Does Internal Linking Help SEO?

Every business on the planet wants its website to rank number one for every keyword that relates to its business. Leveraging internal links for SEO is one of the easiest ways to increase your changes of locking in that number one ranking.

And why not? Billions of users turn to Google on a daily basis to answer their questions or find what they’re looking for.

A problem, however, lies in the simple fact that the internet is a huge place. Even Google only remains the top search engine worldwide because it quickly and consistently provides value to users. If Google didn’t efficiently serve users content highly relevant to their search queries, people just wouldn’t use it, and more than likely, another search engine would claim its dominant share in the market.

Though Google’s algorithm continues to be opaque, we know that clear, consistent web design matters more than ever. The foundation of your website is the content, but the connective tissue is the internal link. Internal linking for SEO is crucial to far more than just your rankings, as it improves user experience and demonstrates an understanding of why your users are there in the first place. Let’s break down the “how” and the “why” of every question you might have on SEO, internal links, and best practices for implementing them on your own website.

Insights On Every Question You Have About SEO and Internal Links

• What Is An Internal Link? What Are The 4 Types?
• Why Are Internal Links Important?
• Do Internal Links Help SEO?
• How Many Internal Links In A Page Is Best? How Many Is “Too Many”?
• What’s The Difference Between Outgoing And Incoming Internal Links?
• How Many Incoming Internal Links Should My Page Have?
• Hierarchy
• Internal Links
• Link Juice
• Internal Links Are Important

What Is An Internal Link? What Are The 4 Types?

An internal link is created when a link is added from one page on a website to another page on the same website. These are all internal links because they share the same root domain.

There are a variety of ways you could breakdown the different types of internal links. Here at DOM, we define them based on the general location of where the internal links are placed and their purpose for being placed there.

1. Navigational Links: these links are commonly found at the top of a webpage or in an HTML sitemap. They are used to help visitors move around your site to the most important or most trafficked destinations. More than likely, you’ll have navigational links to pages that show off your products, services, contact information, and other standard information that a visitor would expect.
2. Footer Links: these links serve a similar purpose to the navigational links. Many times, you will find a strong correlation between the links included in the navigation of a website and the links included in the footer. That said, you may also find footer links include important operational pages, too, like a Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, or a Refund Policy for Ecommerce sites. These pages may not command the same level of authority that you’d find in pages linked in the heading, but are still primarily made up of content that an average user may want to see. 
3. Sidebar Links: these links had their heyday in 1990’s and 2000’s when the majority of internet usage was tied to a desktop or laptop computer. With today’s modern web design being focused on a mobile-first, responsive experience on an iPhone or Android device, these links are less prevalent, though they can still be well-implemented if there is a focus on user-friendliness in both mobile and desktop environments. You will commonly find that sidebar links point users to areas of a website that are complementary to what they are viewing – like popular blog posts or related products to what a visitor is currently viewing. These links, in SEO terms, are less of a direct follow-up to the page in question, and more focused on content that may be of assistance to the same user.
4. Contextual Links: these links serve as a reference point to other related content around the web. Contextual links may be indicated by a “click here” call to action or a “read more” statement. Say you own a sporting goods ecommerce site that points you to the company blog. On that blog, there is a post compiling the top 10 basketball shoes. Since each shoe is available for purchase on the site, you post a direct link to each individual product page in an effort to turn readers into potential customers. These are of particular importance, as you can demonstrate through your content how two pages are connected, both in terms of site structure and the topic in question.

Basically, any link on a page that takes a user to a different page on the same website is considered an internal link. This includes subdomains, so if you’re in a scenario where you need to build a subdomain for your site, internal links to and from the subdomain can help Google to understand and categorize the subdomain in relation to your primary site.

What is the Impact of Internal Links?

Internal links are usually much easier to create and manage than external backlinks, which are created when another website links out from their domain to anywhere else on the web.

Because of their simplicity, they are often overlooked, but a solid internal linking strategy can have a huge impact on your site’s rankings and performance in organic search.

If you have a blog post that gets great traffic, but none of it seems to be pointed toward relevant service/product pages or the homepage, internal links may help to push some users toward those pages with a better likelihood of converting. 

