Asheville SEO Pro Chuck’s 15 Step By Step SEO Tips For Writing Blog Posts

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

As an Asheville Local SEO Pro I am often asked about my secrets for the great rankings I get on my blogs. I’m willing to give some of my tips out if you want them. Remember, it takes dedication and commitment to get your local SEO ranking just the way you want.

1. Choose a keyword or idea on one specific topic to write about. This possibly means researching a variety of terms.

It is important to consider the LSI or latent semantic indexing . LSI keywords are simply keywords that relate back to your main keyword. I use 2 or 3 of them in each post along with my main keyword phrase.

If you want maximum LSI and SEO value check the Google keyword to see what Google says are “additional keywords”.

Writing Blog Posts

Use the “Additional Keywords to Consider” on the Google Keyword Tool or the Google Wonder Wheel f which can be found  by opening the “show options” drop-down box on the Google search page.

These related keyword phrases CAN be used in your post if possible (Google doesn’t just look at a phrase but also related phrases).  If you pull a couple of the top related phrases this can benefit your post.

I chose the keyword “writing blog posts” and added the following LSI Keywords for this post:

• blog writing tips
• writing successful blog
• SEO blog posts
• writing seo blog posts
• internet business blogging
• internet business tips

2. Form a short link for any important keyword hyperlink that you need to track using pretty links pro or a similar keyword tracking service. This is optional but I like to track the progress of the keywords or links that are contained in my blog posts:

3. Remember, the title of the post is the most important on site element. So it is vital that the keyword phrase is in the title. In general If you use the word “How To” or a specific number of steps to achieve a desired goal it will go a long ways towards improving the chances that your blog post gets read.

4. Write the post with the idea that Content is King. I like to use lists to generate traffic. Some content Ideas for lists include:

• how to lists
• different ways to do things
• Step-By-Step systems
• the wrong way to do something
• Links to other blogs or bloggers
• And lastly, resources lists which is one of the common articles I write on this website since I provide internet business resources.

It’s also important to break up long paragraphs into shorter paragraphs to make it easier for your reader to scan or read the article.

5. Consider using video since it’s a great way to communicate “how to” subjects. You can either use Camtasia which is now available for Mac users also or try using their free service called Jing to make shorter screen-cast videos. You may also consider using a Flip Video to record yourself talking.

Once the video is finished then upload it to YouTube, Viddler, or DailyMotion using a service like Tubemogul.com. Also consider video sharing sites that include do-follow. A list of some of them can be found at  http://www.searchenginejournal.com/dofollow-video-sharing-sites/

6. Use Audio: If you don’t feel comfortable using video you may consider using audio. At the very least you may want to consider a wordpress plugin such as Odiogo to place a “Listen Now” button on your blog post which is especially good for podcasters.

Blog Writing Tip- Add alt tags to your images

7. Add pictures with relevant alt descriptions. The alternate descriptions of the images that you use can be very effective when writing blog posts with SEO considerations since search engines tend to place a high level of importance on the alt tags.

8. Think about tags and insert around 5-10 tags for your post. If you were searching for information, what keyword phrases would you use to find this article?

9. Choose categories for the post. Keep in mind the keywords that you are using and choose the appropriate category(s).

10. Publish the article. Review the article for errors and misspells. Preview it to make sure the layout and photos look OK and then publish the Article.

11. Send the article to your mailing list. I use aweber for my mailing list. The advantage of aweber is that, once you write an article, aweber can be set up to automatically broadcast it using their integrated RSS feed broadcaster. You can even set it up to broadcast to twitter.

12. Submit to social networks like twitter and facebook. I use ping.fm . It’s a free service and by placing a button in my tool-bar I simply ping the blog posts.

13. Submit your article to Social BookMarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites can include many media services such as Digg, Technorati,  Google Bookmarks, StumbleUpon and even Facebook and Twitter which I’ve already mentioned. Consider using the following tools:

I use onlywire.com because it’s the fastest way to submit to Social Bookmarking sites since it is almost fully automated. They will give you the service for free if you place their “onlywire” button on your website

Try socialmarker.com- Be sure to take advantage of the sites that give you a Do-Follow link by clicking on the text that says “Select the social bookmarking sites you want to Submit to” located on the right hand side of the page.

