The following post is part of a series on How to Silo Your Website. You should review, How to Silo Your Website the Masthead, How to Silo Your Website the Breadcrumb, How to Silo Your Website the Content. For this part, we’ll be taking a look at the sidebar.

My first bit of advice: do some click tracking to see what people are clicking on. I like to use crazyegg (full disclosure: they are an advertiser, but I used them before they became one) or similar service that actually tracks X/Y coordinates on a page. See what people are clicking on and remove the elements that people don’t use.

Next make sure links to your most popular pages/content/products are there. Resist the temptation to go overboard. 10 is a good number; 15 is as much as I would recommend. If you are in a shopping environment, links to the main departments or categories is also a good idea. If you use faceted navigation (ie product/category links that change based on where you are or your last click), be careful. If the links are straight with no URL parameters, you have nothing to worry about. If the links change and pass parameters you are better off using no-follow. This isn’t to conserve page rank: it’s to prevent creating an infinite site from a search engine perspective. Using the rel=canonical tag is a good back up, but bandaid solutions are no substitute for bad architecture. You never want to leave thinking or decision making to chance with an algo.

Remove links to your service pages (privacy, contact, tos, etc) unless you need them for visual aesthetic (to balance out the content section). In fact, you want to reduce and remove as many links as you possibly can. We aren’t trying to conserve link equity but to control where it goes. It’s a slight but subtle difference.

If you are selling advertising, have affiliate links, or other banner-type content, this is probably where it is. If it’s what pays the bills and keeps the site running, keep it; if doesn’t convert then remove it.

If you have the ability to add in featured content THAT CHANGES daily, weekly, or (at the bare minimum) monthly, then do it. Also if you can add in related content links that change on a per page basis, then do it. You want to keep the sidebar content dynamic, with static and non parametric url’s. Bonus points if you can change the order based on templates or randomization.

So what are the takeaways here:

• Reduce the number of links to a minimum.
• Remove non essential elements, especially third party content, based on user testing.
• Include links to related or featured content, especially if it changes.
• Looks for ways to change or randomize content.

Next in the series: How to Silo Your Website: The Footer
photo credit: Eyeshotpictures

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

How To Silo Your Website:The Sidebar

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12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

A while ago I wrote my case study on how I listened to Google and failed. The post got a lot of attention from the SEO community. Many people wondered whether natural link building was really dead and what was the future of building natural links. I’ll try to answer some of those questions in this post. The statements below are a mix of my opinion/my personal observations.

1. Is There a Universal Definition of ‘Natural Link Building’?

There’s one thing I’ve learned from some of the reactions of my previous post: Not all people have the same definition of what natural link building is.

Put in simple terms, a natural link is a link you get from someone who found your page and decided (on his/her own volition and  without any direct influence from you) to link to it.

Why did the person decided to link to you? Some of the possible reasons include:

- Not necessarily for the content but because you’re an authority in that topic

- For the valuable/controversial/funny content

- Or maybe s/he had a good day and wanted to link to a bunch of random folks on the web

As you can see, there are many reasons why someone would link ‘naturally’ to you. Valuable content is only one reason.

2. Natural Link Building: The Past

In my previous post, I mentioned this article on 25 Free People Search Engines as a case study of a successful link bait. The article got 140k+ views from StumbleUpon and also a bunch of editorial links (check Yahoo and OpenSiteExplorer for more details). Lists were quite popular back in 2008-2009 and you could write anything that was somewhat interesting as a list and get popular on Digg/Stumbleupon/Delicious.

Some SEOs realized this opportunity and started creating a bunch of these types of posts (SeoMoz is a good example. Rand once talked about how they went crazy with list posts during that time). After a while, the effectiveness of list posts as a link bait method reduced drastically because many people realized how powerful they were and everybody started creating their “top x ways to ____” type of articles.

Twitter and Facebook weren’t very popular back then, so you got a lot more links from unique root domains rather than re-tweets or Facebook ‘likes’.

