Navigational (Menus)

Navigational links are included in the menus found at the top of your site, on the left or right hand side, and the footer of each page.  These links appear on hundreds or thousands of pages of your site giving you a lot of keyword rich anchor text for a specific page, but you also have to think about the user.  Don't stuff links in the menu that they are not going to find relevant.

One of the problems with navigational links are that you are limited in how many you can use.  Obviously, you don't want every single page on your site to link to every other one.  Unless you have a really small site you would run out of room quickly.  Most of your navigational links should point to your category or tier two pages using the keyword anchor text you are really wanting to target for that page.

If you are using relational menus you can change the anchor text used in your navigation on the different menus used for each category.  This will give you a boost for any slight variations of the keyword, but you have to be careful when using this technique.  You don't want to make a drastic change and confuse the user.

Context (Within the Content)

Contextual links are included in the body of the content that you write.  You can use these links to direct the reader to more information about a subject or to anything else that's relevant.  I have found a single contextual link is given more weight than an individual menu link.

It's important to make the contextual links appear naturally in your content.  You don't want to keyword stuff your content just to give yourself a chance to link to a page using a certain anchor text.

If used the right way contextual links can provide a big boost to your site.  Think of Wikipedia.  They do a massive amount of internal linking across their site and as a result they rank very highly for a wide variety of keyword terms.  They do not stuff these keywords into the text, the author writes naturally and links to relevant pages wherever it fits.

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Originally posted at: Using Internal Links to Boost Rankings

<a href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/on-page-website-optimization/">on-page optimization</a>

and the anchor text is "on-page optimization."

Importance

Why is anchor text so important?  Because the words used in the anchor text go a very long way towards getting the page being linked to ranked for the keywords used as the anchor text.  The example link above will give a slight boost to my page in the rankings for "on-page optimization".

For competitive terms, a single link is not going to give you a big boost.  Competitive terms can have hundreds, if not thousands, of links pointing to the top pages for the given keyword.

Internal & External

It's not only important to link to your own pages using the anchor text you want to rank for, but you also need links from other sites.  In fact, links from external sites are going to be given more weight, because it is easy for you to create pages and send links to your own page using whatever anchor text you want.  In theory, links from other people's sites are tougher to earn and thus deemed more trustworthy.

Use Variations

It is important to mix up the anchor text that you use to point to your pages.  If 100% of your external links are pointing to a page with the same anchor text, it looks spammy.  I'm not entirely sure if there are filters set up to catch this type of search engine gaming or not.  It seems likely to me that there are, but either way it's not a good idea.  You want to rank for every possible combination of the anchor text, plus any modifiers that could be used to describe the page so mixing up the anchor text to your page makes a lot of sense.

For example if you have a page that sells "men's hats" you might also want to rank for "hats for men."  By driving anchor text to the page with a variety of terms, you can rank for different variations.

What the experts do is drive enough anchor text to rank on the first page for several related keywords, then take a long hard look at their analytics.  They check to see what keywords are driving the most traffic and what converts the best.  Those are the keywords that take top priority.  The answers are not always as obvious as they seem and can lead to a more efficient use of resources going forward.

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Originally posted at: What is Anchor Text

What I do is use relational menus.  I call it "relational" because depending on the category of the piece of content the user is currently on, the menu will change.

For example, on this site I use a right-hand menu structure.  On the homepage and all of my category pages I list the different categories.  However, if a visitor clicks down to read a pice of "Search Engine Marketing" content the right-hand menu changes to show links to my most popular and important posts pertaining to SEO.  What this does is increase the PageRank that is pushed to these pages, enabling them to rank higher in the search engine results.

Other webmasters who use this trick also try to block the links to other category pages, thus preserving and pushing more PageRank to the tier three pages.  However, I leave the links to my other category pages as well.  For me, these pages serve as landing pages for highly competitive keywords so I still want to push as much link juice as I can to them.

If you try to block link juice from passing through your links you have to use javascript or other technical tricks of the trade.  It's easy to screw up.  If you do mess something up, you will be doing yourself more harm than good.

In WordPress I use this simple trick to display relational menus.  On the template that shows your posts find the call to include your menu. It will look something like this:

<?php

include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");

?>

You want to replace that code with something like:
<?php
if ( in_category('keyword-strategy') ) {    include(TEMPLATEPATH."/keywordsidebar.php");}

else if ( in_category('search-engine-marketing') ) {

include(TEMPLATEPATH."/seosidebar.php");

} else if ( in_category('social-media-marketing') ) {

include(TEMPLATEPATH."/socialsidebar.php");

}

else {

include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");

}

?>

In place of "keyword-strategy" you will want to include the slug of a category on your site.  Obviously name the sidebar something specific for each category of menus you want to include.  You can do this with as many categories as you have on your site, just keep adding "else if" statements to include them.

