Search Engine Marketing in Plain English: Link building
Link building: Links are crucial to your site’s ranking in Google’s formula. To build links, you must connect pages within your site, known as internal links.
Internal links: Links to pages within your sites.
External links: Links to pages on a different website.
Backlinks: Links pointing to your site from other sites.
Google’s ranking evaluator (SEO crawler) likes a balance of 2/1 internal/external links (I.E., a link to Nike.com) anytime you post a blog entry.
Internal links should match some of the keywords on the page title. For example, if you’re planning to write a post that mentions Pepsi, you should create a company profile page (or post) on your site.
I wrote about Pepsi’s switch from the 12-pack case to the 8-pack case, with a link to the Marketing Shift profile page of Pepsi.
Within weeks, the story had thousands of views, and my follow-up posts were also popular, because they were all connected via the profile page. Now, if you Google search Pepsi 8-Pack, you’ll notice several marketingshift.com stories at the top.
Another example is NASCAR driver Ken Butler. I created a profile page of Ken Butler III, within the Marketingshift directory of people. From that point on, when I referred to Ken Butler, I linked to the profile page.
Eventually, your collection of internal links will elevate your ranking for those terms in search results. For example, the marketingshift.com profile page ranks in the top 10 for search “Ken Butler III”, just below official site and NASCAR links.This ranking is due to the multiple posts that referred back to the profile page.
This system of internal linking is simplified, if you devote sufficient categories and respective pages to function as an extensive directory of people, companies or products mentioned on blog posts.By posting a profile of a company or person that will be mentioned in a future post, you can organize a directory of people & companies mentioned on your site.
