Search engine optimization plays a key role in generating AdSense income
because how well your Web site places in search results determines how
much traffic your site sees. If you plan to have AdSense ads on your site and
you hope to generate a decent revenue stream with them, having a welloptimized
site is essential. And part of site optimization is having a linking
structure — the links that connect the pages of your site together as well as
the links that connect your page to other pages on the Web — that leads to
other, complementary sites as well as having other sites link to you. Like keyword
placement, link management is almost as much of an art form as it is a
strategy.
Linking schemes
Linking schemes are nothing more than the structure of how your Web site
is linked to other sites, how other sites are linked to you, and where internal
links lead. Good Web design principles include all three types of linking
schemes, and all are important to search engines because what a search
crawler is looking for is site usability first — how easy it is for visitors to go
from one place to the next on your Web site — and then site relevancy, or
how appropriate your site is to the topic for which a site visitor is searching.
Crawlers literally follow all the links on a Web page to make sure that what’s
connected together makes sense and is useful in the context of where the
links appear both in text and in navigational menus.
When you’re creating your linking schemes, remember that the ultimate goal
is to make your site as usable and as valuable as possible to your site visitors.
Assume that your visitors have landed on your page because it contains
information for which they’re searching; the idea here is to make your site as
valuable to those visitors as possible by providing your visitors with the info
they’re looking for and then some. (It’s the and then some that keeps them
coming back for more.)
Creating value for your user encompasses one concept — provide the user
the information he seeks. It’s that simple. That doesn’t mean that you need to
have every detail or product related to a specific topic on your site. But if you
don’t have it and you don’t plan to put it there, at least be prepared to point
visitors to another site that does have the information or products sought.
All of that is accomplished through linking. You’re either linking to another
page on your site where the information being sought is available or you’re
linking to another site entirely. In return, you should also have other sites
linking to your own, for the same reasons. (I have some tips on how to get
other sites to link back to you later in the chapter.)
Internal linking
Internal linking is the process by which the pages on your site are actually
linked together. The type of links isn’t nearly as important as the way
in which the pages are linked, but even the structure can have some benefits.
For example, text links — called hotlinks — can be more valuable than
graphic links because they allow you to use your keywords within the link.
But it’s also important to have a consistent navigational structure — the links
that usually grace the side or top of a page that lead to different sections of
your Web site. Both hotlinks and navigational links can be used in your internal
linking process.
Using keywords in your navigational structure gives you freebie opportunities
to use them — the keywords within links don’t count toward the keyword
density of a page because the percentage of times a keyword is used is
based solely on the content on the page. This means you can use your keywords
more often. But using hotlinks does count toward keyword density, so
be careful about how you place those links.
It’s also important that no matter how your links are formatted, you always
need to leave an escape hatch — every page on the site has to have a clearly
defined navigation area with easily recognizable links that make it a snap to
return to whatever page the visitor wants. Users who click from one page to
another in your Web site may not appreciate having to click the Back button
to get them back to the page they were previously on. Even more importantly,
if there’s no way for users to go back from whence they came, they’ll
leave. Typical surfer behavior when they can’t escape a page is to close
the window or browser that’s pointing to the site on which you have them
trapped. They may also just type a new address in the browser bar and navigate
away from your page that way.
Internal links all qualify as navigational links, even when they include hotlinks.
Use these links wisely, and always provide a way for users to navigate back
the way they came. I don’t care whose fault it is; if you lock a visitor in Web
page hell, she’ll leave and probably won’t come back.
It’s far better to have all your pages (even those that are unrelated) connected
in a loose kind of way. Every page should have a way to go back to
the main page as well as a way for visitors to get back at least to the previous
page if not to the beginning of a section. It may be that your navigational
structure expands to show previous pages or sections of your Web site,
based on where the visitor is on the site at any given moment. Whatever you
choose to do, make sure visitors have plenty of ways out.
When you’re creating the way that your internal pages are linked, also remember
to keep like pages grouped together. When you think of the structure of
your Web site, think of it as a tree. The trunk of the tree is your main page, and
each of the branches is a major topic. Subtopics are the smaller branches off
the main branches, and the leaves are individual pages of information.
If you were to draw your Web site structure, it should resemble (in an
abstract kind of way) a tree lying on its side, as shown in Figure 4-6.
Each different topic of content on your Web site should be related to the
overall theme of the site — nobody would argue with that — but each topic
should also be further broken down into smaller categories so that site visitors
can quickly find what they’re looking for. For example, if your site is
about healthy cooking, every page on your site should be related to healthy
cooking. However, individual sections of your site can be broken down into
the different types of dishes that you cook or the techniques that you use to
create healthy dishes. Keep like content together and keep it all related to the
main theme of the Web site.
External linking
External linking — the links you use to connect your Web sites to other relevant
sites on the Web — is also going to play a major role in the way that
your Web site is categorized by search engine crawlers. External links lead
away from your page, and for this reason, many Web site designers think
it’s best to avoid external links on a page. Not true. In fact, if you don’t have
some element of external linking on your page, it becomes an obstacle in
both search rankings and in helping potential visitors find the information
they’re searching for.
Search crawlers look for external linking on a page as a sign of how well connected
the page is to the industry or category that it’s included in. For example,
if your site is about mental health issues, users will expect to find links
to other sites on the same topic. Crawlers will too. And if a crawler examines
your site and finds you’re not linked to other related sites, it devalues the
site, assuming that the site will be less useful to site visitors (because no
single site can have every piece of information about a topic or category).
