The last couple blog posts here at meaningful marketing have talked about how to create great local SEO content, and within those blog posts, we’ve mentioned how important interlinks are. As I’ve gone through those last two blog posts, I realize that I haven’t even mentioned why interlinks are important, so that’s what I want to do today: I want to talk about the importance of interlinks.
Why Interlinks Are Important
Interlinks are important for a couple of reasons.
The first one being that it helps keep people on your website longer. So, if you have an article or a landing page that people are on and you’ve got three to six or ten interlinks on that page to other useful articles, you’re going to keep people on your website longer. And it’s kind of a theory that’s been known as a click-hole. The click-hole is if you get on a website and then twenty minutes go by and you don’t even realize it, next thing you know you’ve been through fifteen or thirty articles, depending on the website.
And a prime example of who does the click-hole well is buzzfeed. You’ll be on buzzfeed, you don’t know how you got there, and you landed on an article, it could be something to do with “What The Cast From Saved By The Bell Looks Like Now“, or something like that. Then next thing you know, 25 minutes have gone by and you’ve gone through 30 articles just of useless information.
Now, your idea and your concepts shouldn’t be much different, but you want to provide your website visitors with some good, useful information. You want to be sure to keep on linking to good articles within all of your pages.
So, that’s the first reason interlinks are important.
The second reason is it tells search engines which pages on your website are important so that those pages can get better rankings for their own keywords or targeted keywords. So, as you write more and more of the articles we’ve talked about in the great local SEO content blog posts, you want those rankings for those blog posts to improve themselves.
The Bicycle Wheel Strategy
Again, the bicycle wheel, the homepage is the middle of the wheel, and all these other little pages and pieces of content that you get off your website are spokes in that wheel, so the more spokes you have, the better off you are. Those spokes and those pages are going to be landing pages for people who are searching a lot of these long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are any of these three to seven to ten word keywords, like ‘the best blah blah blah in whatever city you’re in,’ or ‘how much does your service cost in the city that you’re in?’ Those are long-tail keywords.
As you get more and more of those pages created, you’ve got to improve their rankings. You can do that by providing interlinks from your blog posts to those pages. And again, the more and more of those pages that you have, the more and more interlinks you’re going to have for those pages and the better rankings they’re going to get. Why? You’re telling the search engine that these pages are important. As long as you have the right anchor text, the linking to that page, to that other blog post, you’re going to tell the search engine that ‘hey, this page that we’re going to link you to is descriptive,’ and the text that is linked, that’s the actual concept of this next page or blog post.
Interlink Text Is Very Important
So, an example here for Meaningful Marketing would be we mentioned the word ‘interlink’ throughout a lot of our blog posts over the last three years. But we don’t actually have an article on interlinks, thus why I wanted to create this one.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to go through and find all those mentions of interlinks on this site and change the text a little bit to focus on the keyword “the importance of interlinks”. So then, we’re going to link that text, “the importance of interlinks” to this blog post.
Hopefully I haven’t confused you on talking about interlinks while using an example of interlinking text, but that’s what we’re trying to do, because we want this blog post to rank high for the search term “the importance of interlinks”. Hopefully that makes sense and I haven’t confused you.
The last thing on interlinks is to make sure that you use a very descriptive anchor text, so don’t provide a lot of ‘click here,’ where that’s the text that links to a different page, or “learn more about by clicking on this page” don’t have a lot of “this page” linked to the next page. You’re not providing the search engine with very good information there, so be as descriptive as you can in your text link.
If you have a page that talks about massage therapy for runners, anytime that you mention “massage therapy in running”, you want that text linked to that page. Make it very descriptive and make it so that text is actually what that page is going to talk about that the page is going to link to, or even the searcher is going to link to.
There you go, that’s a quick little blog post, and I guess the Soundcloud recording here on the importance of interlinks, we’ll see you again soon.
If you are small business and you’re struggling with trying to create good local SEO content for your website, then you’re gonna want to listen to this Soundcloud recording, or read this blog post for ways on how to do that.
Sorry I got confused there, but we’re trying something new here at Meaningful Marketing and I decided, “You know what, I want to utilize my Soundcloud account here and get a voice memo that talks about how to create good local content”. Actually, it all really comes down to the fact that I kind of hate having to write and it’s just easier to talk!
The concept and strategies I’m going to talk about in this blog post, teamed up with this local SEO content strategy I’ve already talked about will no doubt increase your web traffic.
Read on and I’ll go into greater detail on how to create great local SEO content.
While doing some link research last night for a client, I came across a fantastic website full of useful information. It deals with travel industry and that industry, along with real estate are two of the easiest to create useful content for prospecting.
Many people think of SEO and their websites as one page and that they can only attract people to that one page. That’s not the case at all. You can create so many webpages on your website targeting people at different stages of the buying cycle. You just need to sit down and think of the questions and information people are looking for at every phase of the buying cycle.
So what was this resource I stumbled upon last night?
It was a website created by a Victoria BC hostel, inn and suites property Ocean Island called Ocean Island Victoria Guide. It’s full of useful information for travellers to Victoria and even locals who are looking for things to do in Victoria.
The websites lack of optimization and lead capturing doesn’t hurt what a great resource it is and who knows, they probably have a different marketing strategy driving people to that website.
