linking require that these links utilize normal hyperlinking code, and always employ descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text (the text used to describe the link).

Why Use Internal Links?

Internal links have three main purposes. The first is that they serve as navigation within a website, directing visitors from one related page to another. Internal links spread “link juice,” or page importance, throughout the website, and also help define a website’s hierarchy of information.

Proper Use of Internal Links

Search engine “spiders” are programs that explore the Internet, crawling websites and following an ever-expanding web of links like new threads on a spider web. For this reason, it is essential that all websites use internal linking to provide search engine pathways for spiders to follow:

Without proper internal linking, parts of a website may be invisible – and therefore impossible for search engines to index. In the above image, Google’s spider is visiting Website A. From the homepage, the spider can easily visit Pages B and E, but Pages D and C are not linked, and the spider therefore cannot see them. No matter how keyword rich or well optimized these pages are, they will not be indexed, and therefore will not be included in Google’s search results.

SEO Best Practice

The ideal website layout is organized like a pyramid outline, transitioning from general subjects to more defined topics:

The above pyramid structure also serves as good SEO practice because it has the fewest possible connections between the homepage (the large dot) and specific-subject pages (the smallest dots). This allows link juice, or a page’s importance based on search engine ranking, to trickle down throughout the site without becoming unnecessarily diluted.

Internal Link Structure

Internal links should follow the same format as any other hyperlink:

This structure is standard, and therefore easily understood by the search engines. The spiders will follow this link to the referenced page, and from there continue on to explore other internal links.

Be aware that search engine spiders cannot follow all link types. If the spider cannot follow an internal link, it cannot index that page. Avoid the following link formats that are unfriendly to most search engines:

  • Pages that are not internally linked, and can only be discovered via site search
  • Links contained within frames or I-frames
  • Links that are accessible only through submission forms
  • Links that exist on a page with more than 150 links
  • Links embedded in Java applets, Flash code, other plug-ins, or built with Javascript
  • Links to pages that have been blocked via the Mega Robots tag or in the Robots.txt file

Posted in Andrew Orlander.

By admin
January 7, 2012

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How Facebook Tracks Users

The details of Facebook’s tracking was released and reported by USA Today. Facebook’s engineering director, Arthur Bejar and Gregg Stafancik, Facebook’s  engineering manager, along with two other executives were included as sources of the information.

Facebook begins tracking a visitor for the first time when he/she registers for an account, at which time the visitor gets two cookies. One allows Facebook to display an alternate message to yo next time you visit and the second declares the account you happen to be using.

Basic cookies are not really a problem and they are commonly used to track visitors. But on every page you visit that has a Facebook plugin (the ‘Facebook like’ button is considered a plugin- and appears in MANY places) Facebook manipulates the cookies and keeps an accurate track of each page you visited.  Facebook keeps this log of sites you’ve been to and stores the information for 90 days.

If you visit a site while logged out of Facebook (but with the cookie in your browser) your computer’s IP address, operating system and basic system information are  stored. If you’re logged into Facebook when you visit those sites, your personal information (name, email, friend information,  and other data are also stored.

How is the information used?

Facebook says it doesn’t use this data (except to evaluate plugin performance, frequency of visits, browser information, etc).

The problem is that Facebook can also gain insights into your sexual  orientation, medical problems, religious beliefs, politics, and a host of other information you may not want to be in anyone else’s hands.

Many people are not aware of these issues and the question remains,  how much privacy do we really have? And how much protection do we need?

Posted in Andrew Orlander.

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November 23, 2011

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5 Steps to a Killer SEO Strategy

Here are 5 crucial steps to a killer SEO play

1. Analyze the Market for weaknesses and decide where to attack.
It is important NOT to build your website until you do a complete researching and analysis of the market you’d like to attack.  Certain industries and niches are easy to take over and also to dominate, however some markets would be impossible to compete in without a huge budget, so be sure to find key phrases you know you can rank for before you begin. Many website owners don’t think of their SEO strategy until AFTER they’ve already built their site and then they realize they’re not attracting visitors. Continued…

Posted in search engine optimization.

