13 Ways to Use Internal Links to Improve Organic Rankings

What is an Internal Link?

Internal links are links between pages on the same site. For example, a link from your site home page to service page or links from your site product page to similar product pages.

In short, internal links are links within the site and not pointing outside of the domain.

An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a webpage to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. Hyperlinks are considered either "external" or "internal" depending on their target or destination. Generally, a link to a page outside the same domain or website is considered external, whereas one that points at another section of the same webpage or to another page of the same website or domain is considered internal.
Wikipedia

Unlike other SEO factors, internal link has double effect on a website. Firstly, it influences user engagement metrics, including time spent on website, page views per session, and conversion rate. And secondly, internal link has significant ranking importance that can boost any site organic position in the SERPs.

Importance of Internal Linking

In SEO and Technical Side, Internal linking has four main purposes:

1. In website navigation, internal link help user find more pages in the site.
2. Internal Link Help Defines the Website Architecture and Hierarchy.
3. Internal Link Pass Page Authority and Ranking Power Throughout the Site.
4. Internal Link help search engine spider discover more pages on a site.

13 Ways to use internal links to improve your site rankings

1. Create Lots of Content.

In order to create internal links, you have to have lots of pages and posts. The first step is maintain a internal linking strategy is to have a killer content marketing strategy. You can’t have one without the other.

When you create lots of content, you’ll have lots of content for Internal Linking. The more links to Pages and Posts, the better your internal linking strategy will be.

Some internal linking strategies propose extremely complex layers of pages, silos of content, and a mathematically-balanced formula for number of links to levels of pages. I say it doesn’t really matter. Internal linking doesn’t require organizational spreadsheets and trigonometric derivative charts.

An internal linking strategy with lots of content looks less like an org chart, and more like this:
There are no “cycles.” There are no “silos.” There are no “tiers.” There are no structured flow diagrams. There’s just plenty of happy links going to helpful places.

2. Use Relevant keywords in the anchor text.

In keeping with the your website content theme, your internal links should only use anchor text - not images or any other media files. Image links are fine, provided that images are not the main source of links, and assuming the image is properly alt-tagged.

The use of anchor text for internal linking might not look natural. So, don’t use optimized anchors. Just use natural, un-optimized sentence fragments as anchor text, and you’ll do just fine. No cute tricks. No overthinking it. Just highlight the text, link it, and done.

3. Link deep.

The deeper your links go, the better. There are two types of internal links you should avoid:

• Homepage. Most sites have too many links to the homepage as it is. You would rather strengthen internal pages to boost the overall SEO of your site, rather than simply point more links at the homepage.
• Contact us. This is a common mistake of many who are starting out in content marketing. As part of their obligatory call to action at the end of a post, they may write something like, “Give us a call to find out more about our awesome services!” Then, they link to the “contact us” page using the anchor “give us a call.” Don’t link to the contact us page unless absolutely necessary.

In Essence, you should avoid links to the top level pages on a site — pages to which the main navigation menu already has links.

The Best links and the most natural links in a content marketing strategy are deep within the structure of a site.

4. Use links that are natural for the reader.

Internal linking requires a user-focused approach to adding value and information. The link value that gets distributed throughout the site is secondary to this key point providing value to the site visitor.

One of the corollary benefits of internal linking is that it improves user engagement on your site. When a user sees an informative link that truly matches the context of the content, they are likely to click on that link. It can be an external link, as long as it’s something that the reader will be interested in. If that link is an internal one, the site visitor stays longer and becomes more involved in your website experience.

When you link in your content you’re telling the search engine that the target of your link is so relevant and important that you want your visitor to simply be able to click a link and go straight there. Basically, that what you’re linking to is potentially so relevant that the visitor may want to stop what they’re reading and go to the next page.

Content links are a strong signal to both the search engine and the user that the content you’re linking to is really good. Readers want that. Thus, internal linking is helping the reader. But you’re also helping your SEO.

5. Create Only When Relevant.

Internal linking, as I’ve made clear, is less rigorous and scientific than some might think. But you still have to be intentional. Don’t merely link for the sake of linking. Instead, link to content that is relevant to the source context.

In other words, let’s say I have a page on my site about dog food. And, I have a page on my site about the nesting habits of parakeets.

Should I link the two pages?