On the flip side, if your product/services pages are doing well, but you’re not getting traffic to the content you create, it may be that Google hasn’t indexed your blog yet, which internal links may be able to remedy to some degree.

How Do Internal Links Help SEO?

Not only can a defined internal link structure contribute to a positive, intuitive user experience, but Google can also better understand the content on a site with clear, ordered internal links.

One of the biggest impacts of internal links is that once Google has a greater understanding of the relevance of the content on your site, it can rank your content higher. It’s no coincidence that Google Search Console has a report specifically dedicated to internal links.

The internet is gigantic and is growing every day. The service that Google provides is a simplified way to navigate this seemingly infinite space by providing pages that are relevant to user searches. Before search engines like Google, the best way to navigate the web was to use directory services that categorized websites by content type (think Yellow Pages). A few of these directories still exist, but they are mostly simply too large to be useful, and do not provide enough specificity to be of use in most scenarios.

How Many Internal Links On A Page Is Good? How Many Is “Too Many”?

If you clicked down to this question, hopefully you did so because you’ve just found a post that is getting some rankings or traffic. If your goal is to find out how many contextual internal links you should place in a page to benefit other priority pages on your site, this is the right place for you.

The impact of links in SEO can vary depending on a number of other factors, but while we’re staying focused on internal links, let’s talk about the best practices to follow so that your traffic will disseminate throughout the site as expected.

Side note: if you’re trying to determine how many internal links a page on your website should receive, this isn’t where you will find your answer. But keep scrolling, please, because we address that below.

How Many Internal Links On A Page Is Good?

Historically, conventional wisdom among the SEO community was that the optimum number follows this easy guide:

Every long form piece of content and all important pages should have around 3-4 internal links pointing out to other pages, with an additional link per 300 words or so.

Granted, these were loose guidelines.

Then, of course, there was also the equivalent of the “it depends” answer, too. Many SEOs would tell you that you have to add more or use fewer links depending on the actual content itself.

How Many Internal Links Is Too Many For SEO?

So, if you’re trying to determine the precise, accurate number of internal links you need to have pointing to your top pages, we hate to be the ones to break this to you…

There is no right answer.

Seriously, have you ever paid attention to a Wikipedia page before?

If you ever have a question about whether or not you should add an internal link from one page on your website to another, try asking yourself if placing that link improves the user experience.

If it’s useful, do it.

If it’s not useful, don’t.

If the internal links seem to clutter the page, it may be worth adding an important link as a button or something along those lines to make it stand out from the rest. The key takeaway here is that the link must be useful, otherwise it will be detrimental. 

What’s The Difference Between Outgoing And Incoming Internal Links?

Every link on a page that goes to a different page, no matter whether that page is internal or external, is called an “outgoing” link. If this sounds like every link on a given page, you’d be right! Every hypertext link we make is considered an “outgoing” link.

Using the page you’re reading for reference, every hyperlink we create, including this snazzy one pointing toward our SEO services page, is considered “outgoing” from this page. If another blog article is particularly relevant to this content, the link pointing to this page would be considered an “incoming” link. 

An incoming internal link refers to links that come from elsewhere to a given page. Therefore, the subject of our next section is these “incoming” links.

How Many Internal Links Should I Place To A Page On My Site For SEO?

If you’ve read down this far, you know how to begin a strategy to add internal links pointing to your top website pages. For most websites, and for most pages on those websites, the optimum number of links that point back to your content should be around 20. As with everything else related to SEO, this number will get slightly smaller or larger depending on the size of your site. If you have a ton of pages on your site, it may be worth it to add more, whereas a smaller site would benefit from these links being optimally placed, rather than having a large quantity of them.

The tool we use on our travels through the valleys of SEO, SEMRush, has a bunch of resources we can use to see the entire link architecture of a website (some of which also include external links). You can get a succinct internal linking score that gives you an overall target to aim for, while also including a series of suggestions for how you can improve your website’s score. A high score equals a good link profile, and any SEO tool with its price will have something similar.

As you see in the above example screenshot, the example website has an internal linking score of 71% overall, with a whole bunch of major issues presented for us, the stewards of the web, to fix. And that’s not even the whole list!

