The easiest links to get for SEO success
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study at the end of the newsletter.
There is a large segment of the SEO world that is too obsessed with backlinks.
To those in this population, the number and quality of the backlinks a site receives is all that matters for SEO rankings. In their crusade to achieve the best “rankings” at all costs, they neglect all the other aspects and requirements of SEO. But, while links are important, they are focusing on the wrong kind of links.
What is more essential than backlinks is internal links which also happen to be a lot easier to “obtain.”
Backlinks background
Backlinks are vital, but it is just a single factor that contributes to a site’s visibility. Google’s initial differentiation from all the other search engines in the late 90s and early 00s was that they scored a website in their algorithm based on the websites which linked to it. The other search engines used the words and order of words as the primary signal to score a site’s visibility.
(Sidenote, I try to always use the word visibility instead of the word rankings. The word “ranking” is more appropriate when there is a single scale on which something can be ranked. There are billions of potential search terms and a ranking on one phrase does not necessarily determine how it will rank on a different term. This is in contrast with a song ranking on Spotify or a product listing on Amazon where there is a vertical ranking for each category.
Additionally, a ranking in search results is not a KPI because revenue/downloads/users are not acquired from that position alone. Contrast this to a book that can be ranked on a bestseller list and that is an achievement even if that ranking does not drive additional sales.)
Ultimately, the quality of results that came from measuring links was better than what the other engines used and this is likely why we Google things and not Yahoo them.
Backlinks aren’t what they used to be
With so many advances in artificial intelligence and the increased power of the search algorithms themselves, the value of a single link is likely vastly diminished. As a personal example, about 13 years ago, a company that competed with my employer received a link from whitehouse.gov which is one of the most valuable links any website could get from an authority perspective.
I saw this competitor improve its visibility in our dashboards although this is only correlative because it would be nearly impossible to improve a causative connection. A number of years later, while I was at SurveyMonkey, we also received backlinks on three occasions from the White House and saw no measurable impact.
While White House links are strong from a domain perspective, when relevance is factored in, they weren’t that valuable in Google’s updated calculations.
To be clear, this isn’t to say that strong domain links don’t matter at all, they absolutely do and that will be the focus of a different newsletter.
Internal links
Back to internal links, these are the links that one should focus on first as they are a lot easier to acquire and are very powerful. In the same way that Google (and other search engines) value a page based on the websites that link to it, they value a page within a site’s internal hierarchy based on which internal pages link to it. In the desire to acquire external links, many sites miss out on this important lever.
Some easy things you can do right now to improve your internal linking are:
1) Ensure that every page on a website has at least one other page linking to it. Ideally, it should have a lot more than one internal link, but one is the absolute minimum
2) It’s not just what page links to another page, but it’s also where the pages link from. The homepage is the most valuable page, so the closer a page gets to the home page, the more value it will have.
3) Create an HTML sitemap as this will make sure that every page has one link and better yet, link this page from the homepage so each internal page will be closer to the homepage.
4) Use contextually relevant anchor text. The value of anchor text has been diminished in external links due to spam, but internally this is still a valuable signal.
5) Create sitewide navigation in the header, footer, and/or on the side. Navigation increases internal links to those important pages, and in my tests also helps elevate the importance of the linked pages.
6) Use tools to help calculate the links to each page. Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and OnCrawl are my favorites for this task.
7) Update internal links on a regular basis with the use of programmatic methods and scripts. If you don’t do this programmatically you will need to update your internal linking manually on a regular basis.
8) Create a target list of pages you want to link so anyone building/writing will keep these in mind.
9) Like anything in SEO, there’s no perfect formula, so always test the value of your internal linking to know what to improve.
10) Don’t overdo it. As with external links, Google’s algorithms are sensitive to spam and any tactic that gets overused will be ignored.
Internal linking is one of the tactics that I see improve a site’s visibility in a short amount of time, so if this is not an area you have never invested in, there is likely low-hanging fruit to pick.
Keep in mind that the time to see success will depend on the crawl rate of the website; therefore, the links will only be calculated once the search engines see them.
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