When it comes to raising your website’s organic search rankings, inbound links from outside sources are important and some will say it is all they work on but have you looked at your internal links? Your internal links, the ones that point visitors to different parts of your site should be modified to improve your link juice throughout your site.
Getting links from other quality sites will never be easy. But even if you get high quality links the biggest challenge is to get the link to say what you need it to say in order to help your site/page move higher in the organic rankings for that specific keyword phrase. That is why your link building strategy starts with your own site because you can name your links what ever is the most popular keyword phrases in your industry or what you need to rank high for. Lets look at some tactics you should implement on your own site for link building:
- Benchmark and test – establish baselines for your site’s performance and start testing:
- Number of clicks on each link you receive.
- Organic traffic to each linked page.
- Conversions (sales, lead generation, white paper downloads, any KPI) on each page.
- Organic search rankings of each page.
- Make “tweaks” to the hyperlinks – The hyperlinked text of a link or anchor text helps signal to search engines what type of content is on the destination page. Using your target keywords in the anchor text of your on-site links can boost the pages’ performance in searches for those keywords. How much should you increase it? It’s impossible to know without testing.
- Let your internal content out! – one of the most overlooked tactics is using the power of your most visited pages, especially your homepage, as a way to expose the interior content that otherwise might not be seen. Have product pages, videos, or press releases? Use your top visited pages like your home page to showcase these with a link. This will also improve the search engine spider to “crawl” these pages and allow them the opportunity to rank high organically. Have a content section such as “pick of the month” and point it to rotating areas of the site.
- Test navigation links – Some sites have navigation sections that feature dozens of links to different pages. These blocks of text links can be less than user friendly, but many site owners believe the huge list of navigation links improves a site’s natural search performance. Try testing using fewer links, or rotating through your entire list of navigation options. This technique can improve the user experience.
- Help your “orphaned” pages out – The key to this is analyzing your web stats and finding some pages have been orphaned. They have one or no links pointing to and/or from them. Sometimes this orphaned content can be valuable. It can be updated or repurposed, and linked to other portions of your website. Sometimes there is gold in those hills! Look for these orphans and decide whether they should have less or more link exposure on your site.
- Always be searching for new keywords – I can not stress this enough! Think twitter, going green, and WII! Search habits change, and you may see an increase or decrease in traffic being sent to your site from certain keywords. Keep an eye on these keyword trends and watch for any upstarts that might be worth testing as new anchor text in relevant on-site links.
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