Another tool we use is Yoast SEO‘s integration with WordPress. It’s a handy way to do a lot of different SEO operations, often allowing us to see the parts of our pages that have the most impact on our organic rankings. If you don’t believe us about how important internal links are, you can believe Yoast–you can see, at a glance, exactly how many outgoing and incoming internal links each of your blog posts currently has, like so:

Those two icons on the right? Those are internal links. You can even sort your pages by the information in those columns so you know which blogs have the most (or least) internal links flowing into them and flowing out. This can help you determine which pages need internal linking the most, allowing you to prioritize pages as you work through your website.

As you get to know what your link setup looks like, you will start to see a pattern emerge. This pattern of links is called the hierarchy.

Features like this are just one of the reasons Yoast SEO is included in our exclusive list of the best WordPress plugins for SEO.

SEO Internal Linking Hierarchy

The hierarchy of a website is important because it lets a user understand where they are on your site. Most websites are not single-page sites and therefore require some sort of directory-like structure for their content. Information is best understood when categorized into groups of similar pages.

For example, if you were selling vehicles, it would make sense to categorize them in a number of ways, with pages devoted to specific manufacturers, body styles, model years, etc. The key thing is to ensure that there’s a logical grouping of content in such a way that a user should intuitively understand it.

If your website does not have a logical grouping of content, Google’s site crawlers may not be able to properly discover and index all your web pages. More importantly, users will likely struggle to navigate your site and quickly bounce.

Websites tend to fall under one of two hierarchical content grouping formations: flat and deep hierarchies.

A flat hierarchy is a website that has a larger number of categories than sub-categories. This type of web site is said to be “wider than it is tall,” in terms of graphical link structure. This ensures a relatively small crawl depth, but it may be harder to navigate in terms of logical groupings.

A deep website hierarchy is a website that is organized into many sub-levels of information. Content is said to be more discoverable when it’s not hidden under multiple hierarchical layers. Deep hierarchy website structures are considered more difficult to use. This is likely due to how the human brain stores information and processes location.

Imagine your website as a sprawling, multi-level library, where each webpage is a book on a shelf. The entrance to this library is the homepage, the most accessible point for visitors, akin to search engine crawlers starting their journey.

Internal links serve as the library’s system of staircases and corridors, connecting various sections and floors. Crawl depth refers to how many staircases (clicks) it takes to reach the furthest book (webpage) from the entrance (homepage). A well-organized library ensures that no book is too many staircases away, making it easy for visitors (and crawlers) to explore the entire collection efficiently. 

Without sufficient and strategically placed staircases (internal links), some books might remain undiscovered or take too long to reach, mirroring webpages that are buried too deep for search engines to index effectively.

This means that neither a flat nor deep hierarchy is necessarily better than the other, as long as internal links are arranged in such a way to make it all easily accessible.

Both types of websites can utilize a home page, which acts as a high-level information hub. In a flat hierarchy, a larger portion of the website’s content is understood when examining links from the home page. This is not only because there are more links from the home page, but also because those links do not lead to multiple sub-levels of information. This is compared to a deep hierarchy structure where the index page links to high-level categories of information that then link to more high-level categories of information.

Where Should I Place Internal Links?

Your website’s internal links and anchor text are essential to search engine optimization (SEO). Especially when a website is newly developed, these links will be the only links to your website’s pages and are pivotal to Google’s understanding of your website content. Within the Google Search Console, there is even a tool that analyzes your internal links to show you which of your pages you link to the most.

In general, every page of a website has the same header menu, top menu, and sidebar if there is one, though sometimes the sidebar menu will be reserved for certain sections of the site, like the blog. Therefore, the number of links to each page of a website is typically approximately even. The hypertext that links from each menu to a category page should be descriptive of that category. Google uses this hypertext as an indication of what type of information is contained in the linked page (this is of course not the only method they use to determine page content, but it is a factor).

So spamming tons of internal links is the answer, right? Not exactly.

We recommend only linking pages when it seems natural. Performing historical SEO by going through old pages and blog posts and looking for internal link opportunities is highly recommended here. It is also important to try to diversify the hyperlink text leading to each page. As it pertains to link spam, in technical terms, Google is advanced enough to cross-check page relevancy by comparing the semantic distance between linked entities within the semantic web.