Then images became quite popular (people love pictures more than text–not surprising) and a bunch of web design blogs suddenly appeared with their “30+ Beautiful ____” showcase posts. Just type “beautiful site:stumbleupon.com” or “beautiful site:digg.com” if you want to see how popular they were. As with lists, ‘showcase’ posts are also dying slowly, but their popularity lasted long enough to give rise to a whole new category of web design blogs (which are more like gallery resources, honestly).

By the way, I am talking about the ‘rule’ here. There are always exceptions. Some amazing list posts still go popular occasionally (Cracked.com is very good in making creative list posts).

3. Natural Link Building: The Present

The number of people who tried to get their posts to go viral (by writing list posts and publishing images) increased dramatically and, at the same time, Twitter and Facebook REALLY took off. People that wanted to ‘share good stuff’ found these services easier to use for sharing than having a WordPress or Blogspot blog. The result? If you create linkbait and it goes popular, then you should expect a lot of re-tweets/stumble thumbs-ups/Facebook ‘likes’ but a very small number of links from different unique root domains. Do these links from Facebook/Twitter carry any special importance?

Matt Cutts once said in a YouTube video that they rate links from Facebook and Twitter just like any other link! Yay!

One recent lesson I’ve learned about ‘niche’ link building is that you can get viral in your niche community. Take SEO and this blog, for example. I’ve witnessed how different SEOs follow each other and, in case someone has something interesting to share, then other people in the industry re-tweet him and the chain goes on. This is not the case for every niche market unfortunately.

4. What’s the Future of Natural Link Building? Is it DEAD?!??!

Okay, 3 points here:

• Many people who link ‘naturally’ have switched to Twitter/Facebook (this is from my personal observations)
• Matt Cutts said Google treats Facebook/Twitter links the same as any other link
• Thus, if you want to build natural links, you need to appeal to a VERY SMALL number of people who still own sites and want to link to other resources (very, very tiny minority)

This is, of course, a very ineffective strategy, which is why, in my opinion, you have an increasing number of people who go and hunt for links (that are not natural of course). They can get some great links with great content but the result is re-tweets and so on which aren’t very important in Google eyes.

PLUS, according to some SEOs, people that own websites became stingy because of the ‘do follow’ paranoia of ‘leaking PR,’ so that could be a big factor as well.

5. What Does the Future Hold?

I am pretty sure Google will start treating Facebook shares/Twitter re-tweets as more than just 1 ordinary link from a same domain. These links will probably become more important for ranking in the SERPs.

The only problem here is spam. If Google starts giving greater importance to Facebook/Twitter, they know people will start spamming these platforms like crazy and new markets will emerge where people will sell re-tweets/Facebook shares depending on the profile ‘authority’.

I hope you found this post to be useful.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Natural Link Building: Past, Present and (Predicting) The Future

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4. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
5. Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
6. Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
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8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
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10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

One of the problems I encounter on large client websites–or with clients who constantly add or update existing content–is getting this content into the index as quickly as possible. One of the tactics I recommend is using the homepage.

But how do you put this into practice? Here are some examples:

• Place links to your 10 most important products right on the homepage
• Run a seasonal website, changing the links on your homepage every month
• Publish new articles, putting the links on the homepage
• Update content or living URLs and put the links on the homepage
• Have a blog, making sure the links are here to your latest posts

At a time when Google places value on page speed, having excessive calls to the database on your most visited page doesn’t make a lot of sense. What I recommend is building static include files once a day, every few days, or once a week. This gives you the flexibility you need without the unnecessary overhead.

If you are looking for a way to include info from an rss feed (like a blog), here’s a nice and simple script you can use called rss lib. If you use it, be a nice guy and make a donation. Open source gpl stuff helps everyone.

Lastly, when I talk about adding dynamic content I mean in the main content section not the footer. Putting dynamic content in the footer has a purpose, but it is much more effective when it’s in the main body area.
photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

How To Make Your Homepage More Dynamic

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4. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
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6. Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
7. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

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Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information. Be sure to check out our new Sponsored post option.

Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend

Thesis Theme for WordPress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for WordPress Review.