Now the main market they are targeting is people thinking about coming to Victoria and looking for things to do. If they stumble onto the Ocean Island Victoria Guide, they’ll be on the site for a few minutes. Eventually they will see an banner ad with rates for the Ocean Island Hostel.
Targeting Different Stages Of the Buying Cycle
It’s brilliant yet simple.
Here you have a lodging property trying to get their business and website in front of travellers. Most properties are trying to target people with their minds already made up they want to visit the city of Victoria and who would search “hostel Victoria BC”.
No doubt their website ranks high for that term. But only looking at this stage of the buying (decision in this case) process, they’re also targeting people who are thinking about coming to Victoria and thus looking for things to do. These people aren’t fully sure they want to visit the city. If they land on the Ocean Island Victoria Guide, they might be convinced to visit Victoria and will then look at booking accommodation. What lodging property is going to on the top of mind here? Ocean Island’s hostel, inn and suites!
Another market they seem to be targeting is locals and trying to get them to come down to the Ocean Island Cafe & Lounge for live music and drinks. I even found some cool things to do in the city.
Think Like A Consumer
So how can you emulate what Ocean Island has done and create useful content for your business and website?
Think like a consumer.
No matter what product or service you sell, people are searching for information at every step of the buying cycle. You have to create content in the form of articles or blog posts for every step. If they’re properly optimized, you will get targeted people to other webpages of your website outside of the main page.
You have to think of your website like a bike wheel with various spokes. Each spoke is a webpage (blog post or article) that targets someone searching about your product or service at a different stage of the buying cycle.
This content will also be helpful for people who land on the main page of your website. When they land on your main page and see that you have loads of articles about the product or service you sell, they’ll most likely read those to learn more. When they read more, they’re on your website longer and not on your competitors.
Information Is SEO & Content Marketing
People are looking for information. Give it to them!
Sit down and think about every step of your offerings in the buying cycle.
If it’s countertops, someone might be searching broadly for “countertop materials?” while another person might have already found the type they want are now looking at cost per square foot.
In this case you need to write one article on the types of countertop materials where you educate people on the materials and they’re pros and cons. Then you write another article on countertop material cost per square foot.
Another benefit of creating useful content is that you build trust and credibility with visitors. There are lots of people who are in business who are not trustworthy nor credible. This makes people skeptical. By having useful content on your website, you will turn skeptics into paying clients.
Not only are you building trust and credibility with website visitors, you’re also building it with the search engines. Google, Bing and Yahoo want to provide searchers with quality websites that have lots of useful information so the searcher doesn’t have to visit the middle of the first page of their search result to find what they are looking for.
You don’t want to be the website at the bottom of the first page. You want to be the website ranking in the top 3. Take the advice of this blog post and you’ll be well on your way and ahead of your competition.
*Update – Google is no longer displaying images beside the search results. More information over at Search Engine Land and their post on authorship is dead.
Todays post will talk about getting your image to show up beside your website. The image to the right is for a new website I just started called Best In Victoria. It’s a way to help my current clients get more backlinks to their website while increasing their exposure.
A nifty idea I think. But enough about that plug!
During a recent search you may have noticed images showing besides website results in Google.
You may have also wondered how to get that image beside your website or blogs search result. Well I will show you how in this post.
Google Rel=Author
This is known as Google’s rel author. It’s a way to tie your Google + profile to your website or blog.
The biggest benefit I see for local businesses is improved click through rates. Seeing a business owners image before they view the website builds trust before they have visited your website.
Mark Traphagen posted on Google Plus a few studies from website owners. No matter what the increase % is, it will boost your click through rate.
I had a potential lead contact me a few months back. I asked him why he clicked on my website. Keep in mind this was before I was ranking high for SEO Victoria BC. He said it was because I had an image beside my website.
Already the time I spent doing this was well worth it.
Setting up Google Rel=Author
1) Setup a Google + Profile.
If you already have a GMail account, you should have a G + account too.
2) While fully filling out your profile, add your website(s) to your “Contributor To” section.
The “Contributor To” area is located under the “About” tab in your Google + profile and down at the bottom in the “Links” section.
Click here to see on my account. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom where “Links” is located. And while you’re at it, add me to your circles!
Click on “add custom link” and add your website and it’s name.
3) Add this link somewhere within your website’s main page and or blog page.
Obviously replace your profile link where mine is listed in blue.
4) Head over to the rich snippets testing tool and enter your website url. You will find out if your G + profile and website has the link above properly displayed. If not, something has gone wrong. If that’s the case, post below in the comment section and let me know.
Hopefully you know understand how to get an image beside your website in Google search results.
Today’s post is going to be short and sweet. It’s my fifth post in a series of the ten best free Internet marketing tools you should be using.
This post will cover Hubspot’s Marketing Grader. It’s like Webmaster tools but it analyzes much more. It grades your social media, SEO, blogging, mobile and lead generation.
To have all those areas graded, simply head over to Hubspot Marketing Grader then enter your website and email. Give it a couple of seconds and you’ll see where you’re strong and weak. Then what to do about the weaknesses’.
Pretty simple and like I said, it’s a short post. But a useful one.
As a side note I want you to learn about how Hubspot markets.
While doing some link research last night for a client, I came across a fantastic website full of useful information. It deals with travel industry and that industry, along with real estate are two of the easiest to create useful content for prospecting.