In layman’s terms, don’t spam links.

Link Juice: The Impact of Internal Links

Google ranks pages, not web sites. While it is important to remember that domain rank is a dated metric, its core ideology is still in use and highly relevant today. This is easy to prove. In our 15-plus years of experience helping companies grow confidently online through digital marketing services, we have never seen a website that ranks highly for a highly trafficked query and doesn’t rank for any other queries. Clearly domain authority has some effect here.

Although PageRank often cannot fully explain a website’s keyword rankings, it is a very good indication of where a website has the potential to rank.  Since the original PageRank algorithm was largely released to the public by Google, it is possible to determine a numerical approximation for the potential of each domain and page to appear in search results. The most popular tool for determining page rank today is the Mozbar and is one of many important tools in our SEO arsenal. Other commonly used web browser extensions for determining domain rank or domain authority include Ubersuggest, SEOquake, and the Ahrefs SEO toolbar.

Other Questions About Internal Links

Let’s sum up some of what we covered, and maybe address some other concerns that don’t fit neatly into the above categories.

If we weren’t clear about this before, let us address it more directly here: yes! Internal links help SEO in a big way.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as Google Partners before you reach out.

This video provides an overview of why expertise, authority, and trustworthiness matter for SEO. Plus, Justin provides actionable tips to handle the contact info your site and the author info on your blog.

SEO Internal Links are Important

Google organizes the web in an automated fashion. To do this, it must use factors pulled directly from your website, internal links being one of the more important of those factors. If you are seeing a large drop-off of site visitors, a high percent exit on certain pages, or low goal completion rates, you should consider re-evaluating and optimizing your approach to strategically placing internal links.

It’s good for your users. It’s also good to help you achieve your SEO goals.

Interested in discovering more ways to improve the search optimization of your site? Contact us for an SEO audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below:

• Readability Analysis Tips To Improve Your Writing and SEO
• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• How To Crush Your Unminified JS And CSS Issues
• These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions
• How to Tell if Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business

Frequently Asked Questions About Internal Links

The post How Much Do Internal Links Affect SEO? (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Simply put: it’s not easy to be in charge of kickstarting growth for treatment facilities and rehabilitation centers.

Scammers and third-party lead generators have increased the difficulty for organizations to rank their websites to be found by the 23-million-plus Americans in need of treatment. 

But the biggest Google change challenging SEO efforts for treatment facilities and rehabs isn’t the scammers…

Instead, it’s the government. 

Learn how the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has been impacting your ability to rank at the top of the search results. Then, get a glimpse into 12 of our top ideas to rise above SAMHSA in the search engines so you can get your growth plans off the ground.  

SAMHSA’s Impact on Digital Marketing for Addiction and Mental Health

Back in February 2018, Google rolled out a significant change to how it presents search results in the United States when users look for services and information related to substance abuse and mental health.

That change? The placement of the National Helpline page provided by SAMHSA as one of the top three search results for high volume keywords like:

• “anxiety symptoms” — 77,500 monthly searches*
• “drug addiction” — 22,200 monthly searches*
• “signs of alcoholism” — 18,100 monthly searches*

The rise in the ranking presence of this page was exponential. According to data from SEMrush, its presence in the top 10 of Google results increased by over 1,100% in just the first month.

But that was just the beginning. Today, many of those same searches continue to show the SAMHSA National Helpline, and the number continues to grow.

For instance, as of August 2020, you can now find it listed on the first page of Google for over 89,000 terms. As a result, traffic estimates to the site have also grown by enormous leaps and bounds.

If you are responsible for confidently growing admission applications at a substance abuse or mental health facility, this change has forced you to rethink a few of your tactics. The good news is that rehab facilities like yours can respond and succeed despite this.

Get started with the extensive list we’ve created for you below.

Below, you will find 12 alternative marketing tactics – three using PPC strategies, and 9 using SEO strategies – that you can leverage quickly to compensate for SAMHSA’s ownership over the most clicked-through keyword positions in the search engines.

