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.

Many websites have a haphazard internal linking structure between pages, and although they do have internal links from page to page, the links are not organized in a way that makes it clear to the search engines what the theme of the site is about, making it hard for your keywords to gain natural ranking.

Creating Themes through Siloing

Siloing is a type of site architecture that creates strong organizational themes for different areas of your website by splitting the focus of your site into groups and concentrating the groups into distinct areas that can send a strong signal to the search engines for the group of related keywords you wish to rank for. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer who handles cases involving drug recalls, but you also handle personal injury cases like car accidents, construction accidents and wrongful death, each area should be organized into its own group or silo- and each silo should have several pages, each linking to the other in a specific order. This organizational structure is called a silo.

Internal Linking through Silos Improves Keyword Rank

Without getting too technical, once you create a silo for an area of your site, you then create several pages for that theme and link the pages from one to another in specific order. The main category in this case might be ‘drug recall.’ Under drug recall (the parent category) each of the specific drugs would have its own page. You would have a page for Yaz, Accutane, Chantix, and so on. Each page would fit into the category of drug recall, each page would link to the other, and all pages would link to the parent category page. By creating themes in this way, rather than haphazardly linking one page to another on your site, you’ve created a strong signal to the search engines that this part of your site contains information on drug recalls, and these particular pages all belong together, and they all have to do with the same theme- dangerous drugs. The other category, accidents is a totally separate theme and must be dealt with in the same way. Parent categories should be linked to other parent categories, but the children have to be interlinked properly to avoid diluting the theme of your site.

Use Proper Analytics to Test your Results

Always have good analytics in place to test your results. It will take a few weeks to see how the changes you made affect your keyword ranking, so be patient. So record the changes and watch your analytics. As you improve your internal linking strategy, you will see your rankings improve.

Be sure your content is keyword rich and includes all the terms you are trying to rank for. You can read my post on Proper Keyword Targeting to Increase Traffic to improve your content as a reference.

As America struggles with health care reform, and as we look at how we can truly save money on health care, it is not only the cost of insurance that needs to be scrutinized. Yes, the cost of health care has sky-rocketed. Americans can barely afford the cost of health insurance. But are insurance companies to blame? Maybe; but when it comes to seeing your doctor, why do we have to see the doctor? What’s causing us to be unhealthy in the first place?

If you were a smoker and you needed to see the doctor for lung cancer, would you blame the cost of health care on the insurance company? If half of all Americans were smokers, and the insurance companies had to raise premiums because they were paying for x-rays, MRI’s, asthma, cancer treatment, and repeated visits for lung-related care on a large part of the population, who would you blame? The insurance companies? The tobacco companies? The consumers?

If you were overweight and it was causing you to have high a series of health problems and you just kept eating, would you blame the insurance company? If 67% of the American population were obese, would you blame the insurance company?

When you consider that over 53 diseases are directly related to obesity, and that obesity is the second leading preventable cause of death in the US, it becomes painfully clear that the cost of health care is not only a function of insurance company.

Why don’t insurance companies pay for weight loss programs? That’s one question to consider.

Another point to consider: when does the consumer take responsibility for his/her own actions? The consumer can’t eat until he/she is overweight by 50 pounds, and then complain about the cost of health care.

What’s the solution? Well, it seems there must be a series of solutions ranging from consumer education, taxation of empty-calorie items, to insurance coverage of medical weight loss and in addition, incentives for consumers and companies who promote weight loss, exercise and healthy lifestyles.

Studies that advance the prospect of losing weight without diet, as proposed in the UK,  offer hope that you can just alter the gene code and you can be healthy without going on a diet, but until then, physicians offer more realistic approaches.