There is not a strong connection between dog food and parakeet nests, especially on a superficial level. These two pages probably won’t provide mutual enhancement from internal cross-linking.

But, if I have a page on parakeet food, then it might make a great internal link for my parakeet nest article. Chances are, information about “parakeets” is going to be on both of the pages. Because of this content overlap, the link is relevant.

As much as possible, link to relevant content in your internal linking.

6. Use do-follow links.

Do-Follow links are the best way to build out the internal link architecture of your content marketing.

One theoretical internal linking strategy of the past was to no-follow most of the links on a page, in order to increase the link juice to a single page. This type of pagerank sculpting doesn’t work as an SEO strategy.

Back in 2005, the search engines came up with the no-follow, known by the attribute rel=nofollow. The idea behind no-follow was that the link “should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.” As Wikipedia stated, such links would “reduce the effectiveness of certain types of internet advertising because their search algorithm depends heavily on the number of links to a website.”

Despite the uproar and confusion in the wake of the no-follow link, most people now agree that it’s a good idea. As Danny Sullivan explained, no-follow links can help sites “avoid problems with search engines believing they are selling influence or are somehow involved in schemes deemed as unacceptable SEO practices.”

In spite of its value, however, using no-follow links is not a strategy you should be using as part of your internal content links. The link value needs to flow freely to and from internal pages, rather than get stopped up by a no-follow. Keep things free and fluid.

7. Use a reasonable number of internal links.

You don’t need tons of links in your internal content. Google’s instructions are simple: “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.”

What the Heck is a Reasonable Number?
Answer is Simple Nobody Really Knows.

Smart people have tried to answer the question, but not even Matt Cutts has provided a definitive statement. He wrote, “It seemed about right to recommend 100 links or so,” and “in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links.”

So, should you go for 100 links? Maybe, but that 100-total links includes all the links on a page — footers, headers, nav bars, ads, everything. 100 links isn’t as hard as it sounds, once you calculate the total number of HREFs on an entire page.

When it comes to internal linking, I suggest around three to four, depending on the length of your post. I usually write articles that exceed 1,500 words, and I don’t have a link-heavy navigation bar. So, I wouldn’t feel bad about throwing in ten or twenty internal links if I needed to.

There’s no magic number. There is however, the all-important user. Add as many links as would be helpful for the user.

8. Make sure all the important pages are linked.

These days, search engines rely both on sitemaps and links to discover web pages. It means that even unlinked or the so-called 'orphan' pages can be found by the search engines as these pages are listed in the sitemap.

But it's impossible to find 'orphan' pages through the website's navigation. Such pages virtually don't exist for the users. It's a good idea to get rid of orphan pages; you can either delete them (if they are useless) or link them from other pages of the website.

Landing pages that are created for pay-per-click campaigns are an exception. They often act as independent website areas that are not linked from the main website's content and are normally blocked from indexation.

9. Make sure image links have alt attributes.

The alt attribute of image links acts like anchor text for text links — so it's another opportunity to send a ranking signal to search engines.

So, Make sure image links have alt attributes.

10. Mind duplicate links to the same URL.

If there are several links on the same page that point to the same URL, search engines would give the priority to the first anchor text.

Keep this in mind and use the right keywords in the first link's anchor: subsequent anchors won't matter as much.

11. Place links within pages' main content.

The links placed within a page's content have a higher SEO value than the ones in the header, footer, or sidebar. The latter have more to do with navigation, and it looks like Google treats those as non-editorial links.

Links in the main content, on the other hand, add new information and value to the text. Furthermore, the text and keywords surrounding a link also matter for the ranking of the target page.

On the contrary, if you force links with additional information to open in a new tab, it's easier to go back to the original piece of content.

In order to force browser to open a link in a new tab, add a 'target' attribute to the link in HTML:

<a href="http://exampleurl.com" target="_blank">Anchor Text<a>

However, remember to avoid this tactic when you channel users through a conversion funnel. In this case, links should be opening in the same tab.

12. Point links from traffic pages to conversion pages.

Many companies run a blog to create "engaging and useful content". Some of them achieve the goal, and their posts attract significant traffic. The problem is that a blog post can rarely boast a high conversion rate.

Why not channel users from high-traffic blog posts to landing pages that are specifically optimized for conversion?

