In one of my previous posts, I wrote about some search engine ranking myths that are still prevalent nowadays. I concluded that post by stating that I will be sharing two things that can significantly improve your search engine rankings.
Believe it or not, these two things are very easy to implement that almost anyone can reap the benefits. Continue reading if you want to know what they are.
Implement A Robust Internal Linking Structure
There’s one category of links that you have 100% control over, and that is your internal links. Internal links are links to pages within your own web site.
Most modern blogging and CMS software have decent archiving functions that organises pages into categories, tags or some other archive format.
WordPress, which is what I run HTNet on, is a very robust blogging platform that takes care of my internal linking structure very well. Since this is done automagically, I can concentrate more on generating content, instead of getting my hands dirty with internal link-building.
If you run your blog or web site on WordPress, here are some internal linking tips I find useful:
- Forget about the weekly, monthly, yearly archives. Displaying them just takes up space and doesn’t contribute much to the user experience. Do you sieve through monthly archives of your favourite blogs? Do you expect others to do the same with yours?
- Make sure your categories archives are easily accessable. If you have only a handful of them, then you might as well stick it on every page. On the other hand, if you’re pretty much an open-mic blog, then you might want to consider dedicating a special page to list your categories; like what I’m doing with my HTNet Tags page.
- Link to posts or pages you’re especially proud of in every page of your blog. This will help it gain a significant SEO boost.
- The Related Posts plugin should be installed if you have over 100 posts in your blog. It helps spread the link-love around.
Get Stable Web Hosting
This is an often overlooked area for webmasters moving on from free hosting. There are plenty of quality free web and blog hosting services. Tripod, WordPress.com and Bloggercomes to mind pretty easily.
Eventhough these services are free, they are built on highly-tuned hardware, and connected to solid Internet backbone links… and this is not something you’ll get easily when it comes to commercial web hosting. Unfortunately, if you want to be taken seriously in the online world, you got to have your own domain name and paid web hosting.
Maybe you are already asking, “What has servers got to do with SEO?”. A whole lot!Regardless of how well you’re getting linked, that incoming PR is worth nothing if your server is down when search engine spiders are trying to crawl your web site.
Imagine, months of link building going to waste just because your server was down when it matters most (from an SEO standpoint). This is not theory, it is very much real. If you want to talk to someone who has experienced it first hand, I’d suggest you talk to Joneh who runs Papajoneh.com as well as JonehRC.com; two web sites that faced different fortunes in the server stability front.
To sum up, you need to focus on these two areas first before doing crazy SEO ninja stuff. Personally, I think that these are the two foundations of SEO. Once you have these two in control, you’ll have more freedom to experiment with other SEO techniques.
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