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Todd shared his case study on internal link building
as a speaker on the Internal Linking panel at
SES Latino in Florida and also shares the highlights
with us on this show.
Recorded Live July 28, 2006
5 Elements of Internal
Link Building
Internal Link Building
Case Study
Todd Sarouhan and his partner, Rick Long have
been establishing a network of hotels on their
website, www.GoVisitCostaRica.com.
Three years ago, they started attending the Search
Engine Strategies conferences and quickly learned
the value of the education they received. By putting
SEO best practices to the test, they were able
to increase traffic by leaps and bounds. Watching
their rankings closely, Todd is always on top
of what is happening with his pages and when he
implemented internal linking and added some contents,
he noticed his rankings and traffic increased.
5 Elements of Internal Link Building
In the second segment, Todd shared the 5 elements
of internal link building with listeners. They
are as follows:
1. Navigation: How to lay out your navigation,
image buttons, text buttons
A lot of people like to use flash on their website
and as part of their top level navigation. Todd
doesn’t advice people to use flash in navigation.
You can make things look very similar to flash
without using flash. Flash in not encouraged because
search engines cannot read images and they can’t
follow the links. You can use flash in a small
part of your website e.g. for marketing or selling,
showing a product in 3D etc but stay away from
using flash for navigation.
Todd explained that using images as your buttons
is very traditional but it is better to use text
buttons that you can use CSS and style sheets
to format-they look good and they are text.
Todd warned listeners to stay away from drop
downs. Todd has drop downs on his website and
the search engine can’t really follow them.
Cindy suggested a better option would be to follow
the example of Geeks.com. On geeks.com, when you
hit the left side navigation for a top level category,
it takes you to the page for that category and
pulls up the sub categories.
You want to give the spiders some sort of textual
navigation to visit your site, so when they follow
a link you want the spider to see that you have
e.g. regions in Costa Rica, so that you can rank
for a keyword that, in this case, would be one
or more regions in Costa Rica.
When doing keyword research for the Latin market,
SEOs and marketers need to rely on their intuition
and on trial and error as there is no Spanish
version of Wordtracker. At the moment, selecting
keywords is more of an art than a science in the
Hispanic market but they are working on developing
tools.
If you translate an English site into Spanish
and want to know if simply translating the English
keywords into Spanish will help, take your main
keywords and change them into Spanish and see
how effective this method is.
2. Breadcrumbs: What are breadcrumbs and
why are they important
Breadcrumbs are usually found under the navigation.
It shows you where you are so, for example, if
you pop on to a product page, it will say the
name of the product then go back to the different
categories and will link back all the way back
to your homepage. For example, on the eMarketing
Talks Sow schedule page, the breadcrumbs look
like this:
Home > Listen by Topic > Upcoming Interview
Show Schedule
On the archives page, the breadcrumbs look like
this:
Home > Archived Shows
The underlined words are links that actually
take the user to those specific pages.
Breadcrumbs are important because if a person
is searching and finds an indexed page that is
a deep page e.g. a products page or a hotel page,
they go there and look at the breadcrumb. The
breadcrumb shows them which city the hotel is
in, which region the city is in, this region goes
back to some area. So they know where they are
at. As a result, when they come back to your site
to buy from you they can simply type in your website
URL which will take them directly to your homepage.
Breadcrumbs also help Web developers. Search
engines also love breadcrumbs because search engines
love you to link to other pages on your website.
It provides more places (i.e. pages) for their
bot to go through. Breadcrumbs are always in text.
Todd suggested that make the breadcrumb look like
a link, underline it and maybe take away the underline
when the bot hovers over it. Style sheets can
be used to achieve this.
3. Internal linking: Linking the most important
content on your main page to other related articles
or products on your website.
When Todd talks about interlinking the main content,
he means putting text links in the body of your
content on a particular page and then linking
it to other related pages on your website. Also,
link to related pages provided that the theme
is the same. Don’t flood it with links.
Do not add more than 5-7 links per page provided
that the content does not exceed 400 words. Do
not link to ‘click here’.
Do your keyword research for Spanish and English
and remember that too many links makes your website
look ‘spammy’ to search engines. You
can repeat a link, but avoid doing this. Instead,
spread it around if you have a lot of pages or
mention the word 5 times and only link on it once.
Also, try to use the same keywords.
4. Site maps: How can you make site maps
for small websites versus big ones, as the techniques
used are vastly different?
Regarding Dynamic site maps and site maps in
general, Todd came up with a group of suggestions.
He has a page of 80 links from A-Z of the cities
in Costa Rica. There is a next button at the bottom
of this page and at the top of every 80 link page;
A-Z is spelled out. So it is sort of similar to
an index. If you click on ‘A’, a page
that lists all the cities that start with A opens
up and so on. Todd also advised listeners to link
to dynamic site maps in their regular site maps.
You may have more than one such link.
5. Footer: Make use of the footer by inserting
useful information using your keywords.
Internal Link Building Case Study
In segment 3, Todd talked about the case study
he presented at SES Latino using his GoVisitCostaRica.com
website. Since Todd and his partner have done
a really good job of promoting and building their
site so that it is search engine friendly, Todd
had some really valuable tips to share with listeners.