14. Submit to Blog Carnivals– shoot for 20-30 Carnivals. Go to http://blogcarnival.com/bc/ and follow the easy steps to submitting to blog carnivals

15. Article Submissions

Rewrite your Article and Submit it. You may consider manually submitting to EzineArticles.com, goarticles.com, and articledashboard.com.

Another idea is to use a service like ISnare.com. They charge $10 to submit your article to several thousand sites.

Since it is important to rewrite your article to make sure that you don’t have duplicate content all over the web you may try a program called Magic Article submitter because the  2 package tool-set includes an article rewriter and article submission service. I also use this service which is located at Free Traffic System.com.

If you need more tips on these SEO steps contact me at SEO Pro Asheville.

Tags: asheville SEO expert, chuck taft asheville, local search engine optimization, local SEO, local SEO expert, SEO tips

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My view of google Panda as a local SEO pro

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

Much has been written about Google’s Panda Update. As an Asheville Local SEO Pro clients have been asking me if the Panda Update is all it’s cracked up to be.

Panda is reportedly THE biggest leap in search technology since being granted a patent for PageRank in 2005 effectively making Google the dominant source of internet traffic for all company websites. Michael Martinez of SEO-Theory.com uses this phrase to describe it:

Like it or not, all companies are now in the internet marketing business – no other form of marketing has as dramatic an effect on a companies sales. Nearly every one of your potential customers makes searching on the internet where they begin to make a purchasing decision, effectively making Google.com is your companies home page.

Panda As The Farmer Update

Content Farms Are Bad or Content Farms Are Good, which is it?

Exploiting the PageRank algorithm by reverse engineering what the algo values and giving it what it wants has led Google to make changes. Once it was discovered that adding an article to certain types of websites, sometimes called Content Farms, would generate top ranking, a loophole was discovered:

Quantity Outperformed Quality In Terms of Generating Page Views

It was discovered throwing a ton of “junk articles” up on high page rank content farms would allow a company to dominate search results. It mattered little if the article was “good” or poorly written.

Many webmasters panicked when they found their web ranking and web traffic tanked, some hastily came to the conclusion that the algorithm “thinks we are a content farm.”

So how did all of this happen?

Google and Do No Evil

It’s been a long standing policy at big G to not allow it’s paid advertisers to influence the main body of search results, often called the organic search results. Project teams are said to work independent of one another.

The web spam department headed by Matt Cutts does not take orders from the paid advertising department or Adwords.  Google made billions off of content farms because those content farms served up Adsense ads from paying advertisers.

Adwords = you enter into a bidding war with your competitors to buy your way to the top of paid or sponsored links

Adsense = you publish those adwords ads or serve them on your website and big G shares a portion of it’s billions of dollars in Adwords revenue.

RSS feed Promotion and Scraper Sites

Blogs have a feature that static websites do not: RSS feeds. The ranking algorithm favors fresh content, it wants to show searchers “real time news”, a blog qualifies as a “news source” in a way that static conventional websites do not. Simply put a blog will beat a website in ranking in search results.

Some marketers discovered that by ”scraping” RSS feeds and simply republishing someone else’s article or blog post they could make a fast buck by serving up Adsense ads from a ”junk website”.

RSS feeds on eCommerce sites run into what is known as the “duplicate content penalty”. Imagine if you sold a dozen variants of a product, had a dozen different pages on your site and the only thing to differentiate each product was the color. Let’s say you sold decorative backing plates for light switches, and there were a dozen colors to choose from…. and all of those pages were published on your blog’s RSS feed. How is an algorithm going to decide if your internal pages are “newsworthy” when all it has to go by is the text (or lack thereof) on each page?

The SEO solution is to write text, craft a unique description of each “widget” you sell from your site, give the algorithm some help so it can differentiate one product from another.

Syndicating Our Content –  Good or Bad

Through RSS feeds our content (articles, blog posts, etc) to be syndicated. There are 2 very good reasons we want this:

1. Maximize Our Exposure much like we want to cast as wide a net as possible while fishing for new customers, much like we want to have our company found on social media sites.
2. Backlinks pointing to our sites. We want to write authoritative articles about our genre that qualify as Link Bait. An article so good other websites would want to republish it

Tags: asheville SEO expert, local search engine optimization, local SEO, local SEO expert, SEO tips

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Pay attention to your sitelinks and how they rank for local SEO

Friday, August 26th, 2011

Some of my local SEO musings for today:

If you rely on queries for business names to generate a lot of search traffic to your site, like most yellow pages sites do, you just got pushed way down the page, like Yelp appears in this example.  Local directory sites will need to beef up their review efforts to try to at least get attached to the Place Page result for these queries.