Our 12 Top Addiction Treatment Marketing Tactics

PPC And Digital Advertising Tactics

1. Go ‘Legit’ to Run Search Ads
2. Advertise On The ‘No. 2 Search Engine’
3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On The ‘GDN’

SEO And Content Marketing Tactics

1. Get Listed in SAMHSA’s Locator
2. Create Content For Every SERP Feature
3. Market The Map With Local SEO
4. Explore New Markets With Hyperlocal Pages
5. Review Your Past (Optimize It For The Future)
6. Capitalize On Question-Based Searches
7. Expand Upon Your Program Features
8. Blog For Your Decision-Making Audience
9. Barnacle To Top Content Publishers

1. Go ‘Legit’ and Get Approved to Run Ads In Search Engines

For a long time, Google and Bing accepted search engine advertising from rehab and mental health facilities in the same way they accepted ads from other medical service and healthcare providers. But, as the opioid crisis in the United States continued to escalate, the rules for addiction treatment centers started to change. 

Why? Because scammers started taking advantage of those in need.

To help separate the scammers from the legitimate treatment facilities, Google partnered with LegitScript to setup an independent, third-party verification system. Since then, any in-person treatment facility, crisis hotline, or support group has been required to be LegitScript certified to advertise in Google. You can learn more about the LegitScript certification process from our friends at FHE Health, a healthcare institution that delivers quality, medically integrated personalized treatment for those suffering from behavioral health disorders located in Deerfield Beach, FL.

Why LegitScript Certification For Search Ads Became A Need

In case you missed it, here’s a timeline of how the bans and reinstatements of rehab facility advertising in search engines progressed:

• September 2017: Google began restricting ads from showing for searches related to addiction treatment after it noticed that some facilities running ads did not provide a high enough quality of care to help patients recover.
• January 2018: Google followed suit in the UK as well and eventually Google extended the ban globally.
• April 2018: Google announced its partnership with LegitScript. By July, LegitScript planned to verify about 30 facilities and Google would once again reopen advertising to in-person facilities, crisis hotlines, and support groups.
• February 2019: Bing announced it would also require LegitScript certification for all addiction treatment advertisers and would no longer accept third-party lead generators. 

To be fair, there’s no doubt that running PPC campaigns in substance abuse and mental health niches is a costly marketing strategy. In addition to your monthly PPC marketing budget and associated agency fees, LegitScript requires an application fee per facility and an annual fee for verification.

With that said, search engine advertising is likely to be an ROI-positive endeavor if managed correctly. It’s also the only 100% viable option for getting a top page position for a keyword currently occupied by SAMHSA.

Plus, LegitScript certification keeps a lot of the less ethical facilities and scammers from competing for clicks and driving the costs per click higher.

Similar to becoming a listed facility in the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator from SAMHSA (more on that below), getting your facility listed will take some time, but the process is pretty simple.

If you are a representative of a facility interested in starting a LegitScript application, you can click here to submit one.

2. Advertise On YouTube, The Internet’s ‘No. 2 Search Engine’ 

If you clicked here, you were expecting this to be all about advertising on Bing, weren’t you? Or maybe one of the search engines that’s popular in international markets, like Baidu or Yandex?

Well, it’s not. Instead, you need to take a moment and think about leveraging the search opportunities provided by advertising on YouTube. A site that generates more searches on its platform than Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask.com… COMBINED.

Added bonus: it’s also widely considered to be the no. 2 social network, making it a great place to boost your social media marketing.

While it’s not a traditional “search engine” in the way you might normally think about them, there are nearly 3 BILLION searches per month done on the site, according to data compiled by Mushroom Networks. 

That breaks down to over 1,100 searches per second. 

Although it was acquired by Google back in 2006, LegitScript certification is not required at this time to advertise on YouTube. Therefore, it can be a more attractive advertising solution for smaller facilities with cost barriers to traditional search marketing on Google and Bing.

4 YouTube Advertising Tips To Maximize The Performance Of Your Videos

While LegitScript certification isn’t required, you’re still going to need to have a commercial or video ad ready to go for a YouTube promotion. Once you have your creative completed, here are a few ideas on how to get the best performance from a YouTube campaign.

