Chapter 1
Employing Linking Strategies
In This Chapter
- Theming your site by subject
- Implementing clear subject themes
- Organizing your content with silos
- Making the most of outbound linking
- Tackling link building
In Book II, Chapter 4, we briefly discuss siloing, which is a way of arranging your website according to themes that allows for prime search engine optimization. In this chapter, we go into the meat and bones of siloing.
Siloing your site is one of the most important things you can do for search engine optimization. It organizes your website so that a search engine (and a user) can get a good, clear picture of who you are and what you’re about. A non-siloed site versus a siloed one is like the difference between having a bookcase with books and DVDs and CDs and knickknacks all crammed onto the same shelf versus a bookcase with books on one shelf, CDs on another, DVDs on a third, and knickknacks on the fourth. It’s easier to figure out where things are on the organized bookcase versus the messy bookcase.
In this chapter, we discuss how to build categories and themes for your website and how to incorporate those into your silos. We also discuss how links to your site from others support your site’s relevance in the eyes of search engines.
Theming Your Site by Subject
You can do many things to your website to provide evidence of subject relevance. One of these things is understanding what it means to theme a website. Theming is grouping website content in a manner that matches the way people search. One site can have many themes. Each theme can have sub-themes. In our example classic-car customization site, the main theme is customizing classic cars; a sub-theme is restoration of classic Mustangs.
In order to rank for your keywords within Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your website has to provide information that is organized in clear language that the search engines can understand. When your information has had all its design and layout stripped away, is it still the most relevant information when compared to other sites? If so, you have a pretty good chance of achieving high rankings and, in turn, attracting users looking for those products and services. In order to do so, you have to be thinking about the following things:
- The subject themes your website is currently ranking for in the search engines.
The subject themes your website can legitimately rank for.
False advertising is always a bad idea.
- How to go about properly implementing those subject themes.
As you see throughout this book, we often explain the importance of creating silos for your subject themes by using the analogy that most websites are like a jar of marbles. Search engines can only decipher the meaning of a website when the subjects are clear and distinct. Take a look at the picture of the jar of marbles in Figure 1-1 and think about how search engines would classify the theme(s) of the jar.
Figure 1-1: Our jar of mixed black, white, and gray marbles.
In the jar, you can see black marbles, gray marbles, and white marbles all mixed together with seemingly no order or emphasis. You can reasonably assume that search engines would classify the only theme as “marbles.”
If you then separate each group of colored marbles into separate jars (or sites) as in Figure 1-2, they would be classified as a jar of black marbles, a jar of white marbles, and a jar of gray marbles. Now your site could rank for the narrow terms [black marbles], [white marbles], and [gray marbles], but you would be lucky to rank for the generic term [marbles].
Figure 1-2: Now your marbles are easier to tell apart.
If you wanted to keep all three types of marbles together in a single jar (or keep various topics on your website) and go after the very important generic term, you would go about creating distinct silos or categories within the jar (or site) that would allow the subject themes to be [black marbles], [white marbles], [gray marbles], and finally the generic term [marbles], as in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3: Arranging the marbles by theme allows you to keep them in the same jar and still be able to tell them apart.
Most websites never clarify the main subjects they want their site to be relevant for. Instead, they try to be all things to all people and wind up with a jumbled mess.
The goal for your site, if you want to rank for more than a single generic term, is to selectively decide what your site is and is not about. Rankings often are damaged in two major ways: by including irrelevant content or by having too little content for a subject on a website.
So what subject themes are you currently ranking for?
The best places to start to identify which themes are your most relevant are your keyword research and the data from your website. You can start by examining the data from the following sources:
- Web analytics: These are program routines embedded in your web pages that are designed to track user behavior.
- Pay per click (PPC) programs: You can use traffic from any paid advertisements you run in search engine results to estimate whether a keyword is worth targeting in your SEO campaign.
- Tracked keyword phrases: All the phrases you are tracking in your monitors are valuable sources of information when you apply competitive research tactics.