13. Keep it Natural.

This strategy implies that you don't care about the number of internal links, their anchors, or any SEO tricks. You just follow common sense and create links to the content that may be helpful to your users; as simple and elegant as that.

In practice, it means that you should only keep in mind the internal linking best practices that I mentioned in this post.

22 Effective SEO Tips by SEO Experts

How great would it be if we could gather all the Awesome SEO experts in just one room to talk about search engines ranks with a focus on the best SEO tips available out there? It would be glorious! Since we don’t have a room big enough to gather all the best experts in one place, we took advantage of the online “meetings” and gathered all the up to date SEO tips into an awesome expert roundup post. That is how we got the idea of interviewing 22 renowned SEO experts and how we found out 22 awesome and unique search engine optimization tips … the best of them.

22 Effective SEO Tips by SEO Experts for 2017

We’ve got answers from some of the brightest minds about the most actionable tips from the digital marketing world. We’ve found interesting news, insights and really helpful tips and guidelines about mobile optimization, metrics, qualitative content marketing, testing, technical SEO and customer centric websites. These 22 SEO Tips are some of the best for small businesses or large enterprises. Make sure you get the best of them.

1. SEO Is Not Just About Rankings

I’ve talked with many business owners that think ranking high in Google is all you need to be successful. The reality is that SEO is just one of many tactics to drive prospective customers to your website. Sure, ranking high in Google is great, but it’s also worthless if you don’t have a website that is set up properly to convert that traffic into leads and sales. Plus, you won’t rank high for long unless you have proper tracking in place and a process to monitor and analyze your SEO efforts. As you can see, SEO is not just about rankings; it’s also about website conversion rate optimization and website analytics and tracking. That’s important to understand before you start to invest in SEO.

2. Optimize Website for Visitor and Not for the Search Engines

Producing content that’s irrelevant and insignificant to your audience’s wants and needs leads to only one thing – people stop taking you seriously. People click on your links in the SERPs but they do not interact with your website and leave quickly – wasted opportunity to turn visitors into customers.

So how do I find what my buyer persona (not to be confused with ‘buyer profile’) is looking for? Glad you’ve asked, so let me give you some actionable tips. Finding questions that people are asking about your products or services. A very good place to start is Quora. I just went there and typed something very uninspiring like “carrots” (Writing content for a boring industry? No Problem).

3. Understand How Your Site Is Actually Performing Away From Vanity Metrics

If you track for the right KPIs, auditing will supply you with ongoing changes and help you focus on making the highest priority changes for you to hit KPIs and plan for the future.

4. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Creative Technical SEO

People often neglect testing in SEO, mostly because it’s not easy, but optimizing CTR is a way to get some huge wins. Check out how Etsy is doing it or this recent look at approaches from Wayfair and their learnings.

I’m talking about coming up with novel ideas and analyses that help move the needle but are less about copywriting and more about technical proficiency. A couple examples: digging deep into semantic keyword research and data mining or dynamically populating title tags using the Google Search Analytics API.

5. Have Content Deliberately Written to Be Highly Linkable

Highly linkable content is content written on a broad enough topic that you can work it into guest posts and other link opportunities naturally, without the article having to be directly related to the content you’re linking to.

For example, I wrote a big piece on customer delight – a thorough guide on how to make your customers happy at every point in your relationship. I’ve been able to link to this piece within articles on topics ranging from marketing and sales to operations and employee management. Having a few of these kinds of pieces means you’ll never miss an opportunity to link to your content.

6. Do Not Underestimate How Important “Branding” Is to SEO

Do not underestimate how important “branding” is to SEO.

7. Build Your Website on a Solid Foundation of Data and Keyword Research

Your goal should be to build a customer-centric destination that works 24/7 at attracting fresh business.

My company, Search Planet, specializes in E-commerce SEO. I often see even large e-commerce Web shops leak revenue and profit because they’ll mirror their own needs and organizational structure online, instead of focusing on their customers’ needs. So the best prospects don’t find them in search results. Or when they do, they won’t buy from them – but go to their competitors instead.

By transforming your online presence to be entirely customer-focused, you’ll cut through the clutter, dominate search engines, draw a flood of targeted traffic to your website, and make more sales.

