search engine optimisation Archives - MIU Your Creative Digital Agency

March 21, 2022July 29, 2022

Here’s why You Should Prioritize Internal Linking in 2022

Here’s Why You Should Prioritize Internal Linking in 2022

Most SEO strategies incorporate internal linking, but that’s not enough. They deserve more priority.

SEO often tends to focus on a host of other ranking factors; internal linking is one. However, we often fail to realize how powerful internal linking boosts keyword rankings.

Take a look at the chart below.

According to this 2021 data, out of 15 SEO factors responsible for search rankings worldwide, internal linking figures are just at 13.7%. But that does not mean it is any less critical for digital marketing campaigns. It means that it is not being utilized optimally.

And this is what we are going to show you in this article.

We’ll tell you:

Why is internal linking so important?
How to set up an internal linking strategy?

What are internal links?

An internal link connects two pages of your website. It has many benefits, and we’ll come to that in detail later.

Let’s say that it helps both website visitors and search engines. It allows website visitors to look at related information and know more about your company. Doing so decreases your site’s bounce rate, especially if your website’s content is informative. It helps you rank higher on search engines since they use links to navigate your website.

There are many types of internal linking. No website can do without links on the menu, the home page, links to post feed, etc. But you can add links within the content called contextual links.

Contextual links are important because they lead readers to find related and exciting content.

Besides that, Contextual linking also allows search engines to find out which content is related, which determines which content is most valuable. The more links a page gets, the more valuable it will seem to search engines.

Internal linking vs and external linking

Before we understand why internal linking is necessary, we must clear out the confusion. If you’ve ever been confused between internal and external linking, this is where we sort it out.

Internal links connect pages within your website.

External links connect your pages to other websites.

In this post, we’ll focus on the former.

Why is internal linking so important?

</p> <div><small><a href="https://youtubeembedcode.com/en">youtubeembedcode.com/en/</a></small></div> <div><small><a href="https://casinoutansvensklicensmedzimpler.se/">casinoutansvensklicensmedzimpler.se</a></small></div> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>
(Click on video to see the YouTube video explaining why internal linking is essential)

This video shows several reasons why it is essential to focus on internal ranking in most SEO campaigns. Search engines follow links to find content on websites, and then they rank these websites on search results. When search engines see a page or post having a lot of links, it sees them as being high-value content. It works for both internal and external linking.

You’ll also see how you can build an internal linking strategy. We’ll talk about that later as well, so hang on!

If you are new to all this and want to learn from the ground up, Ahrefs has this handy video on internal linking for beginners.

Relationships between content

We’ll talk about Google for our topic. There are other search engines, but Google is the most dominant one.

Have you wondered how Google crawls your website? Or how does it determine which site deserves to be ranked higher?

Google does that by using its Googlebot. It is a web crawler that follows both internal and external links. When this crawler comes to your website, it renders your homepage and goes for the first link. The search engine can determine the relationship between your pages, posts and other materials by following the link. This lets Google understand which pages are related.

Link value

After understanding the relationship between content, it is essential to comprehend link value. Google divides link value across all links on a web page. The homepage tends to have the most backlinks and has the highest link value. This link value is shared between all the links on the homepage, and it then gets passed onto the next page and then gets divided between all other pages linked to it – the process repeats.

If you link your newest article on your homepage, it’ll get more link value. Doing so helps Google find your recent posts faster as well.

When you understand link value, you’ll see that more links in a post mean adding more value to it. Google thinks pages with more valuable links are more important than your competitors. That’s how you rank higher.

Advantages of good internal linking

There are many ways in which internal linking is valuable for your overall SEO strategy. In this article, we will focus on the top six benefits.

They improve usability through anchor texts.

Internal links help visitors navigate to your website easily. This is made possible when you add sufficient user-friendly links to your articles. You must ensure that these point to related, relevant content pieces when you add anchor text. The aim is to direct viewers to content that shall interest them.

They spread the link juice.

It is equally important to focus on both external and internal linking. Creating backlinks is essential. Yes, but don’t ignore internal linking. They aid in spreading the link juice to other pages of a website. While building backlinks to a page, ensure that the page has links to other relevant pages. Here’s the most important thing you should ask yourself: is the link juice reaching your monetization pages? Is it reaching your blog, information repository, and product or service pages?

