Earlier today I was checking out one of the many blogs that I follow called Online Social Networking. I’m not sure where I originally met Larry online, but we started our blogs around the same time.
I was reading this one particular post, which was pretty good, but that’s not what caught my eye. For the first time, I noticed that Larry has a lot of links in each post. I’d never really paid much attention to it, though I’d clicked on a link from time to time, but tonight it really drew my attention. I decided to hover over some of them, and what I discovered has lit something in my mind.
Before I tell you what, let me mention these couple of things. Larry’s blog has a PR of 4; as I always say, I don’t overly care about page rank, but it’s a number so we’ll use it for the moment. He has an Alexa rank of 52,170. He has 703 RSS subscribers. He doesn’t write as often as I do, his posts aren’t as long as some of my posts are, and he has very little in the way of marketing items.
What he does have, though are those links. And what I noticed today was that many of those links aren’t just internal links, but are links to his tags.
As I’ve said, I’m relatively new to tags. I’ve done more tagging on my finance blog than I’ve ever done here. I have categories here, but not as many tags. Still, I could recognize the importance of the internal linking even more than I have up to this point. I link to much of my content when I think about it. However, there’s nothing wrong with doing some of that internal linking to either tags or categories. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen, and I wish I had thought of it before now.
Of course, I don’t think that’s the only reason his blog is ranked better than mine. He sticks to his one particular topic, which is pretty much anything that has to do with social networking and social media, while I kind of dabble in, well, pretty much whatever I want to dabble in. But one of those things we all need to remember with our blogging is internal linking and SEO, and this is one brilliant step that I’m going to start doing, just as I hope to start tagging some of my missives a little bit more also.
Oh, I still won’t have PR for awhile, but I’ve been wondering if there might be ways to increase my Alexa rank, since they still like me, and this might be the next step in helping to put me over. Also, something else I’m going to start doing is paying more attention to other articles I’m reading on other blogs, and if something fits an old post of mine, I’m going to link to it. Anchor links are important to do, even if the content isn’t on your own site. And other people deserve some love also, as I got this week from Kristi’s Fetching Friday post.
Something to important and yet to simple; oy! š
OK, I know how to link to posts; I know how to link to a category, but how the hell do you link to a tag?
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Sire, it’s easy to do if you’re showing your tags, hard if you’re not. What I did, just to test it out, was to activate the tag cloud, look for link on the blog, copy it, then get rid of it. Now, my problem, of course, is that I just recently started tagging content, so I didn’t have a tag that fit this post. However, what I’m going to do is go back and tag a bunch of my posts so that I’ll have more tags that I can choose from. However, I was able to link to my categories tag, which also works wonders.
OK. Too bad I got rid of my tag cloud because I was cutting down on unnecessary plugins, and unfortunately that one was one of a few that had to go.
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Sire, I hate the tag cloud myself. I wish there was a way to display it in a more orderly format. I went searching last night for one that plays well with WP, and the closest thing I found was last updated in 2006; didn’t want to even take a chance with that.
I’m pretty sure I did a blog post on a tag cloud plugin that used a drop down menu type idea.
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You might have, Sire, but that’s not what I was looking for. The tag cloud thing for WP is all over the place; I was just hoping for a bit more order to the tag, which I guess would defeat the concept of the cloud, eh?
I’m use this technique for my new mountain biking site. It’s still a brand new site and is not complete yet but some of my tags pages are hitting Google page 1 already!
Ste
.-= Bike RoutesĀ“s last blog ..Free Baileys =-.
That’s a good deal, Dave, and I’m glad it’s worked out for you. I hope you continue getting lots of visitors also.
Taking the technical terms out of it, it just sounds like an attempt to increase relevance.
“If you like this topic, here’s some more.”
“When you came from Search Engine X, were you looking for this? More of it is here.”
“Did you know the topic you’re reading about is related to this, too? Clicking here for more info may help you get the information you’re looking for.”
Who wouldn’t like that: humans and search engines alike?
Although it’s only speculation, it could likely be one of the gazoolion factors incorporated into search engine algorithms. More importantly, though, it likely helps drive site conversions…which are always lovely!
You hit it right on the head, Natasha. The thing is, it just might be more important for someone like me to do it on a blog like this one, which doesn’t really have one specific subject that stands out, than someone who only writes about one thing all the time. And it’s not all that hard to do either. It takes a bit of time, but the benefits could be fantastic.