Your homepage is usually the highest ranking page on your blog, but take a look at it, what do you see? Generally, all you see is a list of blog posts accompanied by a few snippets of text. Most bloggers think that just raising the rank of the homepage pulls all the inner pages up, as well. However, that’s not really how it works. In fact, if all your ingound links point to your homepage, you’re wasting a lot of link juice.
Building the rank of your homepage is important. But the inner pages of your blog are also important. Those pages contain your valuable content and it’s the URLs of those valuable pages that need to compete for index placement. Increasing the rank of your homepage does nothing to improve the rank of each of the individual inner pages. But randomly linking to those inner pages doesn’t help either. Here’s what you need to do:
Link to relevant content
Always link to relevant content. For example, let’s look at article marketing. If you write an article about “The top 3 reasons to use Blue Widgets When You Golf”, then link to a similar blog post that gives your reader even more information, like “How to Use Blue Widgets to Improve Your Golf Swing.”
Don’t, however, link to an article about the best golf courses in Florida so you can promote your travel package. It’s obvious, the reader landed on your article about Blue Widgets because they wanted to learn something about golf equipment. So when you refer them to your blog, send them to similar content.
By just throwing in a link to your homepage that visitor isn’t really going to see anything interesting, and if you send them to an article about golf travel packages, they’re not going to be interested in what they see. Link to relevant content so when that reader finally does arrive on your blog he’ll stick around for a while.
How does this improve your ranking with the search engines? The search engines see those visitors sticking around, too, which tells them you’re offering a quality experience for your visitors, so they reward you with a little boost in ranking.
Vary your anchor text links
Keep in mind, though, that the search engines get smarter every day. Building links is one thing, but building dozens of the exact same link from the exact same location sends up red flags. Very the text and keywords in your anchor text links and spread them over several locations. In fact, spread them over lots of different platforms – article directories, blog comments, links from other blogs, etc.
Link to your pillar posts first and move outward
If all your links lead to your homepage right now then you have your work cut out for you. Pick your top 4 keyword rich pillar posts and start building links to those first. Then gradually work your way deeper into the inner pages of your blog. Be sure to use on-site, inter-linking, too, to link deeper posts to the pillar posts to increase your blog’s strength and authority.
Start generating traffic to those inner pages
A lot of bloggers think it’s all about link building but traffic plays a key role, too. Visitors often share your links for you – and these are the best kind. The search engines give even more weight to these natural links because they know that people are sharing your links because you’re offering a quality experience for the user.
So, while you’re working on link building, get out there and start sharing some of those inner pages with your Twitter and Facebook followers and start bringing in some referral traffic. Let them help spread the word and build some natural links and pretty soon your homepage won’t be the only page that shows up in the search engines. Soon, you’ll be dominating for all the keywords on your blog.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!