An overlooked “link-building strategy” is your website’s own internal links. It seems that once a website is launched, the site owner goes on a mad hunt for links rather than utilizing his own site to improve overall search engine optimization (SEO).
If your site has been online for some time and established, you’ll enjoy great SEO lift from links you control.
Links under your control allow you to vary your anchor text and lead visitors to where you want them, e.g. a sign up page, a shopping cart, a digital download.
When you think about a linking strategy with your own site in mind, it helps clarify the goals of your website and how best to focus your content. When you focus on content you inadvertently create linking opportunities where other sites will want to link to you. Content today is much more the Web copy. Remember, anything that can be digitized can be optimized for search.
When you focus on your content, you give search engines numerous signals to come visit more often. Frequent visits give your pages a better chance of being served up in the search results and more opportunities for a searcher to click through to your site. The more relevant your links, the more likely you are to receive attention from both, and you’ve created a nice feedback look that earns you higher rankings and more traffic.
A clean link structure also speeds up load time. By clean, I mean tightly focused URLs. While long URLs are no longer penalized as spam, there seems to be a 70-character limit before search engines start to slow down. Anything you can do to speed up load time, which is an important ranking signal, will help in search results. Super long URLs also don’t offer a quality user experience. And people do scan the URL to determine further if they are clicking on a relevant page.
So next time link building lethargy sets in, remember that good linking begins at home.
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