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photo credit: levork

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors August 2010

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6. Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
7. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
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10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
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12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

This is a post that may anger you and piss you off, but hopefully it makes you think a little. But I think a lot of the people in the SEO community are short sighted and are willing to sacrifice themselves and the community as whole if they see the chance to get a link or exposure. Much like the scorpion in the tale of the frog and the scorpion, they can’t help themselves even when it means their own self destruction.

I’ve been in this field for a log time. I’ve seen a lot things and gotten a lot of help from people who came before me, and I appreciate the value they contributed in teaching me a trade that allowed me to start my own business. This is why I am so disappointed by the current trend to sacrifice yourself, someone else, a tactic, or even a whole community in exchange for a short term goal that, in the end, isn’t worth it.

I was an editor at threadwatch for a number of years. You could argue that it was at Threadwatch and WebmasterWorld where I paid my dues, cut my teeth, and got my exposure (and officially became a pain in Matt Cutt’s ass ). I learned how to write front page promotion worthy posts and how to craft click enticing titles. It was sad when Threadwatch became a victim of its own success and the site owner had to make the tough call and cut people out, but it was a necessary move. Sadly Threadwatch eventually consumed itself and needed to be shut down. To be honest it was overdue, but it was still sad and, like a self asphyxia masturbation session, the last moments weren’t pretty.

Let’s turn to sphinn: when it started out, it was great, but it too became a victim of its own success. It started to descend into a never ending stream of 2nd rate top 10 lists and a shameless dumping ground that was little more than a second RSS feed for some sites ( I love you search engine journal, but you gotta admit to being heavy on the sphinn submissions). As a result, people stopped looking and visiting and quality spiraled downward. This shouldn’t be taken as an attack on the sphinn editors: it’s hard for them to promote good stuff if no one bothers submitting it in the first place. There’s still some good valuable content there but wading through all the crap to find it is often not worth the effort. My belief that the SEO community can’t act in its own best interests was reinforced.

Recently I started playing with a new ipad app called flipboard. One of the things it does is extract content from links from your Facebook and Twitter stream and displays them in newspaper format. To be honest, I really manage both my Twitter and Facebook friends and follow lists very carefully. I try to keep them filled only with people I trust and consider friends or whose tweeted links I honestly enjoy. It may make me an elitist but, like I said, I don’t trust most of you to not spam up my timeline with your own self promotional or nepotistic crap. Some times I unfriend or stop following people who are friends because of the volume they tweet or their tendency to burst tweet (the irony of this situation isn’t lost on me).

It’s my belief that, in the long term, you can’t maintain an SEO community website without heavy moderation and trusted editors guiding the content. IMHO the best places for this currently is the subscribers section of WebmasterWorld or the paid forum on SEObook. There is still some valuable content on sphinn, I just wish it it went to editorially promoted only stories or ruthlessly culled the second rate submissions. I wish it were otherwise but most of you are simply too untrustworthy.

To be honest, there’s a reason you don’t see old timers wasting their time spamming SEO communities: they have figured out there’s more value in going after client work or focusing on their own projects. The SEO fame game is a futile one ’cause a wallet full of famous will never pay the rent.
photo credit: kevinzim

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

The SEO Community – A Tale of Friends and Scorpions

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6. Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
7. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

Are you familiar with the following concept?  It is much easier and more cost effective to sell to existing customers than it is to acquirer a new one.  Which one would you rather have?  Sell 50 items to 5 people or 50 items to 50 people.  When you are designing and tweaking your marketing campaigns, be sure to include your current customer base and maximum their profit potential.  Here are several ways to do just that, give your customers a reason to come back for more.

Special Discount Offers

I recently purchased something from an online retailer.  When I received my package, I noticed there was a discount coupon inside that I could use on my next purchase.  I’m a sucker for coupons and many consumers are.  It is a great way to encourage and entice your customers to order again.  For best results, the coupon should have a higher discount value than what is normally offered to the general public on sites like Retailmenot.com.  The discount should also be a one-time use coupon.  This will prevent others from sharing it online and reduce the perceived value.