8. Spend the Time and Money to Have Your Site Analyzed in Terms of Its Existing SEO

You could have all kinds of issues that you aren’t aware of and rather than just trying to throw links at the site or find someone to write better content for your home page, put some focus on doing a thorough SEO audit.

9. Make the Best Page on the Internet for Your Topic

So here’s how I think about SEO:

• If you made the best page on the internet for your topic …there are 2000 Math PhD’s trying to HELP you;
• If you didn’t make the best page on the internet for your topic …there are 2000 Math PhD’s trying to STOP you.

Of course, it’s not enough just to make a great page. But it’s step one. Combine this effort with a clear understanding of off-site SEO, links and basic understanding of how to increase your domain authority and everything is going to work out well for you.

10. When It Comes to Link Acquisition You Need to Be Looking for Trust

The landscape has changed so much, we’re seeing a lot more weight shifting towards user experience, and link building has become a game of trust.

SEOs need to forget about them; there isn’t a metric out there that gives a true reflection of the value of a link, we have come across so many links with good domain authority or domain trust that we would class as toxic websites. When it comes to link acquisition, you need to be looking for trust, and you can only do this through a manual review; is this website the kind of website Google would trust and want to pass value through, is it a trusted source of information? You should then focus on how your links appear on that site, links that look like ads, in the footer or sidebars are going to be less likely to pass value in the long term.

We’re seeing a huge increase in the influence site speed has on rankings. We have run a few tests now with clients and are seeing a direct and almost immediate correlation with speed improvements and an uplift in rankings. Make it a priority, work with the development team and ensure your website is as fast as possible.

11. Invest Time and Effort into Developing a Link Earning Strategy

Do not take any shortcuts to buy or build low-quality links. While links are still a ranking factor, that is no longer their sole purpose. An effective link will provide the opportunity to improve three things; your traffic, your brand, and build trust. These are the links that should be your focal point. These types of links are found in building relationships with relevant websites and companies, creating valuable (not just quality) content, and a consistently having a giving mentality. Though it takes times, the reward will be worth it.

12. If Everyone Else Is Zigging, Then Zagging Is a Strategic Opportunity

If you just want one SEO tip, then let me share the insight that led me to co-found SEO-PR back in 2003. Hundreds of SEOs optimize web pages hoping that they will get a high ranking in Google search results. And many of them do a great job. But only a small handful optimize news stories, blog posts, or press releases hoping that they will get a high ranking in Google News search results.

Now, the Google News algorithm is similar but different than the Google algorithm. Why? Because inbound links aren’t as strong a signal of the importance of a story. This puts a premium on relevance. But, the big mistake that many SEOs make is assuming that the popularity of keywords used on Google is the same on Google News. They often aren’t. You can see this for yourself by using the Google Trends Explore tool. The default result for any keyword will be web search interest. But you can use the drop down menu to see news search interest. And the trends are often different.

In addition, Google says that 16% of searches that it sees every day are new. Well, ask yourself: “Where do baby search terms come from?” And you’ll discover that the stork doesn’t bring them. They are generated by the “news.” So, these are search terms that your competitors haven’t been optimizing their web pages to get high rankings for 15 years. So, you have a better shot of getting your news stories or blog posts (if you’re a news source) and even your press releases to get high rankings for than you would for yet another web page.

Now, admittedly, your ranking in Google News may only last a day or two. But, for near term news and events, this is the opportunity to drive traffic to a relevant landing page on your website. Now, the links in press releases are no-follow, so there is no “link juice” in them. But, they can still drive visitors to a page with more information — if it’s relevant and important. We used unique tracking links in four press releases for Southwest Airlines to generate $2.5 million in ticket sales. And when the CFO asked how we knew that they came from the press releases, we showed him that the tracking parameters on the links weren’t used by any other element of the company’s marketing. And when he suggested that we were merely harvesting interest that had been generated by the company’s excellent TV advertising, we showed him that the releases were for new service to cities where Southwest Airlines had never run an ad. He asked what else we knew. Well, we’d analyzed the database of people who had purchased tickets and found that two-thirds had never flown Southwest Airlines before and that they were generally purchasing round-trip tickets for two people.

13. Invest More in Content

Invest more in content. This is without a doubt the thing that people underinvest in the most, yet, doing so almost always brings great yields, both in terms of conversion and SEO.

