Good Link Structure
posted in Getting Started, SEO |One thing many affiliates don’t consider when they’re first starting out is how to properly structure their site, as well as how to use internal links to maximum effect. You’re focused (rightfully so) on getting lots of good, juicy content out there, and not so much on secondary concerns like varying your anchor text links, creating sitemaps, and interlinking your content.
One of the reasons that I’m a big fan of using WordPress for affiliate sites is that it automatically addresses many of the link structure issues mentioned above. The category structure of most themes ensures that all of your content is both logically arranged, interlinked, and accessible to search engine spiders. Varying your anchor links and link titles is a snap and simply a click of an icon away. A click or two on the permalinks options can instantly ensure that all of your URLs have juicy, targeted keywords in them, as long as you’re using good titles.
Let’s unpack some of the link structure factors mentioned above and get down to the nitty and/or gritty details, as far as what you can do to ensure your site has good link structure throughout:
View Your Site Through Spider Eyes: Good link structure ensures that search engine spiders find and index every single page on your site. When a spider hits your site, it basically worms it way through it, following link after link after link. If your pages are interlinked well, with multiple avenues to get to destination pages, the spider will find every page, since there are many pathways through your site. If you have poor link structure, with only one possible route to some pages, much of your content may be missed and not indexed.
How do you help search engine spiders find all of your content? It’s actually pretty easy. Give them more than one way to navigate to each page. Using this site as an example, spiders can find pages via the Categories links, the Archives links, and the Latest Posts links. I also try to link from post to post as well in the text itself, which is another avenue.
Another great tool to help spiders (which I haven’t yet implemented here) is to publish a sitemap page, which gives yet another way for spiders to find and index every page on your site.
Get the Most Out of Your Internal Links: Internal links are the ones that you create yourself when you link to other pages on your site. These can either be in the body of the text on a page, like this link to the Google Adwords CPC tool, or broader navigational links.
The key with these is to use them, first off, as they kill two birds with one stone, as far as highlighting important pages to users and adding another layer of good site linkage. But another equally important factor is that these links are used by search engines to potentially boost your pages in search results, if you use them well.
Internal links should echo the content on the page they’re linking to and reinforce the keyword you’re trying to get search engine traffic for. In the above example, the title of the page of the first link is “Google Adwords CPC Estimateor Tool”, so I want the text of the link I’m using to reinforce that, which is why I used Google Adwords CPC tool. This is much, much better than another typical link I might have used, such as cool Google tool.
See the difference? Both read roughly the same and link to the same place but the first is very specific and reinforces the targeted keyword for that page, which is designed to get search engine traffic for terms like “Google Adwords CPC”, “Adwords CPC tools”, “Adwords estimator tool”, etc. The second works but it doesn’t add any potential boost to the page in search results, while the first one both works and can give a boost.
It’s also helpful to vary the structure of your internal links, using common variations. So if I link to that tool again, I get more bang for my buck if I use a variation like “Adwords estimator tool” instead of always using Google Adwords CPC tool. The benefit is due to the whole semantic direction that search engines are going, which I’ll ramble on more about in detail in the future.
One last thing is to not forget to title your internal links, as well. Hover your mouse over the links above and you’ll see that I also titled each link with a corresponding targeted term, reinforcing the keywords on the destination page. Vary this up as well whenever you can and don’t always use the same title. The boost here is more negligible but it’s a good habit to get into.
Categories Are Links, Too: If you’re using WordPress, don’t forget that your Categories are links, too, and should be optimized for the keywords you’re targeting. You’ll have less flexibility here due to space restraints and layouts, but just keep in mind that these should be optimized as well if possible.
If your site is about poker and you’re creating a category for pages that are poker tips, you’d always want to call that “Poker Tips” instead of simply “Tips”. Both work fine and both alert a surfer on the site that if they click on the category they will find tips about poker, but one is optimized for much more traction in search results than the other.
Don’t worry if it looks silly to have all your categories preceded with “Poker (whatever)” as in the example above. Yes, it’s a poker site, anyone on it knows that, yes it’s redundant, yes the category “Strategy” is obviously about poker strategy and not wombat hunting strategy, but always keep an eye towards the search engines in cases like that. If it looks hugely silly or will break your layout, fine, use the sensible name for categories, but if it only looks slightly odd, err on the side that will help you in search results.