Internal Linking serves multiple purposes:

1. To increase Page Rank of internal or ‘deep’ pages.
2. To build relevancy of a page to a keyword or key phrase.
3. To ensure that your site in its entirety is spidered, even those pages that are not referenced in your main navigation.

Increasing Page Rank of Internal Pages

Google allocates a value to every page of your site. For this they use Page Rank. Many refer to Page Rank as the “juice” allocated to each page and the website as a whole. Your homepage is seen as the most important page of your site and therefore the Homepage will always have the highest Page Rank value.  This Page Rank is then distributed between the lower pages of your site as illustrated in the image below:

The links that point from your home page to internal pages are usually found in the Main navigation of the site. This allows your Homepage Page Rank to flow naturally to the internal pages that are being linked to. The ‘juice’ gets distributed evenly across the pages that are being linked to.

Building Relevancy of a Page to a Keyword

The first and most important step of any successful SEO campaign is without a doubt Keyword Research.
You have to have a very clear objective of which pages you want to rank for and for which keywords or phrases. When creating your internal linking structure you cannot just link to pages using any random text you feel like. You need to use the targeted keyword of the page you are linking to in your anchor text.

Links act like votes for the pages that they link to. So, if you link to a page using “click here” enough times, that page will start to rank for the keyword “click here” in the Search Engines. Go ahead and do a search for the poor guy who ranks NO 1 for “Click Here”!

Ensuring your whole site gets spidered and indexed

Making sure your website and all its pages are spidered by the search engines is in all probability the easiest thing you can do to increase your rankings. You see, the more pages of your site are indexed in the Search Engines the more content you have to offer the user. The more content you have on your site, the more keywords you will inevitably have in this content. And the more keywords you have the better the chances of ranking for those keywords.

So why would Search Engines not be able to spider all your pages without internal linking? Pages can be hidden from search engine spiders when linking is done in a way that the spider cannot read to follow those links. This would happen if your site uses a script-based navigation system for example. Also, image-based navigation may be crawlable or spiderable by search engines, but the search engines can’t see images and therefore can’t assign any relevancy from the image to the page that is being linked to.

Well that’s all I have for now. I hope you got all of that, but if you didn’t, don’t despair! Just give ROI Media a call and we’ll sort you out.

Copywriting for the web is an entirely different beast to copywriting for print media. The balance between pleasing your audience and the hidden search engine spiders (more on this later) is initially, incredibly tricky but grows to become second nature once you have discovered the skills of this trade. It is not an easy road to follow, but for any decent writer it remains a lofty challenge and a goal worth pursuing. This takes practice, endless months of practice repeating the same techniques again and again until they become second nature. So what is SEO copywriting exactly? It is a finely tuned skill which few can correctly apply to their work.

Copywriting begins with a few straightforward techniques which anyone can apply to their content in order to enhance their overall web presence.

• Know your target audience

The client will often dictate the tone which they require from your content. If your content is for ‘Car Rental’ then a thorough knowledge of rental cars is essential. If you write needless paragraphs which idle on about unnecessary information which is difficult to sift through, then your audience will instantly become disinterested and even abandon the site altogether. A good copywriter writes for both their intended audience and their client. A hard line to walk indeed.

• Stick to the SEO guidelines

This point is canon, unless you intend to keep your work hidden amongst the sea of other top ranking pages. SEO is search engine optimisation and without it, my copy would never reach the lofty heights of Google ranking number one, two or three. Keywords pertaining to the site (such as ‘top car rental’ or ‘best car hire’) are thoroughly researched and then strategically placed into my copy. This rockets any work straight into the top tiers. There are countless SEO hints and tips on the web which you can locate and implement into your work.

• Keep it readable

If your copy reads like a fifth graders essay about his holiday in Mykonos, then perhaps it’s time to take your work back to the drawing board. Stuffing in keywords for the sake of a better ranking in the major search engines is poor SEO copywriting and a guarantee that your work will never see a number one ranking. Inject your own unique personality into all of your work; this includes correct paragraph and sentence structure as well. You are writing for human beings, not the computer. Always keep this in mind.

Copywriting is more than a job; it is my life’s ambition and a skill which I will continue to fine-tune for the remainder of my days. Good luck for those who wish to develop their own writing skills. Be proud of your work and everything else will fall into place.

Why do we build Links? The two main reasons are:

1. Search Engine Rankings

Inbound links are very important to your website. Every inbound link associated with your website counts as a ‘vote’ in the eyes of the Search Engines. Why a vote? An inbound link is effectively a vote of confidence. Search Engines assume that if another website is willing to link to yours you must have something worthwhile on there. In other words, the more quality, one-way inbound links you have pointing to your website, the more popular your site will be with the Engines.

1. Traffic

Links also guide browsers in finding the information they are searching for. Links can in fact be seen as the doorways to every single page on the World Wide Web. This means that you can generate higher amounts of user traffic to your site by having links all over the Web pointing to your site. More traffic means more potential customers and that means, (potentially) a higher conversion rate! If these links come from sites related to yours, the users that arrive at your site would have been searching for the product or service that you provide and thus will be much more likely to actually move to action. This is why your product or service has to be the best or has to be presented in the best possible way. You don’t want the potential client to be unable to find the information they are looking for and move on!