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May 7, 2011

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PPC and SEO: Driving Traffic to your Website

Pay per click (PPC) search marketing and search engine optimization are two distinct strategies for driving traffic; however it is common for businesses to use one or the other and not both.  Often we see a business focus solely on pay per click and neglect organic search, or spend resources on SEO and fail to utilize pay per click advertising. Continued…

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December 5, 2010

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Improve Your Keyword Rankings through Better Internal Linking

Creating Themes through Siloing
If you are having difficulty ranking for your keywords, whether they are your site’s generic keywords or more focused keywords, very often your keyword ranking can be improved by better internal linking strategies. Continued…

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July 26, 2010

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Why Web Designers Don’t Build SEO Friendly Sites

After spending tens of thousands of dollars building my third website with a ‘top’ web designer and being unhappy with the results, I finally took the time to study SEO and website optimization. I read several books on search engine optimization, including The Art of SEO (by Stephen Spencer and team) to understand the basics, then I took advanced SEO training courses and spent several months learning what really makes a website rank- and what you can do to design (or should I say ‘re-design’) your website so it does what you intended it to do in the first place; attract Continued…

Posted in Andrew Orlander, search engine optimization, seo, website optimization. Tagged with , , , .

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June 17, 2010

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What’s your long term website strategy? If it’s not SEO, think again…

Save money with SEO

Newspaper revenues are dying on the vine, the number of people buying newspapers is decreasing rapidly, TV advertising revenues continue to diminish; response rates on all traditional media are way down… How do you reach customers in a more cost efficient way? Smart businesses are realizing its way better to reach customers at the exact moment they’re looking for a specific service than to try to bombard them with messages when they’re not interested. It took a while for people to stop using the ‘classified ads’ and switch over the Craig’s List and CareerBuilder– just like people stopped using typewriters when word processors came out; but once people ‘got it’ they let go of the old way and never looked back.

The same holds true for SEO as it compares to pay per click advertising. Although pay-per-click spending is reaching all time highs, many business owners are bothered by the fact that more than 70% of all clicks are not coming from PPC from ads. Data from Enquisite suggests that the cost of SEO may be one-seventh the cost of PPC.

Does that mean you should not use pay-per-click advertising? No… there are many great uses for PPC and SEM, but the question is, do you have an SEO strategy that over time will reduce your need to pay for each and every click (as your competitors continue to bid up the cost of every keyword) and help you transition to a place where most of your clicks are coming from organic search (for free)?

Begin your organic strategy now… and reap the benefits later

You can set up a logical, affordable, organic growth strategy that can sensibly fit your budget; the key is to begin now. With a good, solid content strategy and link building campaign, this can be done over a number of months (depending on competition in industry you’re in) and will land you on the first page of the SERP’s for the terms you want to rank for. Do proper job of keyword targeting on the terms you can rank highly for, optimize your site with proper SEO tactics, including page titles, header tags and the like- (there’s a lot to do but it can be done) add content over time, use keyword-rich anchor text… and a good link building campaign, and after a while you’ll see your traffic go up, while your need for paid clicks goes down. It’s interesting to note, once you build your organic rankings, visitors will put more trust in your organic listing than your paid listing, and click on that instead.

If you’re a small to medium sized business, like a dentist or a house painter, where there are no giant companies willing to spend crazy money to take over the market, you can build rankings that will be hard to beat, and your competitors will spend their hard earned money on expensive keyword campaigns while you enjoy the benefits of organic rank…

It’s really not a question of, is it worth it; the question is… when will you begin?

Posted in Andrew Orlander, search engine optimization, seo, website optimization. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , .

By admin
May 11, 2010

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Medical Weight Loss… the wave of the future

The future is bright for physicians when it comes to weight loss. Medical doctors can flex their muscles over commercial programs and offer results that lead the field. Doctors are finding their programs work so well, patients literally come off medications for high blood pressure and diabetes, and for the first time- are able to stop taking pills.  They feel better  are truly HEALTHIER. The physician’s meteoric rise to success will be a welcome relief to thousands of people as they discover that they can find rock solid solutions with physician directed, individually-customized plans.  Hundreds of medical weight loss centers are already open in over 40 states.  You can find out where the centers are by visiting  www.mdbethin.com. Over 240 centers have been launched in just over two years…. much more to come.