If the category related to your post is not in your list, the default is used.  If you select more than one category, the one that shows up first in your if statement is displayed.

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Originally posted at: Relational Menus

With this article I am going to focus on linking for the search engine spiders.  You will be designing your link structure to get more of your pages indexed and to focus more link juice on your main pages.

When you are trying to build up your important pages there are two things to consider: limit the number of outgoing links on that page and increase the number of pages linking in to that page. Here are four ways to do that.

1.  Combine Your Overhead Pages

Every site has some standard fluff pages that they need to include but do not need to show up in the search engine rankings.  These can include a privacy policy, terms of service, contact us, earnings disclaimer, etc.  Instead of wasting valuable link juice pointing to an individual page for each, create a single page with all of this information and use named anchors to point users directly to the specific section they are looking for.  In my PageRank sculpting article I describe in detail how this is done.

2.  Control Your Outbound Links

The last thing I want you to do is create a site that is a "black hole."  These are sites that link juice enters but can never, ever escape because the site will never link to anyone else.  You should freely link to other sites that provide valuable information to your readers.

What I am suggesting is that you avoid linking to other sites from your homepage, category, tag, and archive pages (the pages you are driving a lot of link juice to).  It's easy to take the links out of your summaries (the short versions of your post that display on these pages).  This will keep your PageRank flowing to your own internal content while also allowing you to link out freely from inside of your articles.

3.  Use a SiteMap Wisely

I use an archive page that links to all of my categories and sub-categories.  If your category archives are large enough where you have several pages of archives, you want to link to each of these pages from your sitemap. This ensures that every piece of content on your site is only three clicks away from the hompage.  By linking to the sitemap from my homepage it increases the chances that the spiders will crawl every single page of my site, leaving no piece of content so far from the homepage that it is forgotten by the spiders.

You should limit the number of links on this page to 100.  The search engines don't crawl an infinite number of outgoing links on a page, they normally cut it off around 100 so if you have a large number of categories, create additional sitemap pages.

4.  Limit Global Navigation Links

Most sites have some sort of global navigation menu.  This menu is the same on every single page of the site.  If you are going to have one of these, you want to limit the number of links in the menu as much as possible.  This conserves pagerank on every page of the site and pushes more to the few pages you link to from the menu.

Another tactic you can use is to change the navigation as users dive deeper into the site.  For example, on this site if someone clicks on the "Search Engine Marketing" category and then clicks through to a piece of content, the menu changes from what's on the homepage to my "SEO" menu listing the important pieces of SEO content I have written.

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Originally posted at: Homepage Linking & Navigation

So, what is the best way to organize your content?  You want to create a funnel that takes them from a general area and narrows it down to a highly targeted, specific page on your site.  Each click a visitor makes needs to take them to a page that exactly matches what they expected to find when clicking that link.  Each click should narrow their options until they reach their final destination.

Home Page (Tier 1)

Most users will visit your homepage at some point.  What your homepage should do is tell the visitor what your site is about and serve as a starting point to finding more specific information.  You need to make it extremely easy for people to find what they are looking for from your homepage and you do this with your main navigational links (or main menu).

What are people going to want to do on your site?  What are the most common questions they will want answered?  When you know the answers to these questions you can look at your homepage and see how easy it is for a visitor to find what they are looking for.

Categories (Tier 2)

Your homepage should link to each category you have on your site.  I prefer to create a landing page of general information covering each category, but if you are using a WordPress site you can use links to your category archives that list every post you have created under that category.

Obviously create as many categories for your site as you need, but you will want at least three links in your main menu.  If you get too many categories that you are linking to you might want to see if there are any opportunities to consolidate.

Content Pages (Tier 3)

Your important content resides in this tier three section and is linked to from your category pages.  Using my site as an example a user can easily go from the homepage to the "Search Engine Marketing" category and then from that category page to this article on organizing content.  For content sites like mine their third tier will be the actual articles, but in an ecommerce store this tier would contain the product pages.

Deep Content (Tier 4 & Beyond)

If you site grows large you may add tiers.  Using the example of an ecommerce store, a product page may link to reviews, color choices, different styles, etc.

Tailor This Structure to Your Needs

As you organize your content keep the user's navigation in mind and go from general to specific.  Use this as a basic guide, but if you are in a targeted niche your site might essentially be a "category" of a larger site.  You may only need to go two levels deep.

If on the other hand you run a large site you might need categories within categories and can get a very deeply tiered site going.