Each of these sources of information can provide the history of who visits the website and why. They won't tell you why the site isn't ranked for desired keywords directly, but they help you understand what keyword phrases your site currently ranks for organically and which visitors find your site relevant.
Web analytics evaluation
You have several ways to obtain the data or logs for the search engine spider history and the footprints of visitors to your site. First off, you may go right to the source and download the actual log files from your server using FTP. If your server comes with a free log file analyzer, you can use that, or you can use a program like Webtrends (www.webtrends.com) or dozens of other desktop applications that help decipher Internet traffic data. Many businesses also use on-demand services that use cookies and JavaScript to pull live data on the patterns of search engines and visitors. These businesses do so through online services like the exceptionally powerful Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), which is a free service. However you access the data history, you are looking for information on how users came to your site. Book VIII focuses on web analytics and guides you through many of your options.
PPC programs
You can also find clues to the words that your current site is relevant for by evaluating the words that you bid on with pay per click programs offered by all major search engines. Often, companies bid on words that they would like to be relevant for within the organic search arena, but that for one reason or another they have not yet achieved ranking success.
Tracked keyword phrases
The last and most accessible method of discovering your website's most important subject themes is to find out which keyword phrases rank the pages within the site best. What phrases are pulling people to your website? Running a keyword monitor and checking your web analytics program reports and server logs for the most-trafficked pages on your site, and using the search engines’ webmaster tools are ways to discover which queries are already bringing you traffic. The Search Queries report under Search Traffic in Google Search Console (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home) lists the top queries bringing traffic to your site from Google searches, along with stats for impressions (how often your result is seen by a searcher), clicks to your site from that query, and your site’s average ranking on a results page for that keyword. In Bing Webmaster Tools, you find a comparable report in the Reports & Data section under Search Keywords.
Obviously these aren't the only terms that you'll want to focus on in your SEO campaign, but they are important to optimize for so that you don't lose the traffic they're already bringing you. Pair them with your new keyword list when you do your organization. See Book V, Chapter 3 for more on creating keyword lists.
After you identify your keywords and implement them in your campaign, you want to continue to track them, paying close attention to which keywords are bringing traffic and, of that traffic, what percentage of visitors are converting.
Keyword research
After creating a starter list of 10 to 100 keyword terms that appear to be most relevant to your company's product or services, it's time to begin keyword research. During the process of keyword research, the first goal is to grow that keyword list as large as possible. Cover as many relevant subjects that can be remotely connected to the website’s subject themes as you can. Use Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool (www.keyworddiscovery.com) or Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) to identify keywords and synonyms that are related to the site's subject matter. Another excellent tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner). Refer to Book II for the nitty-gritty on keyword research techniques.
After you answer the question of where the site currently ranks by running your keyword monitor or analytics tool, you know two major factors: the phrases for which your site ranks and the phrases for which it doesn’t rank in the search engines. The next challenge is to understand what subjects your site is legitimately relevant to and why you are ranked as you are currently.
Many site owners get incensed that their sites don’t rank higher for terms they feel they are relevant for. These owners feel that engines misjudge the value of their sites. But a poor mechanic always blames his tools. There are rare exceptions where the tools are at fault, but 99 percent of the time, the problem is that the site is not focused enough on its dominant topics. Owners try to cram in too many things at once, and the search engine has a hard time figuring out what the site actually is supposed to be about. Your task is to figure out what your site is about after stripping away all the visual hoo-ha and getting down to the actual content.
Page Analyzer
A great place to begin is to run Page Analyzer within the SEOToolSet. SEOToolSet Lite includes the full-featured Page Analyzer tool and is free for sign up at SEOToolSet.com. Page Analyzer reveals the density, distribution, and frequency of keyword phrases used throughout the page (for more information on measuring keywords, see Book III, Chapter 2). By running the main pages of your site through this tool, you can begin to identify whether the major themes are used throughout the titles, Meta tags, headings, Alt attributes, and body content. If your terms are absent, make a note that the keyword densities seem low. Evaluate how often a phrase is repeated in each major category element and take note of the commonly repeated phrases and infrequently repeated phrases. Are all the terms concentrated only near the top of the pages? If so, make a note that the distribution of the keywords could stand to be more spread out. Don’t bunch them all together.