• Use the appropriate format. Here’s a quick list of which type of YouTube ad is best for your campaign, based on your goals.
  • Brand recognition: 6-second bumpers.
  • Clicks: 15-20 second pre-roll ads (bonus: they can’t be skipped).
  • Conversions: 15-20 second pre-roll ads
  • Re-purposing a TV commercial: 30-second In-Stream ads.
• Utilize closed captioning. Provide the best user experience for your viewers with accurate, verbatim transcriptions.
• Target smartly. Find your audience using the options for gender, parental status, interests, or target specific channels they are likely to watch.
• Deploy an end card. You’ve made some great content, now reinforce your brand and inspire the viewer to take their next action by directing your viewers to their next destination – a landing page, your website, or your YouTube channel page.

There are definitely some benefits YouTube can bring to your marketing efforts with a dedicated advertising budget.

In addition, leveraging YouTube can also bring benefits to your traffic and visibility through SEO and referral traffic. Interested in learning how it can help you in these areas? Check out one of these helpful links.

• How We Grew YouTube Traffic 6,800% For This Retailer
• Video Hosting: YouTube or Vimeo?
• 6 YouTube Tips To Improve Your Results

3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On Google’s Display Network

According to Google, its far-reaching Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users around the world. 

Websites. Blogs. News sites. Even Google-owned properties like Gmail and YouTube.

All of them have an advertising opportunity available to your facility through the Google Display Network.

Depending on the business goals you have for your campaign, Google can also manage the campaign for you on autopilot. Just set your budget, upload your ads, and off you go!

But just because it sounds easy, however, doesn’t mean it’s that simple. Sure, automated bidding is handy, but it’s only as useful as the strategy you put behind it. Similar to YouTube advertising and LegitScript approved PPC advertising, you’re going to want to pay a lot of attention to your targeting if you want a display campaign that will lead to conversions. 

Oh, and you’re going to want to keep your ads fresh. You ever get tired of seeing the same ads from leading brands over and over? If you answered yes, then you can assume your audiences will too. Don’t bore them to death with your creative.

With the Google Display Network, you can proceed with confidence. Just be aware that patience and persistence are going to be key in this channel if you want it to pay off. 

THIS TREATMENT CENTER
IMPROVED THEIR ADMITS BY 300%
USING DIGITAL ADS. LEARN HOW.

4. Getting Listed in SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

One of my favorite online marketing strategies comes from the adage, “…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” From some of our research into how Google presents this SERP listing for SAMHSA, the link for the National Helpline will often include a site link to SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator right underneath its meta description.

The fact is that Google favors displaying links from SAMHSA over other possible search results prominently, so getting your original content or sales-driven pages to rank above SAMHSA will be extremely difficult — almost near impossible.

However, SAMHSA has an online treatment finder, and rehab facilities can request to be added to that list of treatment providers.

How To Get Listed In The SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

Getting listed in the SAMHSA services locator is a great SEO tactic for your campaign. For starters, you’re gaining a backlink from a .gov domain — one of the highest-value links you can obtain.

Need a reason beyond that? The site generates an estimated 60,000+ visits per month in the United States from Google searches alone. The high volume and highly specific type of people visiting the site and then being referred to your facility create a great source of well-qualified traffic for your site.

If you represent a newer facility, or your facility is not currently listed in SAMHSA’s locator, getting listed will take some time. Overall, though, the process is pretty simple. Here’s how it works according to the FAQ on the locator’s website:

1. You request the addition of your facility by completing the I-BHS Facility Application Form.
2. The BHSIS Project Office verifies that your facility is eligible by contacting your local representatives or SAMHSA/CBHSQ. As an alternative, you can also contact your state mental health or substance abuse agency to help with verification.
3. You receive a survey in the mail from I-BHS, complete it, and return.
4. About a month passes, and pending final approval, your facility should be good to go. Just know that they typically add new facilities on a monthly basis.

To maintain your listing, you are required to respond annually to either:

• the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), or
• the National Mental Health Services Survey (N-MHSS)

These surveys go out every March, and your facility will be required to provide updated information each year after your facility was added to the list.

5. Create Content For Every SERP Feature

If you have spent time doing searches on Google and Bing for answers to almost any question, or for information on any general topic, then you have probably been served with a featured snippet result in the past.