They boost your page views.

You already know that anchor texts help visitors navigate to your website. They are more likely to read the articles you have linked from the original content if they are relevant. Linking through your content helps in increasing your conversion rate. Relevant links are great for assisting visitors in discovering a website. The more links they follow, the higher your page views get. You have to avoid those significant bounce rates and optimize page speeds for all this to work.

They improve PageRank

Before we move on to why internal linking is vital for PageRank, let’s define PageRank first.

PageRank is a metric devised by Google to find out how essential web pages are. This is based on the number of backlinks relieved by a website, and the score is from 0 to 10.

Pages with PageRank can increase the metric score through internal linking since that helps spread the ‘juice’ to other connected pages. As a result, the related pages slightly boost authority and rankings.

They improve time on site.

One of the best things about using internal linking is the lower bounce rate. Since you take viewers from one page to the next relevant one, they remain on your website for longer. To reduce bounce rate, link them to essential pages for them, relevant and valuable.

They help Google crawlers in indexing your site

We have saved the best for last!

Google bots are getting smarter every day. Already, they can replicate the way a human browses your website. These bots follow all the links on your pages and thus get a good idea of your site’s architecture. With a solid internal architecture backed by internal linking, crawlers can visit pages that website visitors do not often see. Thus, linking to pages increases your search engine ranking.

Now that we have seen why internal linking is so important, it’s time to make sense of it all. It is time for…

Setting up an internal linking strategy

Internal linking is for your website what cardio is in a fitness regimen.

It can jumpstart your SEO strategy when you’re stuck in a rut.

When you add relevant links on your website, you’re telling Google:

How relevant your pages are
How your pages are related
What is the value of your pages

If you want to set up an internal linking strategy, you need to proceed step by step. Of course, it all depends on your website, but there are some steps to follow.

Determine your website’s ideal structure

Imagine your website as a pyramid. At the top, you have your webpage, below which you have sections and categories. Further down, you have individual pages and posts.

It is a basic site architecture, and if constructed well, your website’s menu will reflect the structure.

Want to know how to create the ideal site structure? Click here!

Determine which one is your most important content

Once you have created the best possible site architecture, it is now time to determine which your cornerstone content is.

Not sure what cornerstone content is? Here’s a handy video!

In short, it is the content that you want people to find out the most. It is your best and most complete content. It can be the content that tells people about your company, its values, and its functions.

Now, the way to make Google know this is the critical content you have to add links to it.

Add contextual links

At the beginning of this article, we spoke about contextual linking, remember?

Well, here is where we’ll talk about that in more detail.

How can you show Google that your articles are topically related? By linking them to each other. It doesn’t need to be complicated either. You can add links in the content itself or at the very bottom of the post.

Remember, you want to show Google your cornerstone content. You have to link to your cornerstone content from all the relevant pages and the other way around.

Link hierarchical pages

Suppose your website has a hierarchical structure that interlink parent and child pages. Additionally, interlink sibling pages as well. These pages should be related to a well-organized site, and it makes sense to connect them.

Think about adding a related post section

Whether you’re using WordPress, Wix, or something else, plugins and modules add a related post section to your blogs. If you have a similar strategy, determine whether the associated posts are related. If you’re unsure, it is best to add links manually.

Add navigational links

Apart from interlinking related pages and posts, you can make your cornerstone content even more authoritative by adding links from your home page and even from the top navigation. Ideally, you should do it for posts and pages most valuable for your business. Doing this will give the pages more link value, which ultimately helps rank higher on search engines.

Add links to taxonomies.

Taxonomies, such as tags and categories, help you organize your website, and they also allow both Google and viewers to understand your content’s subject. If you have a blog page, it can be good to have internal links in taxonomies to which the post belongs. This helps Google’s bots understand your blog’s structure, and your website visitors navigate your posts with ease.

Think about adding links to recent and popular posts

It is a no-brainer. If you have recent or all-time popular posts, don’t hide them away—link to such posts from your homepage itself. There are several ways for doing this, and you can link them on the:

Sidebar
Footer

That way, viewers will see them on every page they visit!

