Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of setting up your site for more traffic. You do this by helping search engines, such as Google and Bing, to find your website when people search for topics that you cover.
The search engines have LOTS of rules, called algorithms, that determine which sites appear when a person searches. The algorithms are a secret, but Google and Bing do offer guidelines and analysts have figured out numerous principles, just by observing what happens.
The more you know about these rules, the better you can apply them to get more traffic for your website.
Internal linking is good
Internal linking usually means linking to other blog posts on your website, but it could also be links to other pages. When you do this sort of cross linking, you:
- Tell search engines that these other posts are important.
- Keep people on your website longer, as they go from one post to another. Search engines like sites that hold the attention of readers.
- Help your readers find related content
The more content you have, the easier it is to find related blog posts to link to. So be sure to write regularly!
Of course, it’s easy to find related posts and link to them (and you’ll see how I do that at the end of this post). But you can use some other cool techniques as well.
Supercharge internal linking by linking to category pages
A category page is a WordPress listing of all the posts in a category. Are you using categories for all of your blog posts? If not, you should be. Here is a screenshot of the first few categories on this blog. Look over the categories. Can you see that they are all important concepts that people interested in online marketing search for?
Create categories that are common keywords in your field and be sure to add the appropriate category to your blog posts. You can see that this post’s category is “Keywords & Search Engine Optimization (SEO).”
How do you create a link to a category? Watch this 23-second silent video. (I’m doing this at my mother’s house and she’s listening to some music, so I didn’t narrate it.) In it, you’ll see how I get the URL of the category (keywords & seo) and you’ll also see me scroll through all of my blog posts in that category. That URL is what you would link to. You can see that link at the bottom of this post and click through to see for yourself what the results look like — and read more about keywords and SEO.
Use your sidebar
You can use sidebar widgets to create internal links. The 2 that come with WordPress and which are especially helpful are Categories and Recent Posts. The Categories widget is the one you saw in the above video.
To add one or both of these widgets to your sidebar, follow these steps:
- Log into your WordPress account to display the Dashboard.
- From the Dashboard menu, choose Appearance, Widgets
- On the Widgets screen, locate your sidebar on the right. (You might have only one sidebar displayed on your website, but you might have options for others.) If necessary, click the little arrow next to the sidebar name to expand it.
- Drag the Categories widget to the desired location on your sidebar.
- Do the same with the Recent Posts widget.
When you drag the Recent Posts widget to the sidebar, you have some options, as you see here. When you’re done, click Save.
Using these techniques, you can increase your website’s ranking in searches and pique your readers’ interest so that they click through to other blog posts. That type of engagement is worth a lot!
How to find out more about SEO
As promised, here’s the link to my keyword and SEO category. By clicking this link, you’ll get a list of all of the posts I’ve written on those topics, just as you saw in the video.
And here’s one of the posts in the keyword and SEO category that I think you’ll like, “Increase your website traffic with this simple technique.” I talk about internal linking there, too, but then give you a specific technique that helps you decide which internal links will give you the biggest return.
In a future post, I’ll talk about plug-ins that you can use to increase internal linking and reader engagement.
Here’s a chance to get some link love! Add one of the widgets I discussed in this post to your website and leave a comment with your blog URL so we can see how your widget looks!
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