14. Run Your Own SEO Tests Across Different Search Categories

Don’t believe everything you read and watch on the internet about SEO. Most of the best SEO’s I know don’t even have a Twitter account. Run your own SEO tests across different search categories.

15. Perform an In-Depth SEO SWOT Analysis

My best SEO tip is to do an SEO SWOT analysis. What are your SEO Strengths? What are your SEO Weaknesses? What are your SEO Opportunities? What are your SEO Threats?

If you create a basic SWOT grid and start to detail your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can start to get a better idea what kind of SEO you need. This is exactly how we work at Bowler Hat and even our SEO service page details how you need to identify what kind of SEO is right for you.

16. Understand What Your Targeted Audience Might Be Looking For

Make sure you understand what your targeted audience might be looking for when they might search for a site that you are optimizing.

What words they might use when they search for it, how they might construct their query and what words they will expect to see on your pages. Also what questions they might have about the goods or services offered on that website; and the answers to those questions, so that you can provide answers, and begin the journey towards having them become customers of your site.

17. Test Longer Strategies over Tactics and Measure Each Step of the Way

Is it possible that a single implementation could make a big difference? Yes. Is it likely? Not really. If you’re investing in SEO, you’re accepting a long game.

Google wants to rank the sites that earn their users’ satisfaction. Google isn’t as easily influenced, thanks to new search models and AI that are designed to truly understand the value of a page the way a user would.

18. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly

There are many things you can do to your website to improve SEO, but I would say right now that you should focus on making sure your site is mobile-friendly.

At the moment, Google uses your desktop site to rank you on desktop searches – Mobile First turns this on its head because it will base your desktop rankings on your mobile site. So if your mobile site is very poor, or even if you don’t have one, expect mobile first to cause you problems.

19. Create Your Own Websites and Experiment Things Risk-Free

The one SEO tip I would offer, that applies to both those who are new or more experienced, would be to start your own websites as soon as possible.

When I started out in the industry I was obsessed with consuming every SEO article that was published, but ultimately things really took off when I started launching websites. None of them are particularly successful, but they allowed me to try things risk-free without jeopardizing a client’s campaign. I was able to freely dive into onsite SEO, and I also dabbled in the ‘dark arts’ of link building which of course led to one of my sites being penalized..all fun and games! In order to truly understand how a website works I think it’s important to have some hands on experience, and getting that is easier than you might think. WordPress websites are simple to set up, and building up a bit of traffic can also allow you to experiment with advertising, log file analysis and more!

20. Focus on Content Quality

The single biggest tip I can give SEOs for 2017 is focusing on content quality. Over the last year, I have extensively been running experiments on how much the swing of search results has moved to the quality of the content.

It seems that the Google algo is getting better and better at pulling out content and really starting to understand how that content answers a query. Traditionally we used to talk about “content” and used to hammer in content in areas where really there was no structure, for example on product category landing pages in eCommerce websites. That used to be good enough to dominate the short, mid and long tail of queries as long as you had a decent volume of links.

21. Find a Way to Create Attention

Attention creates awareness, which in turn creates (brand) traffic and links, which will improve your SEO. You need to find a way to create attention (to your product/service/brand/company/website).

22. Hone Your Technical SEO Skills as Much as Possible

If I had to give one SEO tip it would be to hone your technical SEO skills as much as possible.

While SEO is a relatively broad discipline, the technical aspects of it are relatively opaque to many, and there is no shortcut for. On top of that, it is a skill that will likely always be in demand.

Google’s New Mobile Index

Tuesday, August 02, 2016, Google Announced at their Webmaster Central Blog that it will be changing the way it evaluates web pages for mobile searches. With more than 3.49 billion people worldwide using the Internet regularly and nearly 2.5 billion who do so from a mobile phone, according to data from InternetLiveStats, this could have a huge impact on your brand’s SEO efforts.

Read More: The State of Mobile Marketing 2015 [Infographic]

Furthering its push to improve services for mobile users, Google has decided to start indexing search results for mobile separately from desktop to offer mobile users better and fresher content.

In the past, mobile search results were based on the version of your website that’s presented to a user when they visit via a desktop computer. However, many websites have a separate, stripped-down version that’s presented to mobile visitors, so the user experience and value of websites aren't always consistent even though mobile searches return the same results as the desktop version.

