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

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?

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.

Save yourself some money and do it right from the beginning.

2. Design your SEO strategy around the opportunities you’ve discovered.
After you’ve decided which keywords and key phrases are the most vulnerable, design your SEO strategy to generate visits and traffic for those key phrases and keywords.

Depending on the phrases, you must design an on page optimization plan for those key phrases. Design your visible content and non-visible content to accumulate rank. This will obviously involve your main website, but and also may involve a series of other web properties that will accumulate and pass phrase rank for the appropriate targets.  These web properties must be coordinated.

3. Plan an ongoing content acquisition strategy.
You must provide fresh, optimized content to acquire visitors around the opportunities you’ve found as targets. Content must be original, updated on a regular basis, and it must be link-worthy if you expect to attract visitors. If you don’t have fresh content, consider your website a ‘business card’ as it may be nice to look at, but no one will find it unless they’re searching specifically for your name, or they know the your exact URL.

4. Execute a well thought out link acquisition campaign.
You need to develop links from other places on the web which point to your site. Links are votes for your website that tells Google and the other search engines that this site is relevant to the key phrases you’re targeting.  It is also very important to have links from high quality sites, relevant to your industry. (For this discussion, we’re assuming you already understand that you need a solid internal linking strategy in place before you go out and develop back links).

5. Monitor your progress.
Monitor your progress as your campaign unfolds. It’s surprising to me that most search engine optimization experts don’t know what page each key phrase is on as they expend their efforts on organic search engine optimization.  Not only is their effort wasted without proper phrase monitoring, but so is your money.

For more information on SEO and search engine marketing, you can go to these websites, Rankdog and Andrew Orlander.

Pay per click advertising is very useful because it drives traffic immediately; search engine optimization takes time.  With good ad copy and attention to keyword bidding, PPC offers the fastest results when it comes to pure traffic for your website.  with good creative landing page construction, you can see results almost immediately.

The problem with Pay Per Click advertising is your reliance on a single factor; money.  As soon as you stop spending your traffic will die.  On the other hand, SEO provides long term, cost effective traffic with the best return on investment (ROI).  SEO does require more work upfront; research, planning, diagnostics and content optimization, but once you have a stream of visitors, organic search will work for you long term.

Any comprehensive marketing program should consist of both forms of marketing.  By using SEO and PPC strategies together, you can drive long term, cost-effective traffic to your website and enjoy a stable, growing business.

Creating Themes through Siloing

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.

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.

Beware: Expensive web designers don’t use best practices

Just because you overpaid for your website doesn’t guarantee you will have your search engine optimization needs met. I was horrified to learn in hindsight that our expensive web development team didn’t even know what ‘SEO best practices’ meant, although they said the site would be built with best practices in their quote. There are certain key things you should beware of when hiring a web developer, and let me save you some money right upfront- if your web developer says he/she doesn’t write content, this person has no clue about SEO. Many web designers ask YOU to provide the content, and feel their job is to post it for you and make it ‘look pretty.’ If that’s the case, your site will not rank for the keywords you’re hoping to rank for.

It’s not their fault- it’s yours

It’s their job to get your site posted and done quickly and cost effectively; this is how web developers earn money; the more sites that get finished and posted each month, the more money they earn. They are essentially ‘coding people’ who understand how to post web pages and would prefer not to spend all the hours it would take to do all the keyword research, page mapping and internal link designing you need to do in advance of building your site in order to rank for the keywords and phrases you want to rank for. And honestly, it might not be all their fault. You were probably looking to save money when building your site and if the developer quoted you for the SEO work you needed in addition to the work he had to do to build your site, you’d probably reject his estimate and find someone else to do it cheaper. (Not all web designers fit this description, so don’t get offended if you’re a web developer who builds search-friendly websites).

Decide on your keywords in advance

If you want qualified traffic for your site, do your research in advance and understand which terms you are trying to rank for. Pick no more than 2-3 per page and write your content around those keywords. Be sure to check your competitors before jumping in and make sure the words you want to rank for don’t have so much competition that you don’t really have a chance; find keywords and phrases that are realistic and go for those. Evaluate the number of links your competitors have as well. Although there is no such thing as the perfect web page or web site, that doesn’t matter. You just have to be better than your competitor.

It’s like the story of the two guys in the woods who hear a bear coming- one guy starts putting on his sneakers and his friend says, “You’ll never out run the bear!” The guy putting on his sneakers says calmly, “I don’t have to… I just have to outrun you.”

Outrank your competitors

Remember, you don’t need to be perfect; you just need to outrank your competitor. For more articles like this, visit my blog at andreworlander.com.

Save money with SEO

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?

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.

The 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.

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.