Improve Your Website’s Internal Linking Structure

Internal Linking Structure

A website’s internal linking structure is a crucial part of the overall SEO strategy. Whether it is the end user or the search engines, it is important to optimize a site’s internal structure for maximizing the benefits. If you plan to obtain high rankings in search engines, you need to effectively plan your website’s internal linking structure, also termed as a website’s navigational structure or site architecture. The inner structure of the site must be planned adhering to the usability guidelines as well as the best search engine optimization practices.

Given below are 8 important tips to help you plan an inner structure which conforms to both usability guidelines and SEO.

Website Navigation Design

Website Navigation

Website navigation structure and behavior affect the ease with which search engine spiders can navigate through the site and index it. Your site navigation should facilitate the uninterrupted movement of crawlers within the site. 

Search engines prefer sites which are easy for them to navigate and retrieve information related to the site’s topical information, and consequently rank them higher for the site keywords. Therefore it is very important for the site to have a simple navigation structure that is easy for the spiders to crawl.

There are many types of navigation structure that can make it search engine friendly or not.

Few tips to Index more pages

Website Indexing

Want to get more pages of your website indexed by search engines? Here are some useful tips:

1.    Site structure
Make sure your sub pages are easily accessible by search engine bots. Create a sitemap page that links to all pages of your website and place a link to it from the homepage. If you have a large website, break the sitemap up in several parts and keep the total link number under 100 per page. Link from your homepage to deep pages to get them and the sites around them crawled faster.

2.    No session IDs
Get rid of session IDs. Bots rarely index pages with a session IDs because they think that those are different pages (because of the different IDs) with the same content. 

Google Penalty Checklist and Penalty Checker

Google Penalty Checklist

Some content that point out some of the mistakes through which a website suffers from a Google penalty, They are:

• Linking to banned sites

Run a test on all outbound links from your site to see if you are linking to any sites which have themselves been Google banned.

• Linking to bad neighborhoods

Check you are not linking to any bad neighborhoods, link farms or doorway pages. Bad neighborhoods include spam sites and doorway pages, whilst link farms are just pages of links to other sites, with no original or useful content.

Google Penalty Advice

Google Penalty

To check for Google penalties with any degree of certainty can be difficult. For example, if your website experiences a sudden reduction in ranking for its main keyword terms it can be caused solely by a Google algorithm change or search results (SERP) update.

With any algorithm change or Google SERP update, there are always winners and losers, and when a sudden drop in rankings is experienced Google penalties are often incorrectly blamed.

If you suspect a Google penalty, it first makes sense to check whether any Google algorithm changes have been made which could be the cause of the problem

What is Latent Semantic Indexing | LSI?

Latent Semantic Indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.

Role of LSI in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Some Tips For Video Optimization

1.      Make sure that your video clips are relevant and informative

2.      Give your video a Catchy Title

3.     Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site.

4.      Optimize your video for Important Key Phrases

5.      Good old HTML content is still a favorite with the search engines. If you want your video to rank well, you need to give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround your videos with on-page copy that can be indexed by the search engines.

6.      Keep your Videos to five minutes or less

7.      Make use of a Video Sitemap

8.      Tag your Videos

9.      Brand your Video with your Logo

10.  Remember Inbound Linking Factors

11.  Offer the Option to Embed Your Video

12.  Add Descriptive Meta Data

13.  Allow Users to Rate your Video

14.  Syndicate Your Video - Submit your video to RSS.

15.  Offer your audio and video content in as many formats as possible.

Bounce Rate | Exit Rate

Bounce Rate

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs.

One can calculate the Bounce Rate as:

The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page.

Where

• Rb = Bounce rate
• Tv = Total number of visits viewing one page
• Te = Total entries to page

I.e. Rb = Tv/Te

Exit Rate

Exit rate comes into play on the second (form) page after the landing. If you sell the product on the landing and take the information (payment, sign up) on the form page, look at the exit rate. If your landing page bounce rate is low but no one is buying, you might notice a high exit rate on the form page which means there is a problem.

Difference between Keyword Density | Keyword Frequency | Keyword Prominence | Keyword Proximity

The difference between the following terms & how they affect search engine rankings are as listed below:

1. Keyword Density

Keyword Density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a web page.

I recommend using a keyword density ratio in the range of 3 to 4%

2. Keyword Frequency

Keyword Frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page.

I recommend that you ensure that the most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently use keywords in a web page.

But be careful not to abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.

3. Keyword Prominence

Keyword Prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page.

The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag.

4. Keyword Proximity

Keyword Proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are the better.

Avoid Seven Things - When Looking For Link Partners

Link Building

Below you will find 7 tips for avoiding the major pitfalls:

1. Do not link to sites that are irrelevant to yours. 
2. Avoid sites that have a "Links Page" that is hard to find. 
3. Avoid sites that contain more than 25 to 50 links per page. Outbound links not more than 25 to 50.
4. Do not link to sites with directories that are disorganized.  Again, it could be a "Link Farm".
5. Avoid sites that don't contain valuable information.
6. Avoid sites that have poor linking strategies and/or are connected to "Link Farms".
7. Avoid linking to a lot of sites with a low PR.  A few are OK, but generally aim for sites with a higher PR than yours.