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Originally posted at: Organizing Your Content

Title

Page titles are the most important part of on-page SEO.  They tell the spiders and your visitors what the page is about.  Titles are the text you see at the top of a browser window when you are looking at a page.  They are the clearly displayed, links to your page in the results given by the search engines.

You can edit your page's title in the <title> tag of the HTML code.  If you are using WordPress or another content management system the title will be easily editable in the backend.

Some tips for writing an effective page title:

• Use your keywords near the beginning of your title - these words will be highlighted on the results page by the search engine.
• Use less than 70 characters - this is all a browser and a results page will display.  Use that space effectively and avoid running your title over the edge.
• Entice a click through - great headlines encourage user's to click through by getting them interested.  Stuffing keywords in the title doesn't get the user excited to see what's on the page.
• Use different titles on each page - you are mapping each keyword to a single page so this shouldn't be a problem.  Don't create several pages that rehash the same idea as this is seen as spammy and doesn't add anything to your site.  If you have more to say just create a longer page.

Headings

If a piece of text appears larger than the rest of the text on the page, it's more than likely included inside a heading.  These are the <h1> (or 2,3,4 or 5) tags included on the page.  Search engines look at headings for another clue as to what the page is about and give them more weight.  Use the <h1> tag only once per page, and include <h2> tags if you have a couple of sub-headings in your post that you want to stand out.

URL Structure

A URL gives an exact location of a page, for instance this page is located at http://www.jamiefaidley.com/on-page-website-optimization/ .  You want to name your page after the keyword you are targeting.  With WordPress you change the permalink structure under settings to "%postname%".  Here are some more tips on quality URL structures:

• Keep them short and sweet.  Longer URLs are no good.  Don't create a lot of directories and sub-directories extending out the URL.
• Separate words with dashes (-).  Don't just run words together.  Some people use the underscore (_) instead but stick with what's common.
• You don't want to have your URL's be numbers or a date. Instead use your keywords.

Load Time

Users want their information fast.  If your page is taking too long to load then it's likely the visitor will just hit the back button and look for another site.  I wrote an article on how to speed up your WordPress blog if you want a few tips on increasing your site's speed.  Basically, the less code, images, widgets, and plugins you use the better.  Think simple.  Also, go with a quality hosting provider as that alone can show significant improvements in your site's speed.

Keyword Stuffing

Don't stuff your keywords in the body of your text!  This might seem counter intuitive since we have talked about the importance of having your keywords located on the page, but trust me it won't work.

Write the body of your article with the end user in mind.  You want your content to be readable and to solve the user's problems.  Even if you were to rank for a page that is stuffed with keywords, the visitor would quickly bounce off of the page if it didn't answer their question.

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Originally posted at: On-Page Website Optimization

You are not going to be able to optimize a single page of your site for a wide variety of terms.  Your title and meta description only allow for so many characters before you are cut off.  That is why we target only 1-3 keywords per page.  You will want to create new content on your site that is fully optimized for each of the major keywords you are going after and that content should deliver exactly what the user expects to find for that particular search.

Now, you don't need to create new pages for every small modifier of your term.  As long as the modifier doesn't completely change the meaning (free v. buy), most can be combined for a single page of your site.  When you are creating a brand new site, it's more important to focus on the bigger picture and get content created for your more general terms first.  After getting the basic structure of your site complete you can work down on the extremely specific content within the broader categories.

As your site matures you are going to want to use your analytics to map out additional keywords.  If people are finding your site already using a keyword term, then make sure you are serving them the answers they are looking for.  If you aren't, create that content and start directing that traffic to the appropriate page.  You won't have to do much work to rank for these terms since you already are, but you will be able to increase your conversion rate off of that traffic.

So where does that leave the homepage?  Your homepage is likely going to have the most incoming links and thus the most pagerank of any page on your site.  However, your homepage likely will not be very specific for any kind of search term.  That means you should take your 1-3 most important, competitive, general keywords and target them to your homepage.  As you keep working on your SEO you will be able to rank for more and more terms, but start small and achieve some successful rankings before you move on to additional terms.

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Originally posted at: Mapping Keywords to Pages

Even without as many inbound links as a competitor, the internal linking structure of a site can push it higher in the rankings.  A solid site structure magnifies your link building efforts, giving you more "bang for your buck."  There are two audiences you are trying to serve with your site structure:

Human Visitors

Always focus on your human users.  Your most important goal should be to make the site easy to use for your "real" visitors.  The user should be able to get to where they want to go in just a few clicks with each click getting them closer to their goal and final destination.

Every goal you have with your site has to do with the end user, whether it's to get them to buy something from you, support your cause, or whatever else.  A positive experience will leave your visitors happy and happy visitors sign up for your newsletter, purchase products, and link to your site.