This may have made brand reputation management campaigns a bit easier.  Sites that want to push down bad results for brand queries can do strategic linkbuilding around URLs that are likely to get added as sitelinks (e.g. navigation links, URLs with decent inbound links, etc.).  That said, in doing a little (unscientific) research it does appear that sites with what I would consider weak brands are only displaying two sitelinks.  So go search for your brand and you may be able to get a quick idea of how strong it is in Google’s eyes.

Personal rep management campaigns also seem to benefit.  Check out this result O2business phones:

You can see the ‘corner the market’ strategy, right?

The moral of the story:

On the plus side, the sitelinks now give businesses even greater control on how they appear in the SERPs.  I fully expect to see further enhancements of this functionality where eventually the SERP looks more like a Place Page/Website/Plus combo than just a boring old SERP.

This means that unlike early fears, local SEO is a not the death of SEO operations but just another expanding opportunity, if you have the right guide.

Chuck Taft is an Asheville Local SEO expert who is the author of the book Topranked: The Straightforward Guide to Local SEO

Tags: asheville SEO expert, chuck taft, chuck taft asheville, local search engine optimization, local SEO, local SEO expert, SEO tips

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Title tags and Local SEO

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

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Critical local SEO tips from an Asheville expert

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

Local SEO is becoming a highly important skill nowadays with more and more companies starting to offer location based services. In my position as an Asheville local SEO expert I help a lot of companies get a quick jump start into the local SEO game. The old rules of SEO are just that, old, and small business owners need to pay attention to the latest trends in order to get ranked highly and draw more customers.

Even though there are lots of reasons for you to use local SEO, one of the most critical is that you can gain entry into less competitive but highly responsive markets. Since there will always be clients in your area, you can take advantage of local SEO no matter the type of business you run. Thus, you will be able to increase the size of your company in a new direction and find more targeted prospective clients.

It’s important that you get on Google and get your offline business profile made so it’ll be in their database. Registering with the three major search engines is easy, and be aware that they’ll call you so they can confirm your business address. Compared to the millions of offline businesses, there are very few profiles listed on the search engines, and that suggests people may not be aware of this. This simple step will help you with your local SEO efforts, and you really should do it asap.

If you want your site to be recognized on a local level then you need to be open about asking for reviews. You will be missing out on a lot of opportunities if you don’t use this strategy. The majority of the local sites are completely fine with your interacting with your customers and asking them to review you. So, why shouldn’t you enjoy all the advantages of this technique?

It’s simply an issue of taking enough time to ask your customers personally to provide a review for you. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to go out and ask people face to face. All you have to do is put up a request such as “We would really appreciate it if you could post a short review of our business on Bing/Yahoo local / Google.”

This message could be put on your thank you page (after they contact you or sign up for your ezine), in your email signature and on your website. Your business will get more customers in time because these reviews, no matter whether they are great, horrid or ugly, will increase the credibility of your business.

Last but not the least; make sure you have your complete mailing address mentioned all over your site, on every page. You always want to provide convenience to your website visitors, and that will help if they want to know. Local SEO involves much more, but these practices will help you with your site visitors.

Chuck Taft is a local SEO expert in the Asheville, NC area.

Tags: asheville SEO expert, chuck taft, chuck taft asheville, local search engine optimization, local SEO, local SEO expert, SEO tips

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Basic local SEO strategies for small businesses

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Many commercial websites engage in SEO strategies to further expand their website’s visibility. These techniques can help them to rank high in search results and thus provide better chances to attract customers and generate higher sales of their products.

However, before achieving a global popularity, it is better to first concentrate on how you can optimize your site’s visibility in the local section. This means that you must give importance on how your site will be known to potential customers who are located near your business actual address. This can be achieved by utilizing local SEO strategies.

Local SEO strategies can surely help you to efficiently compete with your local business rivals. Internet users who are searching for websites which are offering the products that they would like to purchase would definitely search for it locally.

For sure, they would prefer to buy those products in websites which physical address is near their place. To be able to get indexed by popular search engines, it is a wise idea to incorporate your business’ physical address to your website, web page titles, headings or contents. In this way, your website will have greater chances to appear in the local search results.

