525 – Increase your website’s search engine “value”: Tom talks Internal Linking

Episode 525 – Internal Linking
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's time here with episode five hundred and twenty five of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to give you a little primer on internal linking. Now this, this is on your website. This can be a very complicated topic, so I promise I won't get too much into the technical weeds. Or maybe not at all. But what you hear in this episode will help your visitors find your best content, and the search engines love you for it, too. So it's all good. Now this is internal linking links inside your website. Now I did a back link episode that's a whole different thing, but extremely important to you, and that was episode 466. So whenever you. Want to see you back issue? You go to screwthecommute.com/466 or whatever the number is. Now the last episode, episode 524 was on beginning videography that was myself and Marc Bullard, who is my video guy for, I think, 12, 13 years or more. We gave you all kinds of tips to shoot better. Video and also told you about our VIP video weekend here at the retreat center, where we two days we just immerse you in this. Take your video to a new level.

[00:01:42] So check that out. Now, how'd you like to make big affiliate commissions? Well? Oh, if do is refer our stuff and we'll send you money? I mean, it's that simple. We take care of the customers and you get money. So check it out by emailing me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and we'll give you all the details on how you promote and what you know what would make the best sense for you? Now, pick up a copy of our automation e-book. It saved me millions of keystrokes, literally millions of keystrokes and all the stuff in it is either free or cheap. Ways to work faster. Get more work done so you have more free time or get more people. You know, get it, get to more prospects and more customers and make more money with the same amount of time. So it's an awesome book. We sell it for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the show. So grab your copy. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's screwthecommute.com/app, where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now we're still in the middle of this wonderful program. We've got going with my school to help persons with disabilities get trained in digital marketing.

[00:03:01] And also, we're going to get them hired and get them started in their own business. And it's just a beautiful thing I'm so proud to be associated with. Now we have a Go Fund Me campaign. We'd love to have any of your help. Any little bit helps to fund the thing. We're going to use some of the money to hire persons with disabilities to help run the program, and we've got three people in now. We're shooting for five altogether and they're so inspirational because two of the people are blind and they're making videos. Stuff is amazing. So check it out at my school website. IMTCVA.org/disabilities. That's Internet Marketing Training Center Virginia and click on the Go Fund Me campaign and you can see their videos. And like I said, anything you throw in can be good and I'll figure out a way if you're really flush with cash and you need a tax deduction before the end of the year to make that happen for you and make everybody happy, so. So check it out and contact me directly at Tom@screwthecommute.com if you would like more info.

[00:04:10] All right, let's get to the main event. We're talking about internal links in your website, so this is very easy to do what I'm going to talk about. This is a primer. If you just do what I tell you in this episode, you're going to jump way ahead of competitors that don't know this stuff.

[00:04:29] But you know what? A lot of things tie together. And you know, I've been harping ever since the beginning of this podcast about three years ago that you must do keyword research. And again, this is another place that you have to use keyword research. So make sure you review episode 1 of Screw the commute, because that was the most important thing ever that I've run into in all the years I've been teaching this. And then episode 130 is the upgrades you need to make to your keyword research based on voice search because people search differently with their voice, so make sure you get that under your belt now.

[00:05:11] Let's talk about anchor text. The days of click here to get people to click on something are gone. Virtually every time I see one of them on my sites and I use that for forever too, I change it to appropriate anchor text. So what is anchor text? Well, let's say you had a really long link something like screwthecommute.com slash how dash to dash make dash your dash content dash go dash viral question mark x y d twenty seven UTMB four seven eight 12. I mean, I don't know how you write 12 in a link, but but something really you know you've seen these long, crazy links, right? So you don't really want to put that long, ugly link, you know that ugly looking thing on your page in your website? So what typically you do and what I did until I learned what a bad idea was is to simply put the words Click here.

[00:06:15] And then I would embed that long, ugly link under those words click here. So the words click here were underlined and usually turn blue, and that's what people would click on to go to that long, ugly link. Well, in this case, the words click here or called anchor text. The problem with this is that their words click here are not keywords that are important to to me and my business. This is where your keyword research comes in. So in the long link above, maybe instead of using click here as the anchor text, I would use viral marketing as the anchor text. Those words are important to me. And those are keywords that are important to me. And also, keywords in anchor text get a higher emphasis in search engines. Click here doesn't help me with the search engines at all. But the term viral marketing does, so you should review all the click here type links on your site and replace them with keyword anchor text that applies to the page you're taking the person. Now you never want to put keywords that trick the person to going to a page.

[00:07:42] That's not what the anchor text promised them doing. This makes a very poor visitor experience. They're not going to trust you anymore and contributes to what are called high bounce rates. In other words, the person hits the page and immediately leaves your site because the page wasn't about what the anchor text said it should be. So the search engines see this, and it makes your site look really bad to them and you get lower rankings. Ok, now now we know what anchor text is, it's the words that have links embedded under them. So what are some of the simple things we can do to improve the links within our site? All right, so the first topic is what we call orphaned pages, sometimes called hidden pages. Now these are pages that are on your site but aren't linked to the navigation system. In other words, there are no links coming to the pages from other pages on your site. And no one would know about these pages. These orphans are hidden pages unless you gave them the direct URL to the page. Now I have many of these that I need to fix up because I frequently have standalone sales pages where, like, for instance, screwthecommute.com/viral that's not linked from any place else on Screw the Commute site, but it's a sales letter for my viral marketing book, and I promote the page through email and on social media for people to go directly to that page and other ones when I'm doing other promotions.