Multi-Page Analyzer
SEOToolSet Pro subscribers can use the Multi-Page Analyzer to further help their siloing efforts. After evaluating, if the pages throughout your site contain keyword rich densities, compare your pages to that of the top ten competitors for your major keyword terms. Using Multi-Page Analyzer, you are given a report that summarizes why the competitors’ sites ranked highly and recommends how to adjust your own pages to have keyword densities similar to those of the top-ranked sites.
Implementing Clear Subject Themes
As we describe in the preceding sections of this chapter, you need to know what you are ranked for and what you’re considered to be relevant for, and hopefully you will have performed some analysis on the data you gathered so you can determine why your competition ranks the way they do. But even if you’ve taken care of all that, you’re still not done. For each keyword phrase you’ve identified, you need to make a decision: Is it worth the work to write dozens of pages of content to rank for a subject you don’t already rank for? To make this decision, consider whether your site is really about that theme and whether adding more content about the subject could make your site become less relevant for more important terms. You do not want to dilute your site. You need to sit down and figure out whether you’re willing to make the commitment to establish a theme and do the work required.
There are many ways to establish a clear theme: Begin by visualizing the primary and secondary categories that you would prefer for your site. If you don’t have a clear idea of the primary theme of your website, search engines and users are going to be confused as well. You can start figuring out your primary theme by creating a simple outline. Think of this chart like a business's organization chart, except for themes. Define the major theme or primary subject that you want to become relevant for and create an organization chart or linear outline to cement your ideas in place. Often, it’s not until you actually put pen to paper that major subject complications or contradictions surface. Look at Figure 1-4 and note how one main topic is supported by several smaller subtopics.
Figure 1-4: A main topic is supported by subtopics.
Or you can use a simple bulleted list, like this:
- Major theme
- Subtopic 1
- Subtopic 2
- Subtopic 3
- Subtopic 4
Creating an organization flow chart is a third way to lay out your subject themes visually. The Organization Chart is an easily accessible tool that can be found within Microsoft Visio, or you can use another organization chart–creation software program. Using one of these visual representations of your themes and subtopics (outline, bulleted list, or organization chart) provides the opportunity to visually explain to others involved in the website what the focus of the website should be and what subjects actually serve to distract the search engines from the main subjects.
After completing this exercise, ask yourself what keyword phrases users actually type into the search engines when looking for this information. This helps in organizing your broad phrases for the large, traffic-heavy pages for your site and the smaller, more specialized phrases that go on your sub-pages.
Siloing
After you have your main themes and subtopics laid out on paper (or on the computer screen), you can start organizing and laying out your website content into subject silos. You may have a good landing page (a page that users come to from clicking a search result or an outbound link from another site) for each main topic; if you don’t, put creating landing pages at the top of your list. Next, you want to make sure you have enough subtopic content, or sub-pages, to support each main topic. You also want to make sure that every page’s content is focused on its particular theme. In other words, it’s time to start arranging your website into silos.
One way to visualize a silo is to think of a pyramid structure. Look at Figure 1-5 and notice the top tier. That’s a landing page, which has the big broad terms you want to be ranking for. The pages underneath it are the supporting pages, which are the smaller subcategories you came up with to support the main term.
Figure 1-5: A silo looks a lot like a pyramid in that the main topic is supported by the smaller subtopics.
The top page receives the most support (and hopefully the most traffic) because it’s the most relevant and focused page about its particular subject. Your site proves that it’s the most important by the way it’s structured, with supporting pages under the top page, and by the way its links are set up. The way you set up your site should tell the search engines exactly what each page is about and which is the most important page for each keyword theme.