Another brilliant local SEO technique is to register your site in the Google map. This is free of charge and can definitely help your site to be more visible in local search and thus give your potential customers the exact location of your shop and making it easier for them to get to know your site better.

It is a practice to a lot of SEO experts to first research on the best keywords that you can incorporate to your site to make them more optimized for local search. You must determine the most popular keywords being used by internet users when searching the products your website is also catering.

You must also try to use those keywords and search for them using the popular search engines and take note of the websites that will rank high in the search results. Get to know your competitors and determine the strategies that helped them to achieve high ranking in search results. All these can give you clearer ideas on what strategies will be most appropriate for you to use.

A good local SEO strategy is to also include local keywords in your website. This is to gain better chances for your site to appear in search results when a potential customer is using more specific keywords like a product with a corresponding location. Internet users who are interested in buying a particular product will use keywords pertaining to a product in a specific local area.

When using Local SEO techniques, it is good to take note that the customers are the one looking for you therefore you must put yourself into their shoes and try to imagine how these people think. If you are the customer, what keywords would you probably use to search for a particular product or website? Local search optimization strategies are beneficial to use especially if your business targets customers who are near your vicinity.

Tags: local search engine optimization, local SEO, search engine marketing, SEO tips

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Predicting the payoff from SEO

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

SEO and local SEO are critical components of marketing for every website. There are many tips and techniques that are widely available that can help you increase the chances of getting a high ranking for the search keywords and phrases that are central to your marketing strategy.

Everyone knows that a higher ranking is better, but exactly how high does your ranking have to be to generate significant traffic for your website? Is it possible to predict how much traffic you can generate for a given search phrase and ranking?

It is well known that you can use a resource such as the Google Keyword Tool to estimate monthly traffic for a keyword. Once you have that number, the question becomes: given a particular ranking, what percentage of those searches will result in a visit to your website? You can’t really create a reliable, comprehensive search phrase strategy without this critical piece of information.

There is a variety of counsel and opinion on this topic, not all of it consistent. For instance, one website, which provides research, training and educational services exclusively for the publishing industry, states the following rule of thumb:

“When your website or landing page turns up on page one in Google, you’re getting 100% visibility…But what happens when your landing page ends up on page two or three? We estimate that you’re getting about 32% Google visibility on page two, meaning only about 32% of users ever click through to page two, and a meager 7% visibility on page three. If you’re on page four or beyond, you simply don’t have a chance of being seen by your potential customers.”

The authors cited no source for this rule of thumb, or explanation of how they developed it. There are a number of other rules of thumb about click distributions floating around on the web, which are entirely inconsistent with the above. I’m not going to dwell on these here; I’d rather get right to the data I believe is the most credible and useful.

SEO Click Disributions – The Best Data Avaliable

There have been several eye-tracking studies that have been done over the past few years, all of which produce consistent results. Perhaps the best-known among them is a study that was performed at Cornell University that showed the following:

This data tells a far different tale than the rule of thumb cited above: the first three ranks get 80% of the clicks, and the first page gets 98.9% of the clicks!

You might object, and I would agree, that this data is derived from an eye tracking study, not actual searches, and would thus compel some caution on extrapolating the results. Fortunately, there is some actual data available. In 2006, AOL leaked some data on over 36 million queries. The data was analyzed by Richard Hearne, and the results are as follows:

These results, by and large, are consistent with the Cornell eye-tracking study, in that the first page attracts an extremely high percentage of the clicks. The first three ranks garner 63% of the clicks; the top 10, 90%; the top 20, 94.5%. Here are the percentages for ranks 1-21, 31, and 41:

Viewed another way, an improvement in rank from second to first will almost quadruple the number of clicks. The number one ranking produces as many clicks as ranks two through eight combined. The drop-off in clicks is enormous by the time you get to the second page; a rank off 11 produces only .66% of the clicks; in comparison a rank of 10 produces more than 4 times as many, and the number 1 rank more than 60 times as many!

This click distribution has also been confirmed by an independent set of search data analyzed by Enquisite, a firm that specializes in search optimization software. Based on a proprietary data set of 300 million searches, the first page grabbed 89.71% of the clicks; the second 5.93%; the third, 1.85%, the fourth, .78%; and the fifth, .46%.

Since there are several methods that have produced highly similar results, there is a high degree of confidence that this data provides a reliable foundation on which to base an SEO strategy.