[00:09:19] And sure, I make a lot of sales this way, but I've now learned that having links to those pages on other pages of my site does a couple good things. One, The search engine see those links and can find those pages easier. And to a visitor, to my site that never got an email from me or saw anything about the page on social media can still find that sales page and buy my book. So if you have similar pages, find excuses to put links to them from other pages in your site. Sometimes putting it in the sidebar of a blog will make the link to the page show up automatically on every other page that has a sidebar. All right, next thing. Your home page is the most important anything on a home page of your site gets a higher emphasis from search engine, and I got to mention that you've heard me and other episodes tell you that even though I have the skills, I don't kill myself trying to get search engine positioning or doing SEO search engine optimization. But that being said, like I covered on an episode on Basic SEO, I forget the episode, no, but we can get it to you, put it in the show notes. There's no reason to avoid simple stuff that is well established, the search engines like so you can take any free traffic and high rankings they'll give you.

[00:10:51] I want them if they're going to give them to me and I don't have to do a lot. I just don't want you to be spending money on on SEO people where there's a great likelihood of one, you'll get ripped off and two, you'll not get any return on your investment and you'll waste a lot. Number three, you'll waste enormous amounts of time because they will all tell you and which is true, that it does take a long time for search engine changes or SEO optimization changes to take effect. Say so it it kind of forces you down the road five six months before you see any results from this stuff. Say so. Don't spend any money on that kind of stuff. Anyway, back to home pages, anything you do there gets more weight in the search engines, so you want to link to your absolute best content from there, for sure. And really, you should be always linking to great content because both people and search engines won't go deeper into your site or believe in you if you link to crappy content. All right now, let's talk about varied anchor text. You know what anchor text means now? It's the words that people actually click on to go to some other link. Well, you don't want the exact same anchor text keywords all over your site.

[00:12:15] So each important piece of content on your site should have keyword research done on it so that you'll have a variety of related keywords to use in your anchor text. You don't know which keywords will be the one that pushes the person's emotional buttons or has exactly what they were looking for to get them to click. So having a variety of keyword rich anchor text will allow you to find out, especially if you put different tracking links on each anchor text link. And that will tell you not only how many people clicked on certain links, so you'll see what words that attracted them the most. It will track them to see if they bought or not. See what you might find out is that an anchor text link with less clicks actually brought you more customers. If you only used a basic link tracker, you might throw away the best anchor text because it wasn't getting as many clicks as another piece of anchor text. So you have to use tracking that follows the person to see if they bought or not. And of course, my shopping cart system kicks. Na Cars.com easily does this for you, and we give you free one on one tutoring to teach you how to use all these kinds of functions. So I don't want you throwing away the best stuff because you might have an anchor text. It gets loads of clicks, but the people don't buy.

[00:13:43] But if all you saw was, oh, it got 50 clicks and the other one only got 20, well, the one that got 20 might have been bringing you the customers, and then you would throw away the 20 thinking it was worse because it didn't get as many clicks. You know, go back and listen to this if you don't get that concept, but you can't just count clicks to see which one is better. You've got to see what those clicks led people to do and if they spent money or not. Now, before you tell you, the last two really cool and simple things to do, I want to just remind you about the program we have for the persons with disabilities. I mean, I've raised lots of money for for homeless kids and animals and all kinds of stuff over many years. But this is really something I'm really extra proud of because I'm changing these people's lives permanently. And and they're going to have a digital marketing career and the people in this demographic, I'm not saying these people, I'm not specifically targeting these people that are in the program. But in general, the reason I started this is because people with disabilities have like four times the the suicide rate and way more depression and and unemployment and everything. So I'm on a mission to change that. And so I took a grant writing course.

[00:15:05] So after I proved the concept with these people, I'm going to try to roll it out really big to to help lots and lots of people. So, so please, I'd love to have your help and something you can really be proud of. So visit IMTCVA.org/disabilities that'll be in the show notes anything you can kick in is fine. And if you're like said, if you're looking for a big tax, write off by the end of the year, I'd be glad to to work that out for you so that it's totally legitimate and we can help these people. All right, let's get back to internal linking. So. One of the the simplest things for you to do. Now there's going to be two things here is look for excuses to put links in your content to related content that may be older. This makes a great user experience, leading them to other topics that may be interested, you know, they may be interested in on your site. Now it doesn't hurt you to review your old stuff and go through it again and say, Hey, I could put a link here to this other piece of content. So you're getting people in a loop in your site that they're, you know, stuff that they're interested in. They can read more and more. So this makes a great user experience leading them to other topics, and it looks good to search engines because their time on your site increases dramatically.

[00:16:31] Time on site is one of the ranking factors. If people stay on your site a long time, they must like it. That's from the search engine point of view, and so you must lead them to your other pieces of content. Now, another thing to do this is the second thing is to put a related content section at the bottom of your content. It could be labeled like related articles or readers also liked, and then the list of links to other stuff and anything like that to just give them more chances to link internally with anchor text. So it looks good. It's a good user experience. It looks good to the search engines and it keeps them on your site longer and makes them fall in love with you and all that stuff. So bottom line is is spend some time paying attention to your internal links and it can turn into lots more visitors spending lots more time falling in love with you and buying your stuff. All right, that's my story. And I'm sticking to it. Have a great weekend. And Monday I'm coming out with a follow up to last Monday's about engagement. So these are all kinds of engagement techniques that'll make your social media way, way, way, way better than it probably is now. All right, we'll get you on the next episode. See you later.

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