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eFAQ: Link Strategy

September 2007

TOPIC: HOW TO INCREASE YOUR SITE TRAFFIC

As you would guess, one of the most pressing questions our clients ask us as we begin building their websites is:

"Once our cool, new site is launched, how do we get lots of visitors to continually visit?"

This is actually a question about search engine optimization and eMarketing. While the strategies will vary depending on your business goals, there are a number of general practices that you can use to steadily increase your traffic.

ORGANIC SEARCH: LINK STRATEGY

Sure, it's trendy to be "green," but organic search has little to do with nitrogen tea or ladybugs.

Rather, organic search refers to the free page rankings you get when your site gets crawled and cataloged by the search engines.

During the past year, Web 2.0 has dramatically changed the landscape of search optimization. The new Google buzzword de jour is "Blended" or "Universal Search." These days, the SERPs (search engine results pages) don't just bring you a bunch of text links when you enter a search term. On Google and Ask.com, in particular, the SERPs now also retrieve data about maps, video, images, audio, news and blogs.

A mere few months ago, in the old day, it used to be that Keyword Strategy was The King when it came to getting top ranks on the SERPs. Hours were spent researching under-used but popular terms to pepper across web page copy, hoping to get one's site placed top of search results pages.

While keywords are still paramount, building high-quality incoming and outgoing links is now far more critical. Here are a few organic tricks to pay attention to.

Link Strategy

Place your keywords and their variations into a page with a minimum of 500-700 words of copy and include the keyword you're targeting on the page about 6-8 times. Here's some other quick tips to consider when incorporating keywords into your site:

Optimize your pages for only 1 to 2 primary keyword phrases. Any attempt to do more tends to make the page crowded and unreadable.
Take advantage of the internal linking within your site by using your specific keyword phrases for your link anchor text.
Include your keywords in your page's filenames whenever possible. Don't change the filenames of pages that are already ranking.
Optimize for the reader, not just the search engines. Make sure that what you write stirs an emotional response from your reader—even if it means dialing down the SEO a bit.

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