Make them Feel Good by Giving Back

Everyone likes to feel good and there are lots of ways you can make your customer’s day.  For example, have you ever been to a bar, had a few drinks and then the bartender says “This one is on me.”?  Did it not put a smile on your face and make you love that bar even more so?  Now, I’m sure the bartender doesn’t actually pay for the drink, but has the authority from the owner to give out free drinks as he/she sees fit.  Customers also do not like to feel inconvenienced.  When was the last time this happened to you?  You walk into a store and your purchase comes out to $4.04.  You hand the cashier five ones and she gives you back 96 cents in change.  Don’t you just love all that change?  Why couldn’t the cashier simply say “The 4 cents is on us.”?  Not only would it speed up the checkout process, but also make the customer feel valued.

Email Clubs

Many businesses, especially restaurants are starting to see the value behind email clubs.  An email club should be designed to notify customers of special promotions, pricing and discount offers.  This type of communication creates a unique connection with your clients.  Not only does it allow you to directly contact your clients on an ongoing basis, but constantly reminds them of your brand.

VIPs

The well known 80/20 business rule states that 80% of your business will come from 20% 0f your customers.  Whether this applies to you or not, you should give your most profitable clients the VIP treatment.  The customers that love you the most by spending the most money with your company are the ones that have the most to give back.  Those customers are more likely to tell others about your products or services.   There are countless ways to give your customers the VIP treatment.  Some examples could be an exclusive customer service number, special VIP discounts, higher reward points or a personal relationship manager if you sell an ongoing service.

Reward Programs

Reward / loyalty card programs seem to be very popular today.  There can be a lot of value in this type of program, but it is also the least favorite of mine for several reasons.  Most reward programs require the customer to keep track of their rewards.  They also usually require multiple visits or purchases before any type of reward kicks in.  Take JCPenney’s rewards program.  You earn one point for every dollar you spend.  Once you reach 250 points, you receive a $10 store credit.  The kicker is you must earn the 250 points within 30 days.  This is not very appealing unless you have a major purchase.  Consumers like instant gratification.  The closest you have to it, the better.

So give your loyal customers more reasons to love you.  By doing so, you increase your chance of them telling their friends about your company.

This article was written by Curtis Stevens who is with a credit card processing provider. They help merchants of all types and sizes accept credit cards.

photo credit: seanmcgrath

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Repeat Business: There’s More of You to Love

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7. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

The following is part of the series How To Silo Your Website. Be sure you have read parts one and two: How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead and How to Silo Your Website: The Breeadcrumb. In this part, we will be taking a look at the content area.

I’ve written before about the value of evergreen content, news-related content, seasonal content, predictive content . I’ve also written about how to write interesting content with around keywords and keeping posts on topic with narrowly focussed subjects, which you can review at your leisure.

What I’d like to talk about is how you link it all together. In the breadcrumb part of this series I spoke about the value of having a flat site architecture. For a silo or theming approach to SEO, this means limiting the links in your posts. You want to link only to other content that is relevant and good for the end user and to other sections or posts within the same silo. This isn’t so much about conserving pagerank or link equity but is more about funneling it where you want it to go.

I have written before about using tags and categories and auto linking high level keywords within the text. This is a critical part of internal linking for maximum effectiveness. You can see this strategy in use at Wikipedia (George Washington, Henry 1st, Marylin Monroe) and The New York Times (Senate Votes to Confirm Elena Kagan for U.S. Supreme Court, BP Done Pumping Cement Into Well, A Chance to Re-examine Aaron). In the case of the NYT, look first at the words then look at the SERP’s for those words. The NYT has more trust and authority than you do, but smart use of internal anchor text helps them rank well for high level news concepts and news figures names.

When you set up the links, it’s critical to use identical or nearly identical anchor text for each of the links. Sometimes you will have to deviate a little for sentence structure, but ideally it should only be one or two words. This is hard if you use a writer who doesn’t write for the web and omits keywords within their posts. A trick I use to get around this is use parenthesis like this (see Adsense Tips & Tricks for more information). Another tip is to put links to related posts or similar articles as an inset or at the end of each article.