There are two ways of doing siloing. One way is physical (or directory-based) siloing, which involves building the directory structure to reflect your site themes and constructing your links to follow the structure of your directory, where sub-pages in a directory are also sub-pages for a particular theme. The other way is through virtual siloing, which establishes what your main subject themes are based entirely on links without the reinforcement of your directory structure.
Doing physical siloing
One way you can do your siloing is to link in the same pattern as your directory structure. (The directory structure refers to the arrangement of the folders where your website files physically reside.) When you upload files to your site, you place them in a directory. A siloed directory structure has a top-level folder for each main topic, subfolders within each main-topic folder for its related subtopics, and individual pages inside each subfolder (as shown in Figure 1-6). Linking then naturally follows this structure, effectively reinforcing your directories through links.
Figure 1-6: A siloed file directory structure.
When building a directory structure, be sure not to go too deep. For example, take a look at the URL of the page. The full address is the directory of where the page is. Observe:
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/index.html
The URL lets you know where the page is. Notice how the page named index.html is saved within the folder named mustang, which is a subfolder of the main directory ford. This page is only two levels deep in the site structure, which is good.
Too many levels of subdirectories can have the following negative effects:
- The more clicks it takes to get from the home page to the target page, the less important it is deemed by the search engines.
- Long directory paths make long URLs, and studies have proven that users avoid clicking long URLs on a search results page.
- Long URLs are more prone to typos. This can discourage deep linking or even cause broken links to your web pages from other sites. Also, users can make mistakes typing in your URL.
So don’t get category-happy. Making your directory structure ten directories deep is bad, having five levels is probably too much, and even having three levels of subdirectories is still not great. Although there's no hard-and-fast rule, you should try to keep your directory structure quite shallow: One or two levels deep is usually sufficient. The closer the page is to the root of the directory, the more important your page looks to the search engine.
For example, our classic car website only has one main directory level (the car’s make) and two directory levels of subcategories (model and year). The directory could look something like this:
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/delrio/index.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/delrio/1957.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/delrio/1956.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/fairlane/index.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/fairlane/1958.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/fairlane/1959.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/index.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/1965.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/1966.html
Note how shallow the directory structure is: No page is more than three directory levels away from the root.
The other thing to keep in mind when working with physical siloing is the difference between absolute and relative linking. A fully qualified link provides the entire URL within the link, and a relative link is only linked to a file within the current directory. A fully qualified link looks like this:
<a href="http://www.classiccars.com/ford/mustang/tireoptions.html">
A root-relative link looks like this:
<a href="/ford/mustang/tireoptions.html">
And a directory-relative link looks like this:
<a href="tireoptions.html">
When you use a relative link, it’s only going to work in relation to the current directory (or the next directory up, if you use slash characters relative to the root of the site). So a link to tireoptions.html works only if there’s a file called tireoptions.html for it to link to in the same directory as the file you are linking from.
With fully qualified linking, there is no confusion about where the file is located and what it is about. A fully qualified link has the added bonus of being very clear for the search engine to follow. Fully qualified links allow the search engine spider to have the full address when it follows a link and ensures that the pages being linked to can be found and indexed when the spider returns in the future. Using relative links, or using links that are not fully qualified, can send the spider to a wrong page. Fully qualified links make links easier to maintain and ensure that the search engine spider can always follow them.
Whenever you move files, links need to be updated. Absolute links break absolutely if you rearrange folders, whereas if you picked up an entire subdirectory and moved it somewhere else, relative links actually still work. The disadvantage of relative linking is not being able to see at a glance the complete path where a file exists, which may make it tougher to maintain.
Doing virtual siloing
You may have your website directories currently set up in a non-siloed structure, with thousands of files and hundreds of folders already in place. Or, you may need to maintain a directory structure that does not reflect your site theme for some other reason. Never fear: As with most difficulties, you can use a technical solution that still lets you silo your site and achieve better search engine optimization.