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May 7, 2010

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Proper Keyword Targeting to Increase Traffic

Increasing your website traffic with proper keyword targeting

Although other factors (like linking) add high value and are important to website optimization, keyword usage is still at the core of targeting search traffic.

Arrow On A Graph Showing The Success And Increasing Sales For AThe first step in keyword targeting is to understand your audience and generate a list of terms and phrases your audience will be searching for to find the content, products and services your company offers.  Once you have a list of those terms, you need to include them in your pages in creative and interesting ways.  Great content development is a reverse-engineering process that most website owners don’t think about until after their site is built and they’re wondering what they need to do to begin ranking higher in the search results; however it can still be done after the fact with a well-designed and logical content strategy campaign.  A content strategy campaign can be implemented by the owner of the website, or it can be done by providing the keywords and keyword phrases to a copywriter.  It can be done aggressively or in small increments depending on the needs and budget of the website owner.

Build content around your most important keywords and keyword phrases

One of the important considerations to remember is that you want to build content around some of the long tail keyword phrases that searchers will type to find your site.  These long tail keyword phrases will help you tremendously, as there is less competition for them and you will have a higher likelihood of ranking well for them.  Once you have all the keywords and keyword phrases you wish to rank for, you need to write content that is interesting and relevant which includes those keywords and keyword phrases.

For example, if your company provides laser hair removal services, there may be a lot of competition for the keyword, ‘laser hair removal’ and it may take a while before you can rank highly for that keyword.  However, the keyword, ‘affordable laser hair removal in New York’ might be much easier to rank highly for.  You will still have the keyword, ‘laser hair removal’ in your content, but if you do some keyword research before writing your content, you can do a much smarter job of enhancing your website content and increase the amount of traffic you bring to your site from customers who have a high probability of using your services.

Create good title tags, header tags and anchor text

Proper keyword usage includes creating title tags, meta description tags, heading tags, anchor links, image tags, and boldface text.  These are the important factors that help the search engines see your content as important and relevant, and must be part of a proper content strategy campaign.  These will be discussed further.

Posted in Andrew Orlander, search engine optimization, seo, website optimization. Tagged with , , , , , , , , .

By admin
April 20, 2010

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How Costly is Obesity?

The question is often asked, how costly is obesity?

According to RTI International and the US Centers for Disease Control, 15% of 6-17 year olds are overweight, and 3 out of 4 of these overweight teens will go on to become overweight adults at serious risk for a long list of serious and potentially fatal medical complications associated with excess weight.  In addition to the healthcare concern, obesity is also a financial concern.

The nation spends $147 billion annually on obesity, a cost that rivals smoking.   It is also determined that on average, each obese individual person costs the nation $1,429 per year in additional medical expenses. The obese also suffer an increased likelihood of co-morbid conditions, such as diabetes, some forms of cancer, osteoarthritis, heart disease and stroke, with costs specific to each disease that increases the burden on the consumer with out-of-pocket costs of treatment.

It is so obvious to me when I see the results of medical weight loss that physicians need to take a leading role in the fight against obesity.  One of the first comments I hear from physicians at Be-Thin, Inc. is that with medical weight loss, patients are able to come off their diabetes medications.  It is hard to believe physicians don’t know this until they go through initial training and start seeing patients, but another comment I recently heard from a physician was, “In medical school, I learned more about scarlet fever than weight loss, and yet I have never seen one patient for scarlet fever.”

Day after day we hear stories from our physicians as they change the lives of their patients through weight loss.  Taking patients off medications for high blood pressure and diabetes are commonplace occurrences.  As the world finds out about medical weight loss, I believe they will finally be able to lower health care costs by treating the root cause of most problems instead of chasing after the symptoms.

To find a medical weight loss center near you, visit www.centerformedicalweightloss.com.  It’s not really a miracle that you will become healthier when you lose weight, it’s a certainty.

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November 17, 2009

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