Google’s solution is to split its index of web pages into two parts, one for desktop and one for mobile, to provide the best user experience on each device. Each user’s search results will be dependent on the device they’re browsing from—desktop or mobile. This is a problem for brands who have stripped valuable content from their mobile sites and it may lead to lower search rankings on mobile devices.

According to Search Engine Land, the move will eventually see the newly introduced search index become the primary one. The standard desktop index will remain active, but it won’t be updated as frequently.

This is going to have the largest impact on rankings once this new index is fully implemented. You can check if your website is mobile friendly by using Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool.

There are many ways that you can make your website mobile friendly, so i recommend reaching out to your web designer in regards to this. If you are the one that makes the edits to your website, here are three simple steps that you can take to ensure you’re providing a good mobile experience that keeps both your visitors and Google happy:

Consider Adding AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): AMP Pages are designed to make your website’s pages load a lot quicker on mobile phones. This project was actually designed by both Google and Twitter to help optimize mobile searches. Essentially, it is a stripped down form of HTML that still provides necessary design/information, but has less information to load.

AMP Facts:

• AMP is Open-source that aims to improve the performance of the mobile web.
• AMP HTML can load anywhere from 15% to 85% faster than then non-AMP versions of those pages.
• Pages that run on the AMP HTML will mean much faster mobile web for users, and for publishers using AMP a potential boost in google organic search rankings.
• The little ‘lightning bolt’ symbol next to the result is meant to convey a faster loading time to users.
• AMP is getting deployed across more web content, even ads.
• AMP has more sharing Options.
• AMP Pages can be shown in a carousel that lets you easily switch articles.
• AMP is Under Constant Development.

You can read more about AMP Pages Here and how to implement them into your website.

Create A Mobile-Optimized Website: Website Any concession to mobile users is better than nothing. There are a few ways that you can optimize your existing website for mobile devices.

For Instance, you can create a completely separate version of your website for mobile devices. Many times, these are hosted on a sub-domain such as http://m.example.com. While this option will require additional web development, it can be done without impacting the desktop version of your website. This is the most common route for getting a mobile site up quickly.

Another method is to use responsive design. This will allow your website to match the dimensions of the browser, rearranging the content on a page to fit the available space. This approach provides a good user experience on any device size, but it does require a fair amount of work to implement.

Whatever solution you choose will signal to Google that your website is “mobile-friendly” and deserves a place in the index. From there, it’s just a matter of optimization.

Read More: Fundamentals of Responsive Web Design

Optimize Your Visitor’s Mobile Experience: Now that Google will be viewing your mobile website as a completely self-standing entity, you’ll need to optimize the mobile version of your site in the same manner that you optimize your desktop site. That means you’ll have to work at improving both the user experience and Google search rankings through a mobile-first lens.

From a technical perspective, Google offers a tool that will test your website for mobile-friendliness and offer suggestions for fixing the issues. This is a quick way to identify issues with your mobile website.

In addition, Google’s Search Console provides a good resource for both desktop and mobile issues. Formerly called Google Webmaster Tools, Search Console will show you if Google has detected any errors on your website, alerts you about malware complaints, and gives you insights into how your site appears in Google’s index.

Next, it’s just a matter of optimizing your content. Google doesn't provide any guidelines on that front, but I can infer that they want more than just a light version of the corresponding desktop page.

Don’t Skimp on Content: One of the objectives behind Google’s decision to split their index is to discourage website owners from stripping out valuable information from their websites in order to provide a faster loading site. While both site owners and Google are pursuing the same objective—to provide a good user experience— Google doesn't think that sacrificing depth of content is the way to achieve it, and neither should you. And now that the mobile version of your website won’t benefit from the content on your desktop version, Google is forcing website owners to make sure that content is available to be crawled by their mobile ranking algorithm.

Keep An Eye On Your Rankings: AMP Pages are designed to make your website’s pages load a lot quicker on mobile phones. This project was actually designed by both Google and Twitter to help optimize mobile searches. Essentially, it is a stripped down form of HTML that still provides necessary design/information, but has less information to load.

Keep a lookout for your rankings over the next few months to see if your website is affected.

This Announcement was only made two months ago, so as more updates come out in the SEO community I will make sure to update this Post for you.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask on the comment section.

SEO Tips for a Realtor Website!

