SEO Smart Links Makes Internal Link Building Easy
Today were going to discuss how to make internal link building easy!
…and as I’ve said before and will probably say again a hundred times…
“Our search content marketing strategy should always focus on Simple SEO tactics.”
Digital insurance marketing doesn’t have to be complicated nor expensive. So when I hear marketing consultants discussing SEO like it’s rocket science, I get very frustrated (and write articles to help make SEO easy for you).
Internal Link Building
A large piece of SEO is internal link building. An internal link is any link on your website or blog that links to another page on your website/blog.
Why would you want to link to another page on your website?
Good question.
Let’s say you’re writing an article about auto insurance and you’d like to mention the “no-fault” benefit included/available on most auto insurance policies in most states. But you don’t want to go into all the detail of what auto insurance “no-fault” benefits are because you’ve already done that in another blog post.
Another example of internal link building are the two links at the top of this post. Both take you to articles previously written here on the GROW Blog (also an internal link) that give you additional information.
Think of internal links as roads connecting your content.
Why is Internal Link Building Important?
Internal links play a critical role not only in your website visitor experience, but also in how search engines index your website. Every day little search engine robots are visiting your website and cataloging the information.
The information these search engine robot find is what shows up in Google, Bing and Yahoo search results.
We want to make this process as easy as possible for the search engine robots…
…but we also want to “Rig the System” to a certain extent.
By using internal links we can ensure that search engine robots are always being sent to our most important webpages…
…you know, the pages that have our best product information and sales copy insurance consumers simply can’t resist.
SEO Smart Links Makes Internal Link Building Easy
Internal link building can be a bit confusing and take some work. For a long time I kept an excel spreadsheet on my computer of the most important pages of our website (i.e. our business insurance page, workers compensation insurance page, etc).
I would reference this sheet every time I was writing a new post and keep track of how many internal links I had pointed at a certain page.
I also wanted to make sure and always use similar anchor text in the link (instead of using worthless anchor text such as “Click here.” I’d make sure and use “Business insurance”). This tells Google not only that this page is important enough to link to, but here is the exact term I want the linked page to rank for.
No more excel spreadsheets.
Like I said, this process, done manually, can be tedious. That was until I found the WordPress plugin SEO Smart Links (this is an example of an external link).
SEO Smart Links is a FREE WordPress plugin you can easily add to your WordPress website or blog that manages the process of internal link building for you.
All you need to do is choose 3-5 important pages on your website. Pages that contain information on the products you’d most like to rank for in Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Then choose the keywords you’d like to point to those pages. You may even want to use the free Google Keyword Tool to do keyword research for the terms that could potentially send you the most traffic.
As you can see in the example, every time I use the term “Insurance Marketing” I want there to be a link to the very first post I wrote for the GROW blog which is optimized for the term Insurance Marketing.
The Rub
Now I know many of you don’t have WordPress websites. Most Insurance Industry web design vendors do not use WordPress because they can’t charge as much to build your website. The Murray Group website is built on WordPress and we average approximately 5,000 visitors a month.
WordPress is sleek, professional, search engine friendly and cheap to maintain. This isn’t a sales pitch for WordPress, I just hate to see my insurance brothers and sisters overpaying for websites.
ANYWAYS…
If you don’t have WordPress it’s still vitally important you create a calculated internal link building strategy to drive visitors to your sales pages and help search engines rank you content.
Simple SEO strategies work.
Thank you and Good luck,
I am Ryan Hanley
P.S. Enjoy this article on Internal Link Building? Click here to subscribe to our newsletter and get more!
Drop Some Knowledge
What questions do you have about internal link building? Does this strategy make sense? Can I help you figure out a non-Wordpress internal link building strategy?
I ask because I want to know…
image credit: http://society6.com/RalfCrawford/Chain-links_Print
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Hello there! Quick question that’s completely off topic.
Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly?
My weblog looks weird when viewing from my iphone. I’m
trying to find a template or plugin that might
be able to correct this issue. If you have any suggestions, please share.
With thanks!