Remember about the little thing called link value we spoke of? These pages get a boost in authority when they get more link value. Additionally, showcasing your popular and recent posts help viewers to find them easily. And more traffic is an excellent sign to Google.

We have seen the benefits of internal linking, and we have also seen how to start building an internal linking strategy for your website.

But that happens when a website has poor internal linking? How does that affect your SEO?

Let’s find that out next.

Consequences of poor internal linking

We have seen how essential internal linking is. However, they still require manual upkeep and maintenance. This is why you should have regular site audits, and not doing so can create the same kind of problems that inadequate internal linking brings.

Your website does not remain the same over time, and it goes through significant change, both in structure and content. Unfortunately, such changes tend to produce broken links, and broken links lead to a dead-end or a page that no longer exists. As you can understand, this can put off most website visitors.

So what can you do?

Each time you remove pages or migrate them to a new location, you also need to redirect their links. Find out which links direct visitors to the migrated or deleted page, remove the links or redirect them to a new URL.

Several tools will be of help to you when auditing website:

Discovering broken internal links is essential for your SEO campaigns, as is ensuring link equity from external links throughout your website.

A Recap: Why should you pay attention to internal links?

Internal links are as important as external links.

External links empower your website’s search engine ranking and visibility. Internal links influence your SEO as well.

To recap what we talked about in this article, internal links:

Help search crawlers in determining which pages are important to viewers and search engines
Deteriorate over time naturally, which necessitates the fixing of broken links
Build direct link equity, which is essential for your pages

You should undoubtedly go for external links, but don’t forget your internal links.

April 22, 2021July 29, 2021

The Local Finder vs. Google Maps: How Different Are They?

You do not doubt by now heard countless times that having an online presence is crucial for a brand to propel itself to success. According to a survey done by We Are Social and Hootsuite, search engines are the most popular method to discover new brands. A total of 35% (or one-third) of the internet users surveyed agreed that search engines are their first choice for researching brands, products, and services that they intend on buying.

Other effective methods include social ads, word-of-mouth recommendations, as well as brand websites.

This means that it’s crucial to make sure your eCommerce strategy capitalises on the value that search engines can provide to your brand. And since Google is the most popular search engine, with more than 86% of the market share, it makes sense for us to delve into Google’s functions and what they have to offer small businesses.

As a revolutionary brand, Google has come up with tool after innovative tool over the years. Many of these, while extremely helpful, can be somewhat confusing, particularly for SEO beginners. So today, we’re going to look at Google Maps versus Google Local Finder and what both of them have to provide.

Google Local Finder is a subset of Google Search. It contains an extended listing of local businesses that appear when clicking on the ‘More Places’ link at the bottom of Google’s local pack.

These often include plenty of Google My Business listings. Remember when we said having an online presence is essential for a brand? Well, by signing up for a Google My Business Account, your brand’s ranking on search engines (particularly that of Google) is guaranteed to increase and gain credibility. This also allows you to appear on — you guessed it — tools such as Google Maps and Google Local Finder. And with Google being one of the most significant search engines out there, this can only serve to boost your brand.

However, what one may be concerned with is the difference between Google Maps and Google Local Finder. Is there any advantage to using Google Local Finder, or is it all just a gimmick?

A recent study conducted by Miriam Ellis confirmed that a business’s ranking on Google Local Finder often does not differ from their rankings on Google Maps even though the same search query is used. This means that, depending on which tool consumers use to search for your brand, they might see completely different results.

The area shown on the map at the automatic zoom level for each tool is different as well. In Google Local Finder, the results are often more specific and detailed, whereas Google Maps gives a broader view of the area’s businesses. Product listings tend to show up on Google Local Finder. On the contrary, Google Maps do not have product listings, but it does have attribute icons.

If that’s the case, which is the best tool for you to be using for your brand? Here are some things you can do to find out.

1. Fill in as much information as you can on Google My Business.

We mentioned that the business information that shows up on Google Local Finder and Google Maps vary depending on the platform. To counter this, the best way is to provide Google with as much information about your business as you can.

Google is constantly rearranging the content that shows up on both Google Maps and Local Finder to the point that there is no way to know for sure what aspects will appear on each. Rather than worrying about what will show up on your search results, why not feed Google with as many details as you can give? That way, internet users will be able to obtain as much information about your brand as possible.