Search Engine Spiders

You optimize your site structure for search engine spiders in three ways: funneling link juice to your most important pages, firing keyword-rich anchor text to pages on your site, and linking to your deep content to make sure those pages get indexed.

Link juice is important because each page has to have a certain amount of pagerank in order to be shown in the results. The more pages that link to the page, the more pagerank gets sent to that page.

Anchor text tells the spiders what the page the link is pointing to is about.  Keyword-rich anchor text is the holy grail of SEO marketers, but too many ignore the opportunities presented on their own sites.  If you are looking to get a boost for a certain keyword, change the anchor texts of your internal links to that page and more than likely it will help.

Getting every page on your site indexed is important.  This gives you more pages to work with for firing anchor text and it gives you more landing pages in the search engine results.  The more landing pages you have in the index the more long tail keyword terms you are going to rank for without even trying.  Don't discount this traffic because over time it will make up the majority of your new visitors.

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Originally posted at: Why Site Structure is Important

Definition

For the main page of your site the keywords will be the terms and phrases that best describe what your business, site, product, or service is about.  It is what the users will type into a search engine to find you.  They are the terms that you are going to pay to show up for in the results while running your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.

Keywords are more than just a single word.  I use the term to cover any phrase or combination of words that are used by the searcher.

Brand Names

Unless you are a major brand, your keywords will not be your company name.  People are more interested in the services or solutions that you provide than what you are called.  So for example Amazon.com might be big enough now to get enough people to search for them on their name alone, but early on they wanted to rank their home page for the keywords of "online shopping" or "online books."

How Many Keywords Per Site?

A site can have many different keywords.  Again using Amazon as an example you will see that each individual page of their site is optimized for separate keywords for that specific page.  If you search for an individual product, it almost doesn't matter what kind of product it is anymore, Amazon will show up in the search results.  The product pages of their site are targeting the keywords you are searching for related to that product.  How many keywords to target for your site depends on how many resources you have.

How Do You Use Keywords?

In the old days people use to "stuff" their keywords into their content in order to try to rank high in the search engines for those terms.  This is a big no-no these days as you want your content to read naturally and to give the searcher exactly what they are looking for.

Today, what you want to do is include your keywords in the title and the meta description of the page.  Not only does the title tell the search engine spiders what your page is about, but when your page shows up in the search engine results they will bold the keywords in both your title and the description when displaying you along with the other pages.  That bolding will draw the attention of the searcher to your page and increase your click through rate.

The other way to use keywords is in getting links to your site.  When someone links to your site the words or phrases they highlight when giving the link is called anchor text.  That is a strong signal to the search engines telling them the keywords of your page.

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Originally posted at: What is a Keyword?

Keywords not only drive people to your site, but these are targeted visitors.  People who are hungry to learn, have a problem solve, or have one of their needs met.  You want to make sure that you are targeting the keywords that you can actually provide the answer to.  This ensures you get the best return on your investment.  So if you are going to focus your attention on the right keywords then you need a keyword strategy.

General Terms

It is very important when you begin planning your keyword strategy that you think of what visitors you are going to and can serve.  I worked with an insurance agent once who didn't know much about Internet marketing except that there was a bunch of money in it and he was missing out.  He wanted to rank no. 1 for insurance.  Not only is this going to require a TON of resources to even start to think about getting on the first page for, it wasn't going to give him a very good return.  What kind of insurance does he sell: health, car, home, or more?  Could he serve every state?  How about every country?

After asking a few simple questions about his true customer base, we narrowed his focus down to "Iowa" and "Des Moines" focuses keywords on "car" and "house" insurance.  He might not have gotten near as much traffic, but he received plenty of targeted leads that earned him more business.

The Holy Grail

A lot of new marketers come online and have one goal in mind: rank No. 1 for their main search term.  That's all fine and dandy that you have high aspirations, but don't get too caught up searching for the holy grail of a no. 1 ranking for the term that gets the most traffic.  You see, the real key to winning this game is to realizing that it's not only how high you rank, but also how many keywords that you rank for.

It's a simple formula really: higher ranking + more keywords you rank for = more money.  Don't lose track of both parts of the equation.  Too many people spend the majority of their resources on a few, highly competitive terms instead of shooting up the rankings for a LOT of lower traffic, less competitive terms.

So, maximizing your traffic requires a plan.  The more you research before hand to get an idea of the popularity and competitiveness of your keywords the better you are going to be able to put your resources to use.

Forming a keyword strategy isn't a one-and-done affair.  You are going to want to keep coming back, going over your plan, checking your rankings, and seeing if new terms are worth going after.  Don't worry if this sounds like a daunting task.  The more you work at it, the easier it will become and the more money you are going to make with your online business.

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Originally posted at: Why a Keyword Strategy is Needed