Implications for SEO Strategy

• The ranking you can achieve for any given search phrase depends on a number of factors, including how well you optimize your pages for the search phrase, your page rank, and the amount of competition. If you opt to compete for high volume search phrases with a lot of competition, you have to realistically weigh the chances that you can make the first page.
• A better option may be to pursue a long tail strategy, in which you set your sights on achieving a number one ranking on lower volume search phrases with lower levels of competition. This strategy necessarily involves multiple keywords in order to generate significant volumes of traffic for your website.
• But perhaps the best option of all, made possible by this data, would be to pursue a mixed strategy. The increase in traffic you can expect from improving your ranking for any particular search phrase can now be predicted. You can therefore weigh the incremental increase in your website traffic for an entire portfolio of search phrases, and allocate your efforts in a way that will optimize your ROI.

Tags: Ashville SEO expert, Internet Marketing, local SEO, SEO tips

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Estimating what you gain or lose in SEO ranking

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

To understand the importance of SEO work it is necessary for you to understand how much you stand to gain or lose through search ranking. To help you estimate how much traffic you may stand to gain or lose by moving up or down in the search engine rankings, the first thing you’ll need to review would be the concept of Click Distribution by SERP Ranking. This basically refers to how user’s clicks are distributed throughout the Top 10 SERP rankings.

If you recall, there are limited data sets available within the search industry regarding the distribution of clicks. I’ve taken the liberty of averaging all of the known data sets together in an effort to consolidate the percentages into one percentage. Here’s what I came up with for the click distribution percentages in SERP results.

• Position #1: 45.46% of all clicks
• Position #2: 15.69% of all clicks
• Position #3: 10.09% of all clicks
• Position #4: 5.49% of all clicks
• Position #5: 5.00% of all clicks
• Position #6: 3.94% of all clicks
• Position #7: 2.51% of all clicks
• Position #8: 2.94% of all clicks
• Position #9: 1.97% of all clicks
• Position #10: 2.71% of all clicks

Total: 95.91% of all clicks occur on Page #1 of SERPs

SERP Rankings, Search Volume, and Click Distribution

Lets follow this logic…by monitoring your search rankings, examining search volume, and applying the distribution percentages you can begin to get an idea of how much traffic you’re likely to receive based on where you rank within the search engines.

Lets work on an example. In our example, we’ll say that you’re a nationally prominent seller of dog supplies. Over the past few years you’ve worked really hard and are now ranking #10 for the term “dog supplies.”

By using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you’ll see that the key term “dog supplies” receives 74,000 Global Monthly Searches.

This is the first place where it gets a little tricky. Which search volume number do you use? This depends on your business type and how realistic you wish to be about the quality of your traffic.

If you’re a global brand like Petco or Petsmart then its safe to say you should use the Global Search Volume number. However, if you’re brand is more local within your country, you should go with the Local Monthly Search Volume (Note: Your Local Monthly Search Volume constitues the search volume generated by your country, in my case the United States).

Now, lets apply our initial logic.

“Dog supplies” generates 74,000 global monthly searches and we’re currently (fictionally) ranking #10. Based on our original click distribution percentages, we should receive 2.71% of all clicks. If that’s the case, we should currently be getting approximately (carry the one, minus the blah blah) 2,005 visits. That’s 74,000 x 0.0271. Make sense?

Now, lets make another connection. Let’s imagine that you’ve worked really really hard – built your links, ate your spinach, said your prayers – and achieved the #1 ranking for the term “dog supplies!” Good work.

Based on the percentages, we’ll now take 74,000 and multiply it by 0.4546. This SERP position should give us approximately 33,640 visits. That’s a big jump in traffic and clearly shows you how valuable the #1 position can be in terms of gaining additional traffic. But how much did you gain?

Okay, let’s put this last piece together. Take 33,640 visits minus 2,005 visits and you’ll see that you stand to gain 31,635 additional visits by moving from position #10 to #1.

Quickly, let’s apply this logic backwards. Let’s say you’re ranking #3 and slip to #6. At the #3 position you should expect around 7,467 visits. At position #6, you should expect around 2,916 visits. That’s a slip of 4,551 visits! That’s a lot to lose and can be the difference in gaining or losing a lot of web revenue/exposure.

The Flaws in this Logic

Now here’s the disclaimer. The above logic is flawed. It assumes that every search result is absolutely perfect and only includes the 10 organic listings – nothing else. We know that’s false.