You can make the theme of your web pages clear to the search engines even if you do not follow your directory structure, so long as you connect your pages on the same theme through internal linking. This is virtual siloing.
Here’s how to think about it in the simplest terms possible: The Internet is a series of web pages connected by hyperlinks. A website is a part of the great Internet soup, being both a member of the whole vast network and an individual group of pages unique unto itself. What search engines attempt to do is collect information from individual sites into content groups: “This site means this, and that other site means that, and so forth.” They try to determine every site’s content and give the content a category. Search engines award the websites that have the most complete subject relevance with high rankings for those keywords.
The difference between physical siloing and virtual siloing is that in physical siloing, it’s about how you set up your directory structure and links. Virtual siloing is about setting up your links regardless of your directory structure. In virtual siloing, the following are your tools:
- Anchor text: The hyperlinked text that describes what the hyperlink actually links to
- Internal links: The links within your site
Anchor text
The anchor text for a link tells the search engine what the page that’s being linked to is about. Clicking a link that says “tires” should take you to a page about tires. Because if the page is about tires, and the anchor text says it’s about tires, and any other links to that page all contain the word tires (or synonyms of tires), that creates a giant blinking neon arrow to tell the search engine that that particular page is about tires. Anchor text is the hyperlinked text that explains what the link is and what the page it is linking to is about. It sometimes helps to think of anchor text as your ability to vote for what keyword phrase the target page should rank for.
Internal linking structure
The last part of virtual siloing is building subject relevance using the navigation and on-page elements of your website. This means arranging the main subjects in the most straightforward way possible in order to build subject relevance, and organizing your navigation menus to categorize the content of your site. Remember the pyramid that we tell you about at the beginning of the chapter? The broader terms are supported by the lesser terms, and the lesser terms are supported by the even lesser terms, and so forth.
Every silo needs to be assigned a main landing page focused on that silo’s primary subject theme. The landing page should have a substantial amount of supporting pages. Supporting pages can also have supporting pages. Linking should stay within the silos or point to other important landing pages. Look at Figure 1-7, which shows a graph of a silo with one big broad page and five smaller subcategory pages, each with its own attached supporting pages.
Figure 1-7: A typical silo: Note how the categories are arranged.
When you’re building your silo, the smaller pages should not link cross-category. Your page on Ford tires should not link to a page about Chevy tires, for instance. Instead, have both pages link to a separate landing page about tires. Too much cross-linking between unrelated subjects dilutes the silo and confuses the search engine.
You can also use a couple of tricks with cross-linking in order to keep the links streamlined, but they should be used sparingly. If you must cross-link theme-supporting pages (not landing pages), you may want to add the rel="nofollow" attribute to a link to keep the search engine from following the link. This allows unrelated pages to link to each other without confusing the subject relevance. Alternatively, you can use one of the methods we talk about in the following section on excessive cross-linking.
The nofollow attribute is not a substitute for having a good linking strategy, and every page on your site must be linked to from at least two perfectly normal, followable links on perfectly normal, indexable pages.
Making the Most of Outbound Links
Your outbound links are the links that you have going out of your site. Having outbound links to resources and experts in your industry that help your visitors is important. Also, such links show the search engines that you recognize who the other experts in your industry are and helps the search engines define your site by association. Here are some aspects to keep in mind for your outbound links:
- Link to other experts. Pick noncompetitive sites that you feel are relevant to your own site and are experts in their subjects. Having these links not only increases your standing with the search engines (experts linking to experts), but also makes you appear more trustworthy to users.
- Make sure that the link is useful to your users. Having a bunch of irrelevant links on your site damages your expertise in the eyes of the search engines. It also makes you look bad to your users. They’re coming to your site for research, and if you can’t give them any useful links to follow, they’re probably won’t come back.
- Relevancy is key. Your links have to be relevant to your site, for you and for the search engines.
- Validate links. Make sure that your links are legitimate and won’t get you in trouble with the search engines. (For more on how to avoid getting into trouble with search engines due to links, reference Chapter 3 of this minibook.)