We are now in a computer age, thus realtor website is a must in real estate business. This means that realtors should have their own realtor website to have a presence online. Realtor website is a powerful tool, it tells what you have to offer and how the target consumer can take advantage of it. However, having your own realtor website is not enough, you have to make it sure that it ranks in the first page of the search engine result. Why? It is just because this is your only chance to get visitors that eventually can turn into leads.

Like any other kind of marketing, competition is tough in the World Wide Web. Yes, you can target people around the world but the question is “who’s realtor website will show up in a search engine?” We all know that the method used to get your realtor website shows up in the first page of the search engine is SEO technique. Google is changing its style in crawling realtor websites, but most of the on-page strategies mentioned are the basic, most important fundamentals of SEO for your agent website.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization where in you can optimize your realtor website to get a higher ranking in search engine. Here are some useful SEO tips for a realtor website.

Select the right domain name.

Selecting the right realtor website domain name is very crucial. Do not just pick any domain name, make it sure that it is something people would easily remember and carries your keyword. Let’s say you are marketing real estate on West Bloomfield in Michigan, you can have westbloomfieldrealestate.com as a realtor website domain name. Should it happen that this domain name is no longer available, you can also try .net or .org. Also, consider buying old realtor website domain names that other realtors let expire but still have a good ranking. This way, you can have an instant realtor website with good ranking, all you have to do is to make it better.

Create a realtor website with the right keyword phrases.

Before you start creating your realtor website, make a research for the keywords that people usually search. You can use Google keyword Planner and you will see how many people are searching for a certain keyword. From there you can set up your on-page SEO. On each page of your realtor website, the keyword phrases that you choose should be seen a few times in the content, image-alt tags, meta-tags and title.

Write engaging content.

As they say content is a king and it is still is. Google Panda and Google Penguin finds content attractive. But, be aware of keyword stuffing, it no longer works. A few keywords are enough. Create a blog on your realtor website and write about your city to attract audiences. Create a new post once or twice a week to keep them coming back to your website. You can also add pictures and videos in your post.

Work on your off-page SEO.

One of the effective off-page SEO today is link wheeling where in you do not have to link all your submitted articles to your realtor website but you also have to link it to your other post. For example, you submitted an article to a web 2.0 site linking to your realtor website, and then you will submit another article on article directories, this time you have to link it to the article you submitted in web 2.0 sites. You will make a chain. Then do back linking through blog commenting, forum posting and others.

Try not to spend so much money and got sold into some “guarantees”, but make sure you start with an agent website that builds on a solid system, can be managed easily, the pages are SEO friendly and that you can control the page Meta Tags. Your agent website should also allow you to expand later on when you are ready to add videos, local news feeds, widgets, to build more interesting contents that are relevant to your prospective clients.

Webmaster Academy: A Primer on Search Engine Optimization

If you have a website, you probably want it to be easy to find. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is “the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines” (Wikipedia). While the most important thing to do is to always focus on providing your users with a great experience, here are some great optimization tips to get you started:

Optimizing Content
If there’s one thing to remember, it’s to make sure your website has high-quality content. Your content should be concise, relevant, and unique. Remember to use words that users would search for, which you can find more data on in Webmaster Tools.

Improving HTML
Make sure that your website contains all the proper HTML tags necessary for search engine crawlers to understand each page. Each web page should have a relevant title (created with the <title> element in HTML) that concisely describes that page’s content. Images should have alternate text (the alt HTML attribute) because Google is much better at understanding text than looking at pictures.

Relevant Publicity
While Google pays attention to everything on your website, it can also learn a lot about your site from other websites. Consider sharing your website with other communities online. Don’t know where to start? See if your local chamber of commerce website lists local businesses. Google uses external signals like these when evaluating your website.

Because doing all of this can be a daunting task, many businesses hire search engine optimizers (also called SEOs). Just like with anyone you hire, before bringing on an SEO make sure to complete your due diligence - here are some tips to make sure you are bringing on a great fit that abides by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

While search engine optimization can seem overwhelming at first, remember that it’s all about creating the best website for your users. A comprehensive list of SEO best practices can be found in Google’s SEO Starter Guide. For more information about how to build a great website that performs well in search, make sure to visit the Webmaster Academy.

Posted by Garen Checkley, Search Quality Team