The search results of this day and age are what I like to call “muddy.” The reason I call them Muddy SERPs is that there are so many different types of results that are injected right into the natural results that may draw a click away and water down the click percentages (local, news, social, etc).

Here is an example of a Muddy SERP result:

In addition, there are different types of searches. Different search contexts certainly impact the patterns in which people click around the SERPs, which in turn may affect the click distribution percentages.

Different types of search classifications is discussed in detail by Aaron Wall over at SEOBook. These types are Navigational, Transactional, and Informational.

• In general, for navigational searches people click the top result more often than they would on an informational search.
• In general, for informational searches people tend to click throughout the full set of search results at a more even distribution than they would for navigational or transactional searches.
• The only solid recently-shared publicly data on those breakdowns is from Dogpile, a meta search engine. But given how polluted meta search services tend to be (with ads mixed in their search results) those numbers were quite a bit off from what one might expect. And once more, they are aggregate numbers.

Another thing that may affect how the numbers that Google may not show are the number of searches that don’t result in a click. With the new Google Instant Search feature, I know that many of my searches are abandoned quickly without a click if I don’t see what I need right away. This type of behavior may not take place on the other two major search engines, but Google is ahead of the curve in this regard.

The Smartest Thing To Do

The best thing you can do is knock at least 30% off of whatever number you have, and then you may have a more accurate estimate of the real traffic that may come in by being at a certain position.

So with that logic we’ll re-approach our original example. Remember, we were ranking #10 in which we were garnering 2,005 visits. Remember, we moved to the #1 position which represented 33,640 visits.

Let’s slice 30% right off of both of those numbers. The #10 ranking will probably garner closer to 1,404 visits rather than the original estimate of 2,005 visits. Likewise, the #1 ranking will probably pull in something closer to 23,548 visits rather than our original estimate of 33,640 visits.

This means that you ultimately stand to gain around 22,144 visits per month by moving from the #10 SERP result to the #1 SERP for the term “dog supplies.”

There it is! You’ve done it. You can apply this logic – however flawed – going forward to attempt to estimate traffic gains/losses by fluctuations in SERP rank.

Tags: google instant, Internet Marketing, search engine marketing, SEO tips

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Yelp jumps ahead of Google using service areas as ranking factors

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Nearly a year ago Google added the ability to set a service area for local businesses in Google Places. At the time there was speculation as to how it might influence rankings and many local SEO’s quickly realized it didn’t have as much influence as promoted. Except that if you opted to hide your address, because you were a home based business, it more or less kicked you right out of the rankings all together. That unfortunate side effect of hiding an address has been fixed since the roll out of the new blended organic-local results. But there still is no strong ranking benefits outside of the actual city your address is tied to.

Will Google one day get around to using service areas as a ranking factor for businesses serving say, a larger metropolitan area from one of the outskirt communities (a common occurrence)? Well it appears Yelp has recently done just that.

“…business owners in service-based categories who have unlocked their Yelp page will be able to add up to 5 major cities to their areas of service via our Business Owner Tools!

The best part? Once a business updates its areas of service, it becomes searchable in those cities on Yelp.“

This feature has been added only for specific categories of businesses, these that tend to be service based businesses that travel to customers locations.

Now that Yelp has upped the ante, how long till Google follows suit?

Tags: google places, local SEO, SEO tips, yelp

Posted in Google, Yelp | 1 Comment »

The importance of internal linking

Monday, February 28th, 2011

One of the elements of site development and SEO that often gets overlooked is internal linking. When done right, you can kill two birds with one stone, and improve both search rankings and usability. You may be familiar with the fact that when sites link to other sites, search engines pass value for the terms/phrases used in the link anchor text. (Anchor text is the highlighted text in the link.)

When working on improving rankings for a site, people usually try to target links from other sites (external links) that have the desired anchor text related to terms they want to rank for. However, contextual internal links can also be effective in helping to improve a site’s rankings for targeted keyphrases.

Your website’s text content is filled with opportunities to potentially pass link juice to other pages of your site and to help users find their end destination.

To start improving your internal linking strategy, go through your site section by section, page by page, and see where it would make sense (from a user’s point of view), and insert some contextual links to other pages that you want to rank better.

Be sure to use the keywords/phrases (in the anchor text) that you would like the destination pages to rank for. In your links to these pages throughout the site, vary it up and don’t use the exact same phrases in anchor text, or it will look artificial to both search engines and users.

Tags: internal links, local search engine optimization, SEO tips, website design

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