Where to Link To
Continuation of Lesson 10 from You Can Make
Money Writing
It is time to wrap up this lesson on strategic linking, with
one more look at the question of where to link to with those
resource box links.
When should you link to pages other than your homepage? The
short answer is "when it makes sense." On some of my
sites, I link almost every article I distribute to the homepage.
On others I have articles out there that link to many different
pages. It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish with
your articles.
If you are starting a website, or if it is relatively undeveloped,
you will want to link to the homepage. You need to get that homepage
into the results-pages of those search engines, so you want as
many good incoming links as you can get. In any case, other pages
on your site get increased exposure and Google PageRank as a
result of your homepage doing better.
It works like this: A link is a "vote." Your interior
links - those that link from one page to another on the same
site - also count as votes. The more "important" a
page is (more highly ranked by the search engines), the more
value its links have. So if you get a better ranking for your
home page, that is "shared" with any pages it links
to or "votes" for.
On the other hand, if you add a new section to a site, it
may make sense to optimize the introductory page for this with
incoming links. For example, when I added a section on real estate
investing to my site HousesUnderFiftyThousand.com, I named the
introductory page investing-in-real-estate.html, and used the
anchor text "Investing In Real Estate" in the links
from many authors resource boxes on my articles. It was a decent
enough keyword that I wanted to target it directly, rather than
only by promoting it on the homepage and linking to it from there.
By the way, if you have identified a really good keyword,
you may be better off starting a new website targeting it, and
then linking to that new site from your existing one. Home pages
always seem to be found more easily by the search engines, and
in any case, you can only have so many links on your home page
before the size becomes a problem. The total "vote value"
of a page is divided between all links on it, so eventually -
with more pages - you get diminishing returns from links on the
home page.
As mentioned in the previous lesson, there is also optimization
value in having at least 20% of your incoming links pointing
somewhere other than the homepage. This is based on analysis
web marketers have done, which indicates that search engines
like to see more than one link destination, presumably because
this appears more "natural." In other words, the theory
is that links wouldn't normally all go the same page on a site
unless they are all created by various link exchanges, paid links,
and other schemes that don't indicate "true" votes
of confidence for a website.
More About Where to Link To
When you plan your web site linking strategies for your articles,
ask yourself where the readers should "land" on your
site for you to get the most value out of them. These pages could
include:
- A page where you sell something.
- The page most directly relevant to the topic of the article.
- A page with a subscription form for your newsletter.
- The website that makes you the most revenue per visitor.
- The page that makes you the most revenue per visitor.
- A page that lists all of your other articles they may want
to read.
Give it some thought. Once those articles are out there, you'll
never be able to track them all down and change them in the future.
In other words, try to get those linking strategies correct right
from the start.
Continues with Lesson 10 here... Writing
for Readers
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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