Make sure your website is optimised for the keywords that you’re aiming for. You can also boost your ranking by earning publicity on the third-party websites that Google references as your listings.

2. Study the results for your targeted search query on both Google Maps and Local Finder

Since the results vary significantly for each platform, it is essential to know just the rankings (both yours and your competitors) that pop up for your desired search query. Generally speaking, Google Maps casts a broader net than Google Local Finder for their search results.

For brands that want to rank beyond their location, this is something to keep in mind. Of course, the further a user is from your location, the less likely you will show up in their local results. Your business is more likely to show up in a local pack ranking.

However, the wide net cast by Google Maps could mean that you could bring in potential customers from a further distance. If this is what you’re looking for for your brand, by all means, experiment with Google Maps. Keep in mind, though, that while the radius is more expensive, your ranking might be lower as you would be competing with a more extensive saturation of businesses. Consider adopting some strategic marketing plans to help boost your ranking in these cases.

3. Keep in mind the future direction of Google Maps and Local Finder.

Since local packs default to Google Local Finder, most SEO studies have been focused on this particular tool, leaving Google Maps neglected. However, while Local Finder was introduced in 2015, Google Maps has been around since 2005.

With three times more impressions than searches, Google Maps wears the crown in terms of the favourite search engine. Not to mention — Google Maps is the default app on all Android devices! Users of other mobile brands have stated their preference for Google Maps as well. Think about how much more reach you might be getting with Google Maps.

Since Local Finder is a relatively new tool, Google might have more plans to develop it further in the years to come. Simultaneously, with Google Maps’ massive success, it is not one to be forgotten. The best way to figure out which platform is more suited for your brand is to keep an eye on both and see how it develops in the next few years.

Best yet, you could work on your rankings on both platforms and get the best of both worlds! Contact MIU for more information on how you can boost your SEO ranking today.

April 5, 2021September 29, 2021

How to Avoid and Deal with Negative SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) has pretty much gone mainstream at this point and every business knows they need it to stay competitive. But what a lot of people don’t know is there’s an opposite side of the spectrum called negative SEO or negative reputation.

This can catch companies by surprise and that’s the exact situation our client found themselves in this project:

They tasked us to help them out of the hole they found themselves in. The success of this project helped us move up the rankings of the company listing site The Manifest. While we can’t talk about the specifics of this project, we can share what business can do to get themselves out of similar situations.

What is negative SEO?

Before you can slay the beast, you need to know what it is. Negative SEO is basically a series of black hat tactics that can either be the result of malicious external attacks or the website owners trying to cheat the algorithm.

It makes the site look extremely suspicious in the eyes of the crawlers and push them down the rankings and into oblivion. Negative SEO is a definite threat to the viability of a website and every step should be taken to prevent it.

Disavow Tools

If a site finds itself already in the midst of a negative SEO hole there are ways to beat it. Google itself has provided webmasters with one such method called the disavow tool.

The disavow tool basically allows websites to upload a list of links connecting to their site and tell Google “Please ignore all of these links”. You can even tell Google to ignore an entire website that’s linking to you.

Watch Your Backlinks

An old but gold method of monitoring the quality of the links connecting to your site. Spam links are the main weapons that malicious entities use to bring websites down. This makes sense because good links bring sites up the rankings, so terrible ones have the opposite effect.

Similar to Google’s disavow, there are tools available online that will help this process and even make it easier.

Purge Duplicate Content

This item is a bit special because not only is it a favourite method of attack by spammers, website owners can actually do it to themselves if they’re not careful. This most commonly happens with big companies that necessarily have dozens of web pages.

Fortunately, the answer to this problem is quite simple. Delete it, or if the content is really something you need, rewrite it. Solving duplicate content is easy, finding it is another story. Once again, there are tools that can help with this, but you’ll need to isolate the content you think is copied first.

Social Media Spam

The social media age brings another wrinkle to this equation. Accounts with the same or close enough name as the website will be put into the same boat by the search engine crawlers. This means anything those accounts do will affect your website for better or worse.

Just like Disavow, there are tools that will alert a website owner of this situation and solve the problem in the same way. Tell Google that those accounts are not your company and separate them from you.

