"What You Must Do To Rank Well For Your Inner Web Pages..."

Now that you know how to rank well for your homepage (index.htm page), I'd like to focus on various things you MUST do to rank well for your inner pages.

In order to do this, I'd like to use one website as an example of how you should structure your internal linking within your website and one website showing you what NOT to do. I think you'll be surprised to know that over 90% of all websites on the internet don't have proper internal linking throughout their website.

Note: Internal Linking is the way you link to other pages within your own website.

You might recall in previous lessons that I taught you the importance of using your main keyword(s) in the anchor text of links pointing to your website. Anchor text is the single most important factor for ranking well in the search engines.

Not only must you get links containing your main keyword(s) in the anchor text, from other
websites, but you should also link to other webpages within your own website, using your
main keyword(s) in the anchor text.

A website that has an excellent internal linking structure is:
http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/

This is an internet marketing related website owned and created by a guy by the name of Michael Wong. Michael Wong is actually a well-respected search engine optimizer, so he knows was he's doing when it comes to internal linking

If we take a quick look at Michael's website, you can see that in the right hand column he links to all other pages within his website, using the main keywords he is trying to optimize each webpage for.

For example, he has optimized many of his internal pages for various Internet Marketing names:

• Armond Morin
• Marlon Sanders
• Corey Rudl
• Ken Evoy
• Neil Shearing
• Perry Marshal

Let's take a look at one of these pages. If we click on the link that says "Marlon Sanders", it will take us to the webpage that Michael has optimized for the keyword "Marlon Sanders".

You'll notice immediately that Michael is doing many of the onpage ranking techniques that I've previously taught you.

He's placed "Marlon Sanders" in the page title.

He's placed "Marlon Sanders" within <h1> header tags and has placed it in the top left hand section of his page.

He's bolded the word "Marlon Sanders" and mentions the word throughout the page.

Now... as I mentioned before, onpage ranking factors are things you should do, but that alone won't get you to the top of the search engines for the keyword.

Important: Remember, it's the links, the links, the links... Let's plug Michael's site (http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/directory/marlon-sanders.html) into SEO Elite to give you a quick visual of the anchor text being used to link to this web page.

If we sort the "anchor text" column in ascending order, we can see all of the links pointing
to this page contain the keyword "Marlon Sanders".

Now, let's scroll over the left hand column and sort this in ascending order. Notice that MANY of the pages linking to his Marlon Sanders web page are actually pages from within his own website! Each webpage from within his own site also counts as a "vote" for his Marlon Sanders web page. Remember, the more "votes" or links, you can get pointing to your web page, generally, the higher you will rank for your keyword.

Lastly, let's have a quick look at the Analysis View tab within SEO Elite...

Well lookie here, you'll see that the top two keywords are

• Marlon
• Sanders

The keywords "Marlon" and "Sanders" appear 18 times in the anchor text linking to Michael's Marlon Sanders web page.

Now, do you think it's safe to assume that Michael's webpage is ranked #1 in Google for this keyphrase? Let's have a look.

Go to Google and enter: Marlon Sanders and see whose webpage comes up at the top.

I'll save you the trouble. Have a look below:

What got Michael's page to the top? Several things, but the most important of which is his internal linking from within his website. This is something you could VERY easily duplicate, and should duplicate for your own market. Chances are, nobody else is doing this!

As I mentioned before, Michael is a professional search engine optimizer, so he's a good person to model your internal linking after. Michael is also the author of a pretty solid search engine optimization eBook titled: Search Engine Optimization Strategies. You could probably gleam some things from it.

Now, let's take a look at what NOT to do... We're going to be looking at:
http://www.you-must-think-big.com/

This is your typical, "pretty" looking website that probably gets no traffic and is nowhere to be found in the search engines, for any keyword.

Can you see some of the things they're doing wrong?

• Their page title is "find out which product to sell online and how to sell it". This serves no purpose. No one would ever search for that keyword combination...
• Their h1 header tag is: '52.4% of all households purchased something online in 2004". No keywords... Just a regular sentence. Again, this serves no purpose.
• Most of the main text on the page is actually just a large header graphic image.
• And MANY other things... but you get the point.

Concerning their internal linking strategy, you can see that their navigational links aren't text! They're just graphics... This serves no purpose, but to look pretty. They're wasting "votes" that they could be casting for their internal web pages.

I think it would be safe to say that this website isn't ranked for any of the keywords in their navigational images at the top of their website

• About us
• Products and services
• Success Stories
• Contact us

But let's just have a quick look and use SEO Elite to see if they're ranked anywhere in the top 1,000 websites on ANY of the major search engines.

• We'll select Radio button 5
• Enter their URL into SEO Elite
• Enter "Business Development" (since that seems to be a pretty related term)
• Select All search engines and click "go".

We'll then click on the report tab to view the results.

How about that? They're nowhere to be found in the top 100 search results. So, we can clearly see what NOT to do and now know what TO do.

Remember, if you can "vote" for an inner webpage on your website by using your main keyword in the anchor text within the link linking to that page, ALWAYS do it. As we've seen from Michael Wong's website, doing this can help you rank at the top for keywords that may not have a lot of competition, like the keyword "Marlon Sanders".

The next lesson is titled:

"The secret to increasing your page rank without
getting links to your website!"

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
SEO Elite: SEO Software