What you don’t want to do is create a Web page that’s an island — surrounded
by cyberspace, but cut off from everything. Even the most beautiful islands can
become useless if nothing connects them to the rest of the world. And if your
Web site isn’t connected to other Web sites, (especially where search crawlers
are concerned), the usability rating of the site falls considerably.
It’s necessary to have outgoing and incoming external links to your site. But
there’s a catch (isn’t there always?): The external links on your site should
lead to or from other sites that are relevant to the content on your site. If
you’re linking to other sites in some disorderly, couldn’t-figure-it-out-witha-
clear-explanation kind of way, you might as well not have any links at all.
Search crawlers follow every link leading out from your site and will evaluate
the content on the linked site for relevancy. If the content doesn’t compute,
your search rankings will plummet.
Having one or two links to unrelated sites isn’t a big worry. It’s not at all
unusual for your best friend, who sells handmade soaps, to link to your Web
site about money management. But if you want search engines to take notice
of your Web site, I recommend that you have far more links to other sites
related to money-management vehicles, tools, and information.
Reciprocal linking
One way to gather links to your site and to share your site with other relevant
Web sites is to use reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is the new-age
version of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. You find sites that would be
of interest to your site visitors and then approach the Web site owner with
the offer of putting a link to her site on your own if she’ll do the same for you
in exchange.
It’s a good strategy to get some inbound links built into your site if it’s a new
site, but don’t rely on this type of linking to gain you much favor with search
crawlers. A limited amount of reciprocal linking is acceptable, but when a
search engine is examining the links to your site, it ranks them by determining
if the keywords used on your Web site are similar to the keywords on the
sites that are linking to you. That’s why links always need to be generated
out of true interest in the content on your site. If your link to another page
is matched by a link back to your own page on too many pages, the value of
those links is lessened because the pattern of “I’ll link to you if you link to
me” becomes obvious.
Think about the wildly popular Web sites in your business (or personal)
scope. Even better than just thinking about it, surf on over there and have a
look. Click through a few of the external links on the page and look at where
they lead. Are there links back to the page you just left? In most cases, the
answer to that will likely be “No” because the most popular pages on the
Web don’t need reciprocal linking schemes. People link to them all the time
because the site offers information that’s of interest to everyone concerned
with that topic.
It’s all about placement
One last strategy to extend your linking mileage: Where you place your links
matters. When a crawler is navigating through your site, it’s looking at the
usability of your site. So, if you’re hiding links in places that users can’t find
them simply to improve your Web site ranking, you’ll find your Web site in
search results’ nether regions. And yes, that’s a trick some Web site designers
really use. The idea behind hidden links is to have them there because
you must have that linking structure, but to have the links hidden in places
users don’t think to click so they won’t navigate away from your Web site.
Wrong move. That kind of linking strategy will turn the curious search
crawler into a snotty search crawler that doesn’t score your Web site well for
ranking purposes.
Keep in mind that hidden links are very different from strategies like using
metadata keywords, as I talk about earlier in this chapter. Metadata keywords
and tags are built into the structure of your site and are designed to provide
additional information to crawlers. Hidden links and keywords are actually built
into the visitor-facing structure or user interface. Hidden links and keywords,
however, are intentionally blended into the site so that visitors can’t see them.
This is a deceptive way to include elements of Web design that crawlers look for
but that a Web site owner might not want the site visitor to see.
Creating a well-designed site that uses a more traditional link placement
structure is much better. Not only are Web surfers accustomed to seeing a
navigation structure, or links, in a few places (the top of the page, the left
side of the page, or within the text), but a well-designed site meets a need —
the visitor’s need for information. By meeting that need, you give visitors a
reason to return to your site again and again.
Most often on a well-designed site, some combination of those navigation
structures is going on. Most Web sites have their main navigation bar on the
left side of the page, and users know that that’s where they can usually go
to find the link to the next page within the site. Links to other sites can be
included in the text or in combination with the navigational structure on the
sides of the page.
Once in a while, a page will have the main navigational structure on the right.
In fact, that’s a common structure in blogs, and there’s nothing wrong with
setting up your page that way. Web crawlers don’t give a hoot if your navigational
structure and other links are located on one side of the page or the
other. But it’s important that however you decide to do it on the main page
of your Web site, you maintain that structure across every other page on the
site. Users get frustrated if the navigation scheme changes on every single
page, and Web crawlers will notice the inconsistency and lower the usability
ranking of your site.
Keyword marketing is like watching the news. A big story could hit today, and
it might hang around for a few days until journalists have wrung all the interest
out of the story. Then something else happens, and those same journalists toss
that story aside in favor of the newer, more interesting piece of news.
With keyword marketing, marketers might be willing to fight hard to win
the bids on one keyword today, only to find that another keyword is much
more popular and worth more to them in advertisements tomorrow. These
changes affect the income that you make from each click through, as well as
affecting the click throughs themselves. When the higher-paying marketer
moves on, it opens a keyword for lower-paying advertisers. Sometimes,
though, those lower-paying advertisers aren’t writing ads that are as appealing
to your users.
Users’ moods change, too. What they’re interested in today will certainly not
be the same tomorrow or next week. So, to keep your CTR optimized, you
have to stay on top of your keywords. Watch the effectiveness of the keywords
around which your Web site is built. And don’t be afraid to test new
and different keywords, especially if your traffic statistics begin to fall. Your
AdSense income depends on you staying at the razor’s edge of the marketing
curve. And that requires attention from you.
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