MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

They are many factors to consider when optimising a site, but arguably one of the most important is the onsite layout and internal linking structure. To follow are a few points on this subject that work for me.

• Make all your links count. Remove secondary keywords that aren’t relevant. Make sure all your links are fully written out. Don’t be lazy by just giving /pagename.html; you should give http://www.yoursite.com/pagename.html. By doing it the proper way, when the page ages and rises in the SERPs, you can bring up the ranking of other pages in the site. Another advantage of doing it is when someone scrapes your content (touch wood) you will be getting a link back.

• Keep outbound links to a minimum. If you keep your outbound links down, then there is more link juice that you have to pass onto your own keywords. This will be noticeable once you start getting inbound links, which bring in more link juice.

• Optimise your anchor text. Make certain that the anchor text you choose to link build with appears in your content and your title. Link build smartly. Anchor text is basically telling the search engines what the page is all about. If you do it correctly, you have a strong chance of cementing certain key phrases to that page, so that when a search is done with those key phrases you will pop up.

• Don’t optimise a page for too many terms. If you want to compete for specific terms, then focus a page around one of them, and you can include long tail and some variations. Once you hit 600 words, start a new page. If you have too many keywords on a page then:

• 1. Your text won’t be focussed on the term enough to rank for it.
  2. Search Engines will have a reason to suspect your site to be “spammy”

• Use contextual links when cross-linking pages. Make sure the anchor text is a key word you target on the page you are linking to (which would be another page in your site of course). When the one page ages you have a strong inbound link pointing to one of your pages with the anchor text you want. If possible, keep the contextual link higher up on the page, because links found higher up on the page hold more weight with search engines vs. footer links. Cross linking like this will make your pages support each other.

• Keep your programming code off page. You don’t want the spiders to crawl through all your clutter (programming code) before they reach the content. Use CSS (cascading style sheets). Another option to keep your page clutter free is to use a .js file and link to it. Doing this will help with the load-up time of your page.

• Focus the page on the main keyword. Write the key term 10-12 times in a page of around 600 words. Include it in your H1, Meta Title, and then a variant of it in the H2. Doing this will make the user certain that he or she has found the right site. The search engines also believe they have found the most relevant page for the specific key term, and so you will have a stronger chance of ranking for it.

• Get the pages friendly with each other. Once you have a few strong pages, you can bring up a new (baby) page by linking the stronger and older pages that hold more authority to the baby page. Doing this will give it a collective amount of link juice, and it should shoot up in the SERPs for the key term it’s targeting.

These are a couple of tricks that I’ve learned along the way.They are by no means a sure way to get to the top of the SERPs. Like I said before, there are many ways to optimise your site, but following my tips will help you in your journey to the top of the SERPs.