Blah blah blah, good content, blah blah. Backlinks. Blah blah. We know. Any perusal of the web will tell you that, if you want to rank well, you need good content and plenty of backlinks. The proliferation of these articles and their relative obscurity shows that most SEO folks like to talk about what they don’t do. Here are some tips that you won’t see talked about a lot because there’s actually a little controversy about them.
1. Put lots of internal links on your pages.
Too many sites try to “sculpt” PageRank by pointing links to pages they want to be important while no-following any links to pages they don’t want to be important. See this article for an explanation.
Theoretical musings aside, it sounds really petty. Think about it; you have 100 individual pages, so you sift through them to transfer miniscule amounts of PageRank (maybe) to particular pages at the expense of others. I doubt that important and useful websites like Best Buy, Amazon, and others engage in this arcane practice. I’m instead advocating a different principle: link to as many pages on your site as possible (without sacrificing user satisfaction). Two of the best ranked sites online – Wikipedia and Amazon, link to internal pages. A lot.
A good internal link structure will help the rankings of deep, but revenue-generating pages as well as help even your marginal content pull in traffic.
2. Forget Quality.
Yes yes, good content matters. I’m not saying to abandon quality standards, but I am saying that sometimes publishing junk pays off. Publishing junk, so long as it’s original junk, is a lot faster than publishing something good. Think about it: Harry Potter fanfiction outweighs, in terms of quantity, the books themselves (unless you really want to read about Snape and Super Mario’s hidden love affair). Why? Because it’s junk, and any idiot can write junk.
Each web page has a small amount of PageRank. By adding a new web page to your site, you increase your rank and your overall site standing. The assumption here is that big sites must be indicative of big companies, groups, etc. Big is good; big, combined with other factors, is the only way Google knows that IBM is IBM. Remember, IBM has about 3,210,000 indexed pages. Are all of them good? Do all of them provide useful, relevant information to visitors? Probably, but not everyone can be IBM. You can be like IBM by increasing your website size. To do this, publish some junk. As long as your quality to junk ratio isn’t too spammy, it will help you.
3. Link to Others.
Ooh, scary concept here. I’m suggesting that linking to other websites will help your rankings. The fact is, Google’s founders thought that PageRank should act like a circle. Sites that link to you show that you’re important. Linking to important sites shows that you’re not an idiot. We can’t all be IBM but we can link to them.
When all else is constant, a page linking to someone else will rank better than a page linking to no one. Linking to relevant sites provides context for your website and makes you seem more legitimate.
4. Use “Click Here” as Anchor Text for Backlinks.
Yes, we’ve heard how important backlink text is. It should be contextual to the keyword you’re trying to rank for, etc. If you’re Google and you come across several hundred pages that have the link text “San Jose SEO” pointing to the same web page on the same site, and this was the only anchor text your encountered, what would you think? Would you suspect that the links were artificial in some way, placed through some nefarious (read: paid) way? I would. This is why you need to vary your anchor text. Sometimes it’s ok to have the text be something generic like “visit their website” or “click here.” Of course, if you’re trying to rank for “click here” you’ll want it to be something else. Good luck beating Adobe on that one though.
This article was written by Brandon Schwartz, the owner of Boomajoom.com which provides San Jose SEO services, which you can learn more about by clicking here. (He practices what he preaches.) He helps clients in California and around the country reach more customers online, such as Chicago Murals which provides indoor painting services to the Chicago area.
This is a unique article published on SEO Desk with exclusivity.
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Good points, especially the one about linking out to reputable websites. Wikipedia also does that a lot, and it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt them! In fact, one can learn much about proper SEO by paying attention to the linking strategies there.
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A lot of blogs writing that you need ad must have this and whatever. How funny it is that the key points just only tackled in this post. Mostly some of the article targeting and their concentration were good, unique content and keyword are searchable and more.