- Be selective. If you’re associating with another website, make sure that it’s a good one — no bad neighborhoods, no irrelevant links.
Obtaining Inbound Links
Inbound linking (also called backlinks) is perhaps the most well known and often discussed of the link structure elements in search engine optimization. These backlinks are the links that point into your site from an outside website. You might be saying to yourself, “Hold up, I can’t control what people say about me.” That is true, to an extent. However, you can encourage supporters and people interested in spreading the word about you to add a mention of your site to their personal or even company websites by generally being an awesome resource.
Link building, the process of attracting inbound links, is covered in depth in Chapter 3 of this minibook, but here are a few different ways to solicit links to your site:
- Link magnets
- Link baiting
- Link buying
Link magnets
When we say link magnets, we mean elements on your site that you build in such a way that people naturally want to link to them. Much like a magnet attracts iron filings, these site-content elements simply attract links. People happen upon your site, find the link magnet, and decide that it’s relevant and worthy of a link, so they stick a link to your content on their site. This happens because someone finds your page both useful and interesting — and it’s a process that happens over time. But it means that the link is generally going to be from someone who is actually interested in your industry, not just in your gimmick. Remember, search engines judge you based on your expertise, and good quality links from relevant sites add to that.
The Search Engine Relationship Chart available at Bruce Clay’s site (www.bruceclay.com/serc) is a good example of a link magnet. People in the search engine optimization industry find it relevant to their sites and useful for reference, so they link to it. We continue to keep the chart updated, so it always reflects the current state of the ever-changing search engine landscape. For this reason, the chart maintains its relevance over time, as opposed to something brief and flashy that has no long-term value.
Link bait
Link bait is an accelerated version of a link magnet. Link bait is anything that is deliberately provocative in order to get someone to link to you. Examples would be a cartoon that someone did of your boss, or a video depicting wacky hi-jinks in your office that was linked to by a few well-read blogs.
Link bait, unlike link magnets, is usually more broadly appealing in scope and probably won't appeal solely to your core market. Like any other non-relevant link, a link generated from link bait is often not one that would be considered a high quality link in general. But it does have the bonus of bringing a lot of traffic to your site, and hopefully a few of those visitors may poke around your site and decide to give you a permanent link.
An excellent example of link bait is any kind of viral marketing. Blendtec, a blender company, gets tons of links and traffic from its videos on its Will It Blend? site, where spokespeople put all manner of strange and surprising things into Blendtec blenders (like rakes, marbles, and iPhones) and post the videos on the Internet. Most sites linking to Will It Blend? are not directly related to blenders, commercial or retail, and certainly can’t be considered blender “experts” by the search engines, so those links count for less. However, the sheer volume of links that include the relevant keyword [blend] in the anchor text helps the Will It Blend? site rank.
Link buying
By ad link buying, we don’t mean going out and selling or buying links to your own site for SEO link-building purposes. There are two loose groupings of link buying: buying advertising for traffic purposes but not for SEO, which is acceptable, and buying a link for SEO purposes that is not a qualified testimonial, which is considered deceptive and if detected could result in a spam penalty.
Acceptable link buying is paying for a link on someone’s advertising site. You must do it strictly for advertising and traffic purposes only, and not for link popularity. Google doesn’t like to consider paid links and does not assign weight to a paid link. Paid links may pass some value until detected, but after they’re detected, you lose all SEO value and could incur a penalty. If you do have a paid link on someone else’s site, ask that person to place a rel="nofollow" attribute on it. This attribute alerts the search engines that link equity should not be passed via that link. This is also important because if Google discovers a sold link on the site, it might stop passing link equity to all the links on the site. Read Chapter 3 of this minibook for the important technical requirements you’ll want to do to make sure your paid advertising links are search engine approved.
If you decide the traffic and advertising is worth the effort, it's perfectly acceptable to pay a site to have it run your banner or text-link ad. Be aware, however, that part of the whole “paid links” issue is that you have to pay for them.