Marketing Defined

The application of Accurate Internal Linking Strategies to gain an increase in free targeted website traffic — is often overlooked by many an Internet Marketing and SEO novice.

Links received from external sources are only a part of the overall linking campaign for a webmaster.

Whereas improvements in a site’s internal linkage system, will often bring a positive surge to its’ popularity and SE rankings.

An increase in profits will result if the site becomes easier to navigate. Your potential customers will naturally leave a site that is difficult to move around in, and seek out a competitor who provides better navigation.

Following are the main factors to consider for enhanced Navigation of a website:

SITE MAP:

An expert Site Map should be easy to navigate. When setting up the site map, group the various internal directories into overall themes.

Arrange related topics together to reinforce one another’s theme relevance. By doing so, you are helping the search engine spider recognize the overall themes and topics of your website.

A well developed site map also enables the spiders to more thoroughly crawl a site’s directories by providing entries to those deeper Web pages.

The close interconnection of themes means better rankings in the big 3: Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Site themes are a very important part of the current search algorithms of all major search engines.

Importantly, well planned site navigation means your visitors will easily purchase products and services from your site ..which should bring a smile to any webmaster’s face.

When setting up the site map, make certain that each link to the receiving page contains link anchor text specific to that page.

For example, if the receiving page is about Persian cats, place the keyword phrase “Persian cats” in the site map link.

The additional anchor text, pointing to the desired page, targets that page for that search term.

The added link anchor text reinforces the theme of the receiving page for the search engines, providing an added boost in the search rankings.

The keywords also aid the site user by providing direct information about the content of the page being linked.

MENUS:

The Menus you set up to enable a visitor to move around easily, should preferably be of the HTML variety. SE spiders may overlook Flash buttons and will ignore Javascript, and if they must be employed ..corresponding HTML links should be provided.

As with all links, it is essential that descriptive keyword anchor text is part of all page-connecting links. This reinforces theme relevance.

Right-hand side menus are preferable, thus directing the SE spiders to first read the content containing the all-important keyphrases.

FOOTER LINKS:

As an opportunity to use good keyword rich link anchor text, footer links are a huge plus to a campaign for high SE rankings and increase the flow of targeted traffic to a website.

It is recommended the anchor text for Home should be: Business Name Home. The anchor text for About Us should read, at minimum: About Company Name.

If the domain or company name includes a targeted keyword, added search engine benefits are derived.

NOTE: the Footer anchor text places additional, important keyword density on the page. ..but do refrain from overloading the bottom of a web page with a hundreds of links .. it screams out Spam, and only dilutes any benefits to be gained from such links.

Repeating the website’s main keyphrase in a tagline under the final copyright notice, has also shown to improve SE results. Please see such an example at the very bottom of the placeholder webpage, of the soon to be published main site .. here: Increase free website traffic at Marketing Defined

KEYWORD CHOICES in ANCHOR TEXT of Internal Links:

For accurate SEO of internal site links, it is crucial you always use keywords in the anchor text that reflects the theme of the receiving page.

This keyword relevant link anchor text is highly valued by the link-crazy Google, but is also necessary for higher rankings in Yahoo and MSN Search.

It naturally follows that clickable links on all navigational aids should reflect the targeted keywords for the linked-to page. This link anchor text reinforces the important theme for the page receiving the link.

If your target page is SE optimized for Black Cats, the link anchor text should reflect that term. Link text for Persian Cats would not count and should be reserved for linking to the Persian Cats page.

Don’t use the link text of Black Cats for the clickable link to any pages other than the Black Cat page.

Do keep the anchor text relevance clean and concentrated to the targeted page only.

The link anchor text is a lot more effective if the page receiving the link has the anchor text in its title tags — and should also be in the page’s unique URL — This is the correct focus to place on the Meta Tags of a web page.

It is important the content should include the keyword phrase at the appropriate density of between 2% - 7%. The overall benefit is derived from the concentration of theme relevance.

NOTE: Keyword repetition should be no more than 2 for every 100 words for Google, and upto 7% for Yahoo and MSN.

[Wayne Hurlbert from Blog Business World - Internet Marketing and SEO News is a SEO specialist whose work I have admired and learned enormously from in the past 3 years ..parts of this Post are attributed to what I have directly learned from Wayne. His articulate and expert commentary is usually a first source of reference to quantify any Internet Marketing or SEO website traffic strategy]

Finally - Simply changing your internal navigation will not launch your site to the top of the rankings, but if you use every advantage available, the top ten ranking for your site will hold it’s position, particularly for highly competitive keyphrases.

Accurate inter-linking or internal linking as a SEO strategy will not only get your pages doing better, but will help get your entire site spidered .. and will help build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases .. End result: A healthy Increase in profits from free, targeted web site traffic.

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