It will take some time before website owners will notice any effects these methods will have, which means they need to get done sooner. Negative SEO is a reality every online business must face. But with our help, you can rest easy knowing there’s someone looking out for you.

February 18, 2021September 29, 2021

How to Update Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Spring cleaning is a necessary job in any household, but it’s also a necessary job for your digital marketing strategy. Your digital marketing strategy should be checked, measured, and revitalized a few times per year, and the end of the first quarter is the perfect time to take the first steps.

Logo And Design

The first thing to look at is the design aspects of your digital presence. You should check that your logo and designs work across all platforms. Make sure that it’s still relevant and that your customers and potential customers have a positive reaction to your design. You may need to update your logo to give it a fresh look or change any design elements that are outdated and no longer relevant.

In some cases, you may need to completely redesign your logo. You should also make sure that any changes are also updated on any physical promotional materials as well. Try a free logo app like Logo Creator to come up with some concepts for your business.

Goals

Your digital marketing strategy should have set out goals for your business. You need to look at whether these goals have been achieved. Use your key metrics to analyze what strategies worked well, and which didn’t. You should also assess your previous goals to make sure that they were achievable in the first place.

Set New Goals

When you set your new marketing goals, make sure that they are realistic, specific and achievable. You may also want to consider breaking wide goals down into smaller, more specific steps. Lastly, you should also set a realistic timeline for when you expect these goals to be met. You should have a master calendar for your digital marketing strategy, but you may want to have specific calendars for your social media campaigns, blog posts and email campaigns as well. Doing this means you can make sure that all posts and materials are going out on time.

Social Media Accounts

Social media is constantly evolving and changing with new sites and trends emerging all the time. It’s important that you keep your social media presence updated, relevant, on-trend, and consistent with your brand. This may mean updating profiles, creating new accounts, looking at which posts had the most reach and engagement, and updating your response policies. There are plenty of ways you can boost your social media shares to gain more exposure — check our article here for more details. If customers are reaching out to your business on social media, you need to make sure that responses are timely and appropriate.

SEO

Search engine optimization should be seen as a vital task. It’s incredibly important to keep up to date with SEO practices. These practices can evolve as the way people use search engines change. Check your page speeds, meta descriptions, content, images, readability and headers. Optimize every page. We’ve curated a list of SEO tools here that are not only free but perfect for beginners.

Keywords

Re-examine your keywords. Remove any keywords that are no longer relevant, or have a low or no impression. Create a new list of targeted keywords. This will help you create a much more efficient strategy.

Content

Look at your existing content and see which has the most engagement. Revamp lower performing content with fresh links and keywords. Make sure that the information in older posts is still relevant, or update it to include more recent data.

You can also plan out new content. Make a calendar of when each content should be posted. When you’re planning topics or posts, make sure that it is specific and readable. Large topics should be broken into a series of posts.

You should also check how your advertisements are performing. Look at your paid search ads. Examine which keywords are being used and if these need to be extended upon. You should also check the ad copy. Make sure that the copy is free of errors and that it is still relevant. For the best results, read up on our ultimate guide to advertising.

January 12, 2021June 10, 2021

6 Best SEO Tools That are Free!

With more and more brands going digital everyday, it’s extremely important to maintain your online presence amidst the hundreds of other brands out there offering the same service or product to the same consumers.

That’s why it’s not enough to just have a simple marketing strategy. Whatever content you put out online should also be optimised for search engines to get yourself the exposure you seek. Search engine optimisation (SEO) allows you to show up in more results when consumers look for certain keywords, therefore increasing the chances of them clicking into your content.

There are plenty of SEO tools out there to help you get started. We know it may seem overwhelming to decide amongst the numerous tools — therefore we’ve put down a list of free SEO tools that you can try out before you decide to commit to a paid one, if at all. Here are the SEO tools we think are not only helpful, but great for beginners.

1. Google Analytics

Before you can even plan out an SEO strategy, you need to know what are the areas you should improve on. Google Analytics helps you figure out where the traffic flow to your website is coming from so that you can capitalise on it. Furthermore, you can also look at where traffic flow is in a lull so that you can work harder on the SEO for that particular platform.

