SEO Tip #3 - Build traffic to your blog through internal linking
Google, as you probably know, looks at how many inbound links a page has to determine how to rank it in search results for any given term. Inbound links can come from outside your site or from within the site. External sites that link to your blog or a page on OleOle have more strength but internal are also extremely important - and can be controlled more easily.
This post is about YOUR blog, and how each and every day you can help build traffic by just adding a few links. That's it - just add a few links to your daily post to club, team, league, or player sections on OleOle (also called Topic pages or Topic communities).
Please add links in the body of EVERY post. Not once in a while - every time. This is in addition to choosing the right Topics for every post. And, tell other bloggers in the community to do the same - it will help them build their readership, too. I'll pick on Harry Hotspur to give you an example of how this should work, then explain the theory.
EXAMPLE
On Harry Hotspur's post: http://www.blogger.com/blogs/harryhotspur/posts/david-villa-too-expensive-said-tottenham. In this post, Harry uncovers the fact that Tottenham can't afford David Villa, the Spanish star (or are just too cheap - not sure which exactly). There are no text links in the post, except to an offsite blog. What would help build traffic to both OleOle and the blog is if Harry (names have been changed to protect the guilty) linked the body text "David Villa" to the David Villa main page on OleOle, "Spain" to the Spanish Team page, "Valencia" to the Valencia page, and "Tottenham" to the Tottenham page.
Now, notice that the text is linked to the name of the topic - this is really important. This is "anchor Text" and it give the link relevence. If I linked to David Villa with: click here for David Villa - I have not provided any relevance to the link. "Click here" is useless, and unless its you're first time online, you know what a link looks like so you don't need instructions on what to do. SO, always use anchor text. The links above in this post (to club, team, league, player) are actually NOT helpful because they don't contain relevant anchor text.
So, in summary, that's 4 links in the body of the post to other sections on OleOle, nothing more. It took me less than a minute while writing this.
THE THEORY
How in the hell does that work to help build traffic? Every link - both internal and external - to a page on OleOle helps build the credibility of that page, or its PageRank (as Google calls it). The more links to that page from other pages, the higher the PageRank, and (all things being equal) the higher the ranking that page will have in search engine results. In this specific example, the link to David Villa (and any player in general) would have helped the David Villa page the most. But, since Harry selected "David Villa" as a topic, his post is displayed on the David Villa community in the Recent Blog Posts widget for all to see.
We have ~5,800 teams on the site, and ~57,000 players. For any one section to get highly ranked by Google, it needs many many inbound links. When a search engine ranks an OleOle page higher in search results, that section gets more visitors, and your blog post will get read more. OleOle gets more members, you get more interaction and more famous. Its that simple.
In addition, linking contextually using "anchor text" is MUCH more powerful than links on menus. Search engines give more link relevance to links in body text so they weight those links higher. (Google might also look at the surrounding text to establish context - but this is unproven).
Internal links (links from other pages on the same site) do not have as much weight as external links, and external links with anchor text are the absolute best. But, all links help!
So, if you link to a few topic pages (or history pages) from the body of your blogs each and every day, we will gradually increase the page rank of the topics you're writing about, increasing our listing status in search results, which in turn increases new site visitors, and directly increases the number of people reading your blog.
DO IT - ITS EASY
How hard is it? NOT HARD! Our cracker-jack development team has made it super-easy, in fact with a an easy Quick Link Helper. When writing your blog post, in 'Visual View' just:
- Highlight the term that you want to link to with your mouse. (in this case 'David Villa')
- Click CTRL-Q (works best with Firefox) or click the Hyperlink button on the function menu. You'll see the Link Helper pop-up, and if your text is spelled correctly, you'll see a list of topics appear. If the list doesn't appear, type a variation of the keyword (e.g. delete the 'AS' from 'AS Monaco').
- Choose the correct topic from the list - the link will automatically be found and visible so you can check it.
- Choose Main page or History page with the radio buttons
- Click INSERT and you're done. It's really that easy.
The CTRL-Q Link Helper function also works in Wiki history pages to make linking on those pages fast, too.
NOTES: only one (1) link is necessary for any one (1) topic per post. If you link to Tottenham 18 times in a single post, that will actually hurt pagerank, not help it, since search engines will recognize this as 'link spam'. So, just link once or twice per keyword. Also, don't dilute the links by linking to everything in the post - try to link to no more than 5 topics per post. Generally, any Topic you choose for the post should also have a link in the body text.
Internal Linking: It's good for you, it's good for your readers, it's good for OleOle!
Tom Kuhr
Tom has opinions.
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