Search Engine Optimization is not just a technique that will help you improve your position on SERPs (search engine results pages), but it is also about giving your visitors what they are looking for on your website.
I have covered the three important aspects of SEO, however, there are many facets to SEO. Matt Cutts wrote about this:
“SEOs pay too much attention to the PageRank bar, and not enough to the over 100 other factors that go into our scoring.”
When you add all of the related search terms that a website is about, you come up with thousands of little things that are important. Many of these factors are interrelated.
Let’s talk about another important aspect of optimizing your site for visitors and how this will relay this to the search engines as well.
Interlinking
What is interlinking? It is the building of a section of content and linking it to something that is related to the same topic. When I speak about a topic that I have either covered, or have touched on in a previous post and I build a link to that post, I have interlinked them.
What does that say to visitors?
If you are reading something, you get to the end of the page and the information that you were looking for is not there, your thirst for information is not quenched. Where do you go? If you are on a website, typically you will do one of two things:
1. Keep looking on the website you are on.
2. Leave the website you are on to find the information elsewhere.
So what? Well, if you want to turn that visitor into a buyer, reader or sign up, but if you are leaving it to a 50/50 chance, you are loosing half the leads you are capable of getting because they are leaving. And if you are paying to get those visitors to your website, you are throwing away approximately half of your marketing budget out the window.
How’s your ROI? Could you use to improve this? Keep the visitors you already have.
How to correct this is to link related topics to others that are available on your website. If you do not have more information, don’t link or build new content that supports your most frequently landed on pages. You can leave it up to your navigation to try to keep the 50% that didn’t leave. Wow, your odds are getting worse aren’t they?
Ok, back to the other reason for interlinking in your content:
What does it say to search engines?
Links to other areas of your website are important when they are related, why? Because you are letting the engines know that your concern is for the visitor, you are providing additional information that is related to the topic that the link is included in and that it is there to support your page. Is all of your content on your index, or one single page? I hope not, you have built a website to provide visitors with something, but the problem is, search engines rank each page and send searchers to different areas of your website. So, if a user was let loose on any page on your site and asked to accomplish a task, could they do it?
Navigation isn’t just in the navigation area or the sitemap, and if that is all you are providing, then you are loosing visitors.
What are your thoughts?
Related Posts >>
- “Every Page is a Landing Page” and Other Concepts of SEO
- Hot Topics Around the Company Start Page?
- PageRank – What It Is and What It Is Not
- Google Gives Webmasters a Better View of Inbound Links
- New Tools for Optimizing Your Website