With Google Analytics, you would be able to gather in-depth details about your website visitors such as the bounce rate, the amount of time they spend on your website, which page content attracts more visitors, and more. These real-time data can also tell you whether your SEO strategy is effective or not, even as you’re optimising it.

All you need is a Google account to sign in to Google Analytics and connect it to your webpage. You can even pair it with Google Search Console, which helps you understand how Google indexes your site. When you use Google Analytics together with Google Console, you can find out information such as the ranking of the content of your webpage, the keywords consumers are using to find your website, as well as the click-through rate for those keywords. You can even diagnose what, if any, technical errors there are on your website!

2. SEM Rush

SEM Rush assists webpage owners with keyword research, content optimisation, SEO audits, rank tracking, and many more. All their functions are accessible with just an account, which is free to create. Features such as their backlink analysis and link building tool can help by giving you an insight into your backlink profile on your webpages.

Although the free version only allows up to 100 domains in the link building tool, you can still use the data to figure out which are the domains and backlinks that have the highest referral score. This enables you to find out the areas in which you need to improve your link building efforts. With time, you can decide if you want to upgrade to the paid version if you find their features extremely helpful.

3. Ubersuggest

Just as its name suggests (no pun intended), Ubersuggest helps users generate content ideas and keywords for you to employ on your website. This is extremely useful for when you’re running out of content ideas for your website and need some fresh suggestions to fill your content calendar.

Ubersuggest also has a feature that can give you an overview of the keyword you’re focusing on. It will not only suggest content ideas based on your keyword, but also show you related keywords that you can use in your content.

4. Rank Math Plugin

If your website uses WordPress to publish its content, Rank Math is a great add-on to have. It allows you to add meta titles and descriptions to your URLs so that people can see the concise version of your web page before clicking in. It also helps you optimise your content and structure your data more efficiently.

To use Rank Math, you simply need to install the plugin to your WordPress website and let it do the work for you. If you indicate which keyword you’re targeting, Rank Math not only suggests ways for you to improve the keyword ranking, but also gives your content an SEO score. Win-win! You can even identify dead links on your site and redirect URLs to new pages with this add-on.

5. Google Trends

Similar to Ubersuggest, Google Trends can help you generate new content ideas by showing you what are the current trends and topics in your industry. Using this knowledge of popular market trends, you can better craft a content marketing strategy and optimise it based on what would draw the crowd.

In fact, Google Trends can also show you how trends change over time and the search patterns involved around it. All you need to do is enter a keyword, and the tool will show you how much interest was generated around that topic, which regions showed the most interest, as well as other related keywords consumers were using. With Google Trends, you can easily compare various trends over an extended period of time.

6. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offer plenty of free tools, from Content Explorer, to Rank Tracker, to Backlink Checker and more. Ahrefs Backlink Checker works in a way that it analyses a website and shows you the top 100 backlinks of that particular website just by entering an URL into their search bar. You can also view additional information such as the number of backlinks, the domain rating, and the number of referring domains.

They also have a Keyword Explorer and Keyword Generator tool which helps you analyse the ranking difficulty of a particular keyword and calculate their traffic potential. Similar to the Backlink Checker, the Keyword Generator will show you the top 100 related keywords or ideas when you put in a particular keyword that you wish to target. You can also find out their search volume as well as the keyword difficulties for the first 10 keywords on that list, and the top 50 questions related to said keyword.

If you find Ahrefs tools helpful, you can even upgrade to the paid version to unlock more features. However, the free version is a great start to understanding the industry trends and SEO for your own strategy.

Having a great SEO strategy not only increases the discoverability of your brand, but also helps you gain more visibility online. After all, it has been found that 88% of consumers research a brand online before making a purchase. Consumers are now getting smarter and more wise about their purchases, and many are increasingly doing their research online. Therefore, it is vital for a brand to keep their online presence strong with an effective SEO strategy so they can reach a wider audience.

Planning and implementing SEO strategies are but one of the services that MIU provides. If these free SEO tools are not cutting it for you, you can also contact us for a free consultation to see how we can help your business. From digital strategies, to branding, to design, we offer a plethora of services that suit your needs. Click here for more information on what we do and the services we provide.