So you’re out there building links back to your pages. Good for you!
But maybe your working too hard. Whenever I work with clients, I explain to them the process of off-page SEO, which is in a sense just another word for linkbuilding in one form or another. But the truth is (especially for content sites), while off-page SEO is incredibly important (and what most people focus on), you would be surprised at how effective an internal architecture is when it comes to building links.
To illustrate my point I’m going to use The Brown Spectator, Brown University’s only Conservative Magazine. The site is a bit cluttered at the moment. I’m inclined to put up banners that say something like, “excuse the mess”. But the site is, in many ways, my experimental stomping grounds. But I digress. Recently, I noticed one of the posts, Twilight Book Review, rising in the search rankings for its name. At first glance, I assumed it was the post’s title (which, no doubt, is extremely important). But something curious happened when I tried to do some pagerank sculpting.
If you look at the right sidebar, you will see a widget with the tabs “Ratings”, “Views”, and “Comments”. Each of these tabs has 15 stories inside of them (for a total of 45 links on every page). Moreover, at the bottom of every post, there is a “Related Posts” plugin. All of these pick anchor text based on the title of the post. A few months ago, I thought that 45 links in the sidebar was a bit excessive and I cut it from 45 to 15 (5 in each tab). But when I did that, the posts that were below the 5th post all dropped off in viewership. The dip was dramatic, the site’s traffic dropped nearly 25% during the course of the next week and remained stagnant for the next four weeks. Most notably, the book review on twilight went from around the 40th result down to below 100. Basically the post that had been getting about 5-10 hits per day (even as the 40th result) was getting one hit per week. I thought I’d done something bad and gotten slapped by the Google God himself. But sure enough, when I restored the 45 links (one of which happened to be the book review, the post promptly shot back up to about where it was in SERPs.
So two things: 1) internal linking is extremely important, and 2) the title of your post is extremely important (if you’re using wordpress especially). Most WordPress plugins extract data from your posts and will link to it using the name of the post itself. What does that mean? Well, if you want a strong internal link, you should probably name your post something that is actually well searched, and you should probably find a way to keep extraneous words out of your title. One good way of doing that is by using my subtitle plugin. Using this, you can make your posts’ titles informative, but plugins you install will only display the keyword-rich title you picked. So, for example, Twilight Book Review could be entitled “Twilight Book Review: An in-depth Look at the Twilight Book Series”, but when you install plugins that add links to pages, it will link to the article with the anchor text “Twilight Book Review”. The other thing you can do to help establish a strong interlinking architecture is to install plugins that, in a sense, automate the creation of those links for you. To that end, on The Spectator I use the Similar Posts plugin, WP-PostRatings, WP-PostViews and the preinstalled widget that grabs the most recent comments.
Ultimately, linkbuilding is still King in my book when it comes to ranking well. But remember, you can position yourself well if your site has any kind of authority, just by being careful about your internal link structure.
Remember, always do Keyword research; don’t make Google mad.