Over the last year and a half, he has continually
experimented and discovered new ways to build
links. People can book vacations, hotel activities
and transportation on GoVisitCostaRica.com. Todd
has about a 10,000 unique pages on the Web. These
pages include maps, photos, hotel listings and
interesting information about Costa Rica, similar
to a travel guide.
Todd explained “We took about 350 of our
content pages which consisted of our city pages,
our category pages like surfing, hotels in Costa
Rica, enclaves of resorts, sport fishing etc,
and then region pages. We start with region pages,
and then that leads to area pages which in turn
lead to city pages. We took all the content from
there and internal linked it. This resulted in
a huge jump in traffic. Our unique visitors increased
within 6 months by 148%. We also saw the number
of page views per visitor increase by 18% from
7.6 page per view to 9.”
This showed that the techniques employed by Todd
and Rick were making their website stickier i.e.
people were staying on the site for longer. Todd
said that an 18% increase may not sound like a
lot but when coupled with 148% increase in visitors,
“we saw a page view increase of 193%-a huge
increase. Page views jumped from 210,000 to 614,000
page views.”
On the average, Todd added about 5 to 7 links
per page and encouraged listeners to follow suit
provided that the content ranges from 300 to 450
words per page. The footer and navigation should
not be included in this word count.
The linking works in the following manner. If
you are on the surfing in Costa Rica main page,
on the main page the content mentions specific
cities well known for being good surfing spots
e.g. surfing in Tamarindo, or put surfing in Tamarindo
in the link, mix the links up a bit, i.e. link
to surfing in other cities too, don’t keep
linking to surfing in Tamarindo. Make sure that
you’re linking with the right phrases and
do your keyword research. Also, ensure that you
are linking to the right pages. In Todd’s
case, the different phrases his website was found
on from the search engine increased by 161 %.
This increased his “long tail”. The
number of searches that led to his website increased
from 13,700 searches per month to 36,000. This
is a huge increase.
Todd assumes that this increase was a result
of the different keyword phrases that were used
on his website e.g. instead of using just Tamarindo,
he used “surfing in Tamarindo” or
“hotels in Tamarindo”. In this way
even people who tend to type in long searches
ended up on his website. So, according to Todd
“even though only 2 people might type in
“hotels in Tamaiando by the beach”,
those people really know what they want. You don’t
want to ignore the long tail because it may bring
you 80% of your conversions and traffic”.
Brooke added that a new bestseller was out called
“The Long Tail” and informed listeners
that it covers all that is being discussed and
niche marketing. Todd also emphasized that he
doesn’t think that it is important to stick
to absolute links versus relative links as long
as the website owner is consistent in using absolute
or relative links. Focusing on the long tail led
to an increase in traffic increase and lengthened
the user experience by 18%. In the end Todd saw
reservations increase by 135%.
Todd’s next focus is usability. He told
listeners that “We needed to get our analytics
straightened out because we have a Spanish site
and an English site that are run off the same
engine and the same pages.” Todd explained
“We sniff out the URL. One is GoVisitCostaRica.com
and the other is GoVisitCostaRica.co.cr, which
is a Costa Rican domain. We have one data base
and one set of pages. Initially, we have our analytics
grouped into one and the nice people at Google,
namely Megan, told me that they go by domain and
not IP addresses. So we split it into two. I did
that last week and I was surprised to see the
number of visitors we have in Spanish.”
Todd was pleased by what he saw but he admits
that the influx of Spanish speaking visitors is
also scaring him because it means that he’ll
need to spend more time on the Spanish version
and translations. Todd was amazed to see that
45% of the Go Visit Costa Rica traffic goes to
his Spanish website. This clearly showed that
there are just as many people searching in Spanish
as in English for Costa Rica. Todd also saw that
75% of the people visiting the Spanish website
were in Costa Rica and these people could be tourists
or hotels or natives. 5% of the people visiting
the Spanish site are in the U.S. and 5% are in
Spain. So Todd knows that he has a lot of room
for growth in the U.S..
At SES, speakers revealed that the U.S. Hispanics
would prefer to search in Spanish but since they
know that there isn’t a lot of Spanish content
available, they interchange and search more often
in English, or jump over from one site to another
by clicking on the Spanish language button on
the site.
Cindy recalled that she had read in a magazine,
Marketing y Medios, that Latinos may search in
part English and part Spanish and the search engines
need to focus on this area. At SES, Google and
Yahoo representatives spoke about how to tell
what a searcher is looking for. Some words in
Spanish and English are the same, so should the
search engine show a Spanish website or an English
one in response to such a search.
Todd told listeners that the U.S. Hispanic household
is 42% larger i.e. the general market has 2.4
kids and the Hispanic market has 3.4 kids. So
there will be bigger growth in the us Hispanic
market. This market is also younger as 46% of
Hispanics are 24 years or younger. Research also
shows that Hispanics are really heavy internet
users and view 150 pages on average compared to
133 viewed by the general market, so they are
actually looking at 13% more pages. Apart from
this they spend 87 minutes per day on the internet
compared to 79% of the general market. Since Cindy
happens to be part Hispanic, we can really up
this number.
People may be under the impression that Hispanics
do not have enough money but that is not true.
Statistics show that U.S. Hispanics online are
qualified customers. 40% own their own residence
and 50% of them attend or graduate from college.
Everybody is really motivated in the emerging
Latino marketing sector and it is clear that online
marketing in Spanish is set to grow tremendously.
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