Social Media is probably one of the most popular Link Building strategies out there, and for good reason.

These days it is possible to find breaking news on Social Bookmarking sites like Digg even before the top news agencies had had a chance to publish anything (in fact many of these news sites get their breaking news from the Social Media sites).

Link Building with the help of Social Media sites is a great strategy if you know how to use it properly. Merely leaving your links on all the bookmarking sites you can find most definitely does not guarantee you anything in the way of traffic or “Link Juice”. Here is how you SHOULD be doing it:

• First and foremost, building a good reputation in the Social Media realm is a must! Top Social Media users are known throughout the platform they are using, and therefore they have an army of followers that vote for their additions.

• Don’t bookmark for the sake of a link. Your work will count for nothing. Here, like everywhere else on the web, content is king. Contributing useful and interesting information to the Network will ensure that users click on your link and you will build your reputation.

• Choosing a “catchy” title and using market-related keywords in that title could mean the difference to your bookmark moving up in the ranks or being buried under all the thousands of daily bookmarked sites.

• Choosing the correct category for your bookmark is also very important. Religious Social Media users will bury your link if they feel that you are only interested in leaving your link for self gain. In other words, don’t bookmark your “Cute Kittens” site in the World News Category.

Web2.0 can be classified as sites on the web where the user can contribute to the information found on that site. A good example would be Social Media sites, like Reddit.

There are others, like the well-known and much-used Wiki’s. Wikipedia is a vast source of user generated knowledge and information. AboutUs.org is another Wiki that is mainly used to advertise your service or product on a different platform than your official site. Do a good job and make sure that you don’t duplicate content from your existing site, and the good folks at AboutUs.org can actually remove the No Follow attribute from your created page. Link Juice!!!!!!

Web 3.0 – the Semantic web is on the rise.

Web3.0 uses the semantics of language to be able to deduce what it is that you, as a consumer, like. This means it analyses your likes and dislikes in order to send relevant content your way. Awesome, right? Twine.com is a fantastic Web 3.0 platform. This is a Web 3.0 Social Media site consumers can use to create and bookmark their own “Twines” of information.

Social Media is here to stay. It is already evolving with the use of the Semantic Web. We should keep evolving and use the technology that is out there. Who knows, in the near future the entire Internet will probably be personalised to your suit your specific requirements!

This is a huge problem for website owners all over the world. Unfortunately your website is a virtual drop in the ocean. Without a proper search engine optimisation game plan you really have little hope of ever being found online. Every day, millions of new sites, pages, pictures, audio files and videos are uploaded onto the vast plains of the internet, all competing for exposure. Your website or webpage is just another one of these many pages. So what can you do to make yours stand out from the rest (as far as search engines go, that is.)?

There are two main areas that you should look at improving on.

Your on page optimisation and your off page optimisation need to be carefully planned. Ideally you should address this BEFORE you begin building your website. Like any business model in any industry you need to make sure that you plan ahead.

Planning your on page optimisation means that you need to make sure you are targeting the right keywords for your industry. You need to ensure that your web pages are as search engine friendly as possible. A very important aspect of your website is the interlinking between pages. Make sure your site is accessible to both humans and search engine spiders alike.

Off page optimisation is equally important. There are factors that influence your rankings in the SERPS that have nothing to do with what happens ON your website. One of these things is incoming links into your website. There is a great deal of importance put on links.

So, do the research and optimise your site for the Search Engines. This will help you rank better in the Search Engines and as a result your traffic will increase and ultimately conversion will take place.

Widely whispered to be one of the most important aspects of Search
Engine Optimisation, link building is very much like starting an exercise
routine. Not the easiest of tasks by a long shot, it takes time and effort to
get a successful link building campaign off the ground and even more time to
see the results of your efforts. Suffice to say you’ll have to run around
the track a few times before the muscle starts to show.

Getting links to your site is crucial if you want to dominate the Search engine
results pages on Google and its contemporaries.

Jealously guarding our coveted market-related keywords we all strive to rank
within that mystical top 10 search engine results on Google – that Global
Super Power of the search engine marketing world.

One of the best ways to earn a spot in that elusive
top 10 is to get other sites to vote for yours. Think of each link you build
as a little ballot paper, a stamp of approval that marks you as an authority
in the specific market you choose to target.

Just to make matters a little more complicated it has to be said that not just
any link will do. The links pointing to your site should be relevant, i.e. the
site that links to you should have similar content or content related to the
information on your site. Furthermore, you should also take into account factors
like the age of the site that’s linking to you, the other sites it’s
linked to, as well as the sites that link to them. All of these pesky little
factors can make or break your link building efforts

The fact of the matter is that link building is HARD and, at times, severely
frustrating, but if you keep at it and bear in mind the fundamental link building
guidelines you are sure to see the results.