inbound linking Archives - The Content Marketing Blog

When it comes to SEO, we’re often focused completely on the practice of building our catalog of external links for our clients’ websites. But just as important is the practice of building your repertoire of internal links. If you consider any link as a recommendation of your site in the same way you consider external links recommendations to Google that, “Hey, this site has good content,” then why wouldn’t you recommend your own content and web pages to Google? This is why Internal Linking is such an important tool of SEO specialists, especially if you have a well-ranked high authority site already. You can use your well-trafficked and highly ranked pages to direct spiders and users to more content such as a limited-time campaign “recommended” by the high authority page. Likewise, internal linking provides important navigational features to your site that help users orient themselves and find what they want on your site without having to use search boxes or find orphan pages.
In the year 2013, these are mistakes nobody should be making, but there are also some important things you can do that your competitors might not be that can help you get an edge on the competition.

1. Link to Your Most Profitable/Converting Pages

It goes without saying that at the end of the day companies hire SEO specialists and Internet marketers to help them make money. So, as someone in one of those positions, you want to drive users to the most profitable and highest converting pages on a client’s site. Therefore, the more inbound links to that page, the more you’ll show up in the search engines and (hopefully) get more traffic. Of course, don’t just post href HTML codes everywhere, but don’t neglect the fact that many very profitable businesses put “most popular items” or “recently searched” in their top navigation. You already know these are highly converting pages, so why wouldn’t you try and increase exposure of these pages?

2. Link to Relevant, Related Pages

Nobody wants to have excessive links on a web page. It looks messy, cluttered and overly aggressive on behalf of the business. That being said, most web sites actually underutilize internal links rather than abuse them. If you’ve ever been a regular browser of Wikipedia, you’ll know that providing links to related, relevant and quality content can drive traffic to other pages you wouldn’t have originally considered. That’s why in your SEO strategy you should be utilizing SEO to link to related content on a regular basis. For example, if your client’s site runs a blog and the client has a web page or another blog on a related or relevant subject, you might want to consider linking to these pages. Say your site had a page on landscaping, and you wrote a blog about landscaping. This would be a great time to internally link to that central web page or an earlier blog about a similar landscaping service. Though it may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many webmasters, content developers and SEO specialists neglect to do this. Google also gives a boost to pages linked with relevant anchor text to the page’s content–which as you’ve just seen is something you can easily do.

3. Provide Breadcrumb Navigation

I can’t think of a web browser that doesn’t have a back button, but that doesn’t mean you should let your users rely on it. Breadcrumb navigation (i.e. linking back to a more broad page from one with a narrower scope or focus) is often forsaken in favor of users’ browser back buttons. Nevertheless, breadcrumbs are a great way of ensuring your pages aren’t dead-ends, enhancing the navigational experience for users as well as sneaking in a couple extra internal links. Retail outlets and e-commerce sites such as Wal-Mart and Amazon are common users of this strategy for their sites, and clearly they’re doing pretty well in the search engine rankings. Why shouldn’t you? As an added plus, it again also allows you to easily and thoughtlessly add relevance to web pages with anchor text that is almost undeniably related to the web page in question.

Our guest blogger is Ricardo Casas is the CEO and founder of Fahrenheit Marketing LLC, an Austin, Texas based internet marketing company. With over a decade of experience in the field, Ricardo has seen the field change dramatically and knows how to adapt quickly to the pressures of the rapidly changing world of SEO.

With Penguin 2.0 upon us you should be adjusting your inbound link campaign accordingly. Matt Cutts (Head of Google Spam) has given us plenty of warning about Penguin 2.0 and how you should tacking your link building.

You Will Not Get Ranked With Links Alone

Internet Marketing is not just about link building anymore; you need to focus on various other factors as well if you want to perform well on search results. If you take a look at the below graph, inbound marketing does play a large part in search engine rankings, but you cannot just focus on link building.

If your website has poor onsite SEO, no regular blog posts, no social signals and no brand signals, you will never rank. Every section in the above graph is as important as the other. Do not think of Internet marketing as ranking high on Google, instead think of it as earning high traffic volume as your goal.

In this article I will be only discussing about inbound links, Brand vs Keyword. I thought I would add this note and graph so website owners wouldn’t think creating backlinks alone would earn them more traffic!

How Your Links Should Be Created

For those of you that are not 100% keyed up with inbound marketing, I will quickly go over it. Do not do any of the below:

Pay for backlinks.
Waste your time adding links in headers, footers or sidebars.
Join any link scheme or automated service.
Include your link in spammy content.
Have your link on irrelevant, untrustworthy sites.

Basically keep your links looking natural by guest blogging quality content with your link included naturally.

Keyword Backlinks

For many years now having keyword backlinks used to play a huge role in the positioning of your website on Google, not so much today. A keyword backlink is your targeted keyword used as an anchor text and usually pointing back to your homepage.

I believe keyword backlinks are important, but something you shouldn’t focus all your attention on. You should never only focus on your homepage, you should always build links to all web pages within your website. Every page is important, not just your homepage so build links to all.

If you wasn’t already aware, you should only try and optimize 2 main keywords for each web page, anymore than 2 will start looking unnatural. From these 2 keywords you need to build a list of variants using Google Keyword Tool and Trends. If you are using the same keyword backlinks to your pages, it will start looking unnatural. This is why having a list of variants will keep your links looking natural with the added advantage of being ranked higher for more key phrases.

Brand Links

Brand backlinks are anchor links that contain your company name, website address or a company employee. Branding is huge with Internet marketing at the minute and will be for many years.

Creating brand backlinks will increase your websites traffic on search results in the long run. The key is creating the quality content surrounding your backlink. If your end goal is to get ranked for keywords along the lines of ‘Builder London’, your content should be focused around that theme. For example, you could write an article on how buildings have evolved in London over the past 100 years. This content will be high value and of interest to users, at the same time, 100% focused on your keyword. Instead of using a keyword backlink, use a brand backlink. This way Google will connect your brand and website with the theme of your article (Builder London), thus increasing your sites authority and trust, which will then lead to higher rankings for this keyword, amongst other variants.

Brand backlinks will give your site more authority over keyword backlinks as your content will be connected to all text within the article. Not around the targeted keyword link.

Maintain A Ratio

Before reevaluating your inbound link campaign, have a company generate an internet marketing strategy for your business, not only for your links, but for blogging and social signal. If you are promoting all of these sections, your site will see a return on visitors. I would suggest creating 5 brand links for every one keyword backlink. This way your inbound links stay looking natural.

By Kev Massey – Kev is the Sales Manager at SixtyMarketing and writes the majority of blog posts for SixtyMarketing giving free, useful Internet marketing & web design tips. Please follow Kev and his team on Facebook for their latest posts.