One last point. The one place you want to reduce or eliminate links is on product pages. The only links you should have on those pages are to other products, buying guides, or reviews. Once someone has entered the conversion funnel, you want to limit the amount of ways they can leave. As an example of this, notice how the masthead on amazon becomes unclickable during the checkout. It’s not to limit page rank or link equity (spiders should never get into your cart … ever): it’s to minimize cart abandonment.

What are the takeaways:

• Minimize number of links in the content area.
• Link only where it benefits users, connects to high level keywords, or stays with silo.
• Use consistent anchor text when linking.

Next in this series: How To Silo Your Website: The Sidebar.

photo credit: kadavoor

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

How to Silo Your Website: The Content

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Advertisers:

1. Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
2. CrazyEgg.com - Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.
3. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
4. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
5. Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
6. Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
7. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

One of the mistakes I feel many people make is that they write articles or posts chasing very broad topics. IMHO it’s much better to write narrowly focused posts, pages, or articles and tie it together later on. This is a concept I call head and tail content that I touched on in my How I Manage a WordPress Website.

My preferred method is to attack this from the other end by creating much more in-depth, narrowly focused “tail” articles first and backing your way into the main or head article. So what are some tail articles I would prefer to start with? How about these …

• Best hotels in Disney World for families with infants
• Best hotels in Disney World for families with teens
• Best hotels in Disney World for large families
• Best hotels in Disney World for families with grandparents
• Best hotels in Disney World for families with disabilities
• Best hotels in Disney World on the monorail
• Cheapest hotels in Disney World

While this list is by no means all inclusive, I think you can get the idea of how I am going very narrow. These articles don’t have to be long. You can be quick, direct, and keyword centric with links to individual hotel booking pages for conversions. Now you certainly could combine all of these aspects into one article and it would be very through, but it would also suffer from TLDR . However, more importantly, it’s doubtful you would rank for any of those head phrases without significant site trust and authority. In my experience converting long tail phrases is easier, especially if they answer a question or solve a problem.

Once you have all/most of the tail content written, you can write the head and make sure you have spots to link to the tail content in the posts. One of the reasons I think people shy away from this approach is because of the time/money involved in creating all the content. I suggest creating a master list of everything you need, breaking it down into head and tail, and prioritizing the list. Decide which content requires your best writers or has to be flagship quality. Take the rest and outsource it. I have found I can get good results very quickly from textbroker (see textbroker.com review). Remember IMHO not everything on your website needs to be flagship quality. If it turns out one of your tail pieces ranks really well and drives a lot of traffic but doesn’t convert and you think it should, that may be worth rewriting.

So what are the takeaways:

• Write pages that are narrowly focused on specific keywords
• Tie the narrowly focused articles together in a summary or head article
• Make a master list of all the content you need and prioritize the list
• Outsource based on importance
• Rewrite as needed based on traffic, performance, and conversions

photo credit: nukeit1

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Keep Your Articles Narrowly Focused and Keyword Centric

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In my first post on hotel SEO, I explained how big hotels with conference facilities have an advantage over small hotels. But small hotels need not despair, because they have ample link building opportunities too.

In the interest of keeping things short, here are some link sources I’ve seen in the hotel SEO scene, which sources are accessible to small hotels. I’m [mostly] skipping the commentary.

1. Local universities and colleges – If out of town students have friends or family helping them move in to dorms, where do those friends or family stay? Local hotels that are affordably-priced, naturally. Not those mega-chains with mega-prices!

2. Music, film, food and other cultural festivals – Festivals usually are ongoing for a few weeks, which means that they’re not tied to a single hotel. The organizers can and do mention places they’ve stayed at before or hotels in the vicinity.

Bonus tip: You or your SEO can find these by Googling keywords like ‘festival’ + ‘city name’ + date in the future. I emphasize the date in the future point because you’ll usually find a lot of past festivals crowding the top rankings, since they’ve had more time to accumulate links. A quick google on ‘Montreal cheese festival’ confirms that Google has yet to realize that these queries deserve freshness – that is, more recent results should be ranked ahead of more frequently cited (linked to) pages.

