Affiliate Programs

From what I see, many bloggers and website owners are missing out on a huge opportunity to increase their search engine rankings which can lead to a lot more traffic.

The Importance of Internal Linking

Google has pretty much said that it looks at how your internal pages are linked to each other. So why not take advantage of this?

One way you should be doing this is to use links to other pages on your blog or website in as many of your post as you can.

Don’t just do it once either. You should have as many links pointing to your other pages as you can. If you can get 20 or more links pointing to an internal page, then you’re on the right path.

Anchor Text Can Make Or Break You

Another area where I see bloggers and website owners failing to take advantage of internal linking is the use of anchor text.

Anchor text tells a search engine what the page that is being linked to is all about.  IMHO, anchor text is the most important part of a link and getting the rankings that come with them.

For example, if I link to this page on this blog called http://www.affiliatewatcher.com/how-to-get-adsense-showing-relevant-high-paying-ads/ you can see this is a pretty poor looking link. There is also no anchor text associate with this link.

Now, let’s look at how the link should be constructed.

Make Money With Adsense

This link goes to the same page but now I’ve used descriptive text and most important I’VE USED MY KEYWORDS AS ANCHOR TEXT.

For a little added weight, I bolded the link as well (use the <strong> tag instead of the <b> tag).

If you run your cursor over that link, you’ll see a tiny pop up that says “Make Money With Adsense.” These are my keywords and they tell the search engines that the page is about a making money with adsense. Google loves anchor text!

Here’s how to structure your links, both internal and external. Your link should look something like this <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com” title=”my keyword”>My Keyword As Anchor Text</a>

In the above example, you see the basic link as www.yoursite.com  the “title” is what will make your anchor text. Always used your keywords as your anchor text! The words “My Keyword As Anchor Text” is the phrase that will be linked. It should be your chosen keywords as well.

Turn Your Blogroll Into A SEO Linking Machine

If you’ve noticed, I don’t have the traditional Blogroll on this blog, or any of my other blogs for that matter. For one thing, experiments that I and other bloggers have done showed that Google doesn’t give as much weight to these types of links as they do one good anchor text in an article.

So what to do with your Blogroll?

Turn it into an internal linking machine!

Instead of using the default text of “Blogroll”, I used the words “Popular Articles on AffiliateWatcher.Com.” You can see this on the left side of the page, a little below the fold.

Now, look at each article and run your cursor over them. See the anchor text?

If you have 200 pages on your blog and you create a “Blogroll” like this, along with the anchor text, then you have created over 200 SEO optimized links with anchor text to each of those pages. Google will notice this!

On a weight loss blog I have, my main keyword for a page had stagnated out on page 3 of Google Serps. Once I linked that article in my custom “Blogroll” along with anchor text, I shot up to #5 on Page 1 within 2 weeks!

How To Customize Your WordPress Blogroll For Super Internal Linking Powers!

Some of you may not know how to create a Custom Blogroll name or add anchor text to a Blogroll link.

Here’s how.

Go to your WordPress Dashboard and then click on “Blogroll”. Next, look for “Add Link” in the sub menu.

One there, look to the left side of the page and you should see the box labeled “Categories” with an empty text field box below it. All you do is adf the Title of the new Blogroll category you want to create, for example “Popular Pages on AffiliateWatcher.Com.” Then just make sure you tic the box beside the Blogroll category you want your link to go under. You can make as many of these Blogroll categories as you want.

Now to create the Optimized text that will link your page, look back to the right and fill in the “Name” field. In this case it would be “Make Money with Adsense.” Now in the “Address” field you’ll type in the URL of the page you want to link to.

After that comes the “description.” This is where you’ll put your keyword or keyword phrase to make your anchor text. In this example it will be “Make Money With Adsense.” Now click on the “Add Link” buttom and you’re ready to go.

One Last Way To Link Your Internal Pages

In addition to the technique outlined above, you should also be using a plugin like Aizzato’s Related Post plugin.

You can set the number of post it show’s after each post. I use 5, but I’ve seen others use as many as 10. This will help tremendously with your internal linking efforts!

That’s it, it really is as simple as creating good links to your internal pages to increase your traffic and rankings. These simple tips should have your blog or website moving up in the SERPS soon.