3. Startpages – These are pages that feature a collection of links a particular user happens to find useful. In other words, they’re pretty strong editorial votes by users as to sites they care about – exactly the kind of link Google loves.

Ironically, hotel SEO specialists obsessed with Pagerank will often find these links useless because

(i) Startpages usually have dozens and dozens of links, such that each link would just get a little bit of Pagerank.

(ii) Other times, all these links are nofollowed. So none of them pass any Pagerank at all.

However, there’s an element of trust to links, too – Startpages are hubs, and Google trusts hubs according to various patents they’ve filed. (Find out more about hub finders here – and especially how to fake them out.) So it’s worth testing whether nofollow links from carefully curated startpages can still help other pages rank, or whether they’re useless.

4. Escort reviews – Yes, reviews have gotten so widespread online as to include prostitutes. People talk about their favourite escort agencies and experiences with various ladies (I’ve yet to see it for male prostitutes, but it probably exists too). Unsurprisingly, a fair number of these encounters take place in hotels, which enables you to have your small hotel mentioned and linked to.

(Perhaps you could integrate a Groupon deal here? Siesta special: 30% off for you and your hired lady friend, if we get 50 people take up this deal. Imagine the scene in the lobby haha!)

Liked this post? You’ll likely enjoy a free chapter from my SEO book for experienced pros, too.

p.s. FYI: Back when I worked with a small Montreal hotel, these links propelled them ahead of giants like Hilton and Marriott, to rank #3 on core keywords like Montreal hotel and similar rankings on other terms. The marketing director for that hotel told me that I tripled year-over-year online sales, which brought total sales numbers up 15%. That’s why I say guys like Eric Ward, who focus on these sorts of hub links, can charge $500 – $1000 link…
photo credit: Umberto Fistarol

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

How David Hotels Can SEO Vs Goliath Hotels

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7. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
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9. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

In Part 1 we looked at How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead. In this article, we’ll be taking the next step and looking at the breadcrumb.

With the exception of things like your customer service, privacy, and contact us pages, all of the pages should be under the main sections of the masthead we talked about previously. Unless you are going to have more than 150 pages in each section, don’t add an extra level. Yes, I know Google says 100 links, but you can easily stretch to 150 without much need for concern.

As an example: hotels in Disney World are divided up by which park they are closest to. So there are Magic Kingdom Hotels, Epcot Hotels, and so on. Resist the temptation to add an extra layer or crawling point (at least in the architecture–we’ll talk about the bread crumb in a minute).

Users are going to be likely to look at hotels based on which park they are associated with, so you will need a “Magic Kingdom Hotels” page. From an information architecture standpoint, however, you don’t need the extra layer. This really requires that you understand the topic. You want break things up for usability, but you want to design your architecture as flat as possible for the search engines to crawl. Adding extra layers to crawl through never works to your advantage … ever.

When linking to the home page many websites use the word “home” as a link to the homepage. You can do that but, if you do, you are missing the opportunity to focus a little more internal anchor text. Instead use an icon of a “home” and do an image replacement using the site name as anchor text. I have seen people use their primary keyword: use this with caution as it is a risky technique. The more the anchor text differs from the site name, the greater the risk.

When you are building the breadcrumb use the exact anchor text you are using in the masthead. The more it varies the less effective the technique will be. So ideally this is what you would want:

> Disney World Hotel Reviews > Magic Kingdom Hotels > Contemporary Resort Review

> Disney Vacations > Disney Vacation Promotional Codes

> Disney Information > Best Time to Visit Disney World

So what are the the takeaways here:

• Use breadcrumbs. Make sure they are hyperlinked and use internal anchor text to your advantage.
• Use the image replacement technique for linking to your homepage.
• Use a flat site architecture. Don’t add extra crawling layers.

That’s it. Once this is in place, you are telling Google what the important parts of your site are and using your internal anchor text to tell them what it’s about. Next in this series: How To Silo Your Website: The Content.
photo credit: ginnerobot

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

How To Silo Your Website: The Breadcrumb Trail

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1. Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
2. CrazyEgg.com - Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.
3. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
4. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
5. Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
6. Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
7. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.