What’s a featured snippet? According to Google, it’s that special box at the top of the search result before the standard listings. Featured snippets include:

• a quoted block of text from a webpage in paragraph, list, or table format
• a link to the webpage the text was originally quoted from

The content is also frequently read aloud by the Google Assistant if you do a voice search. 

While that is the general description of a featured snippet straight from Google, they are just one of many top-position-snatching Google features. Google search engine results page features (SERP features) can take many different forms and shapes. In fact, according to SEMrush, there are over 20 different SERP features to keep in mind if you are using SEO as a growth strategy for your facility. 

While some of the features SEMrush monitors will not have a direct impact on an addiction treatment or mental health campaign, many of them will.

12 Actionable Ideas You Can Use To Put SERP Features To Work

6 Ideas That Are Completely Within Your Control

• Local Pack: verify your GoogleMyBusiness listing and get citations on as many of the major local directories as possible (more on this in tip no. 6) 
• Site Links: add links to your top resources and services pages in the footer of your website.
• Top Stories: Have your blog added to Google News. 
• Knowledge Panel: if your facility has a Wikipedia page, or if one of your executives is a published author, one of these may be available for you to claim. 
• Reviews: deploy schema markup in your site header files with star ratings and review counts from sources like the National Rehabs Directory, the fix, ChooseHelp, or Rehab.com.
• Twitter: publish your most valuable blog content and resources in your Twitter feed using keyword-rich hashtags at the end of each tweet. 

6 Ideas You Can Influence (But Google Controls)

• Featured Snippets: if you have a page that ranks in the top 5 of a search term with a featured snippet at the top, create a subheading that includes the keyword, then publish content that matches the featured snippet type, using the keyword phrase 2-3 times in your text. 
• People Also Ask and FAQ: answer the questions Google showcases in the People Also Ask box in an FAQ section on a top traffic page. 
• Image Pack and Image: optimize the file size and dimensions of your image files and utilize up to 100 characters of your alt tag for keyword-rich descriptions. 
• Featured Videos, Video Carousel, and Video: embed your YouTube videos on pages of your site that also rank well for terms with video carousels. 
• Instant Answer: provide calculations and short, simple to answer questions on your top-performing webpages. 
• Jobs: deploy schema markup in your site header files for the pages featuring any of your open job listings. Note that this only applies if you are hosting your job openings on your site. Platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed already do this for you.

6. Leverage Local SEO To Rank Where SAMHSA Can’t Be Featured

While SAMHSA will continue to dominate organic search results, they technically only have one physical location in Rockville, Maryland. As far as Google is concerned, SAMHSA can’t be featured in local SEO search results because they are not considered to be a provider of local treatment services. SAMHSA will always be your biggest competitor for traffic in the search engines, but one area Google is leaving open for you to own continues to be local SEO.

On desktop searches, a map listing with three facilities is included with nearly every top searched keyword phrase related to substance abuse and mental health services.

On mobile devices, the map takes over all of the SERP real estate above the fold. At a bare minimum, if you have not taken over ownership of your Google My Business listing, or verified your business with the following top local directories, opportunity is leaving you behind:

• Apple Maps
• Bing Local
• SAMHSA
• Yelp

If you already have your business confirmed on all five of the platforms listed above, you are off to a great start with maximizing your online presence in your local area. But you’ll want to take it further with local SEO as there are still as many as 22 other local directories we deem to have a “high” or “very high” citation value.

Because of the presence of the SAMHSA listing at the top of the search results, the fact that you want to reach your target audience on a local or national level will not matter – you’re going to want to leverage every ounce of opportunity local SEO has to offer. Don’t get left behind — local SEO needs to be a critical part of your drug rehab SEO strategy.

7. Go Hyperlocal

There are a lot of well-established websites in the substance abuse and mental health niche that have leveraged hyperlocal keyword searches very effectively over the years for their own addiction treatment marketing.

In fact, many of the most highly trafficked sites in this niche leverage creating a directory of treatment facilities and drug rehab centers as one of their main marketing tools to drive referrals to advertisers. Sites like SoberNation and Rehabs.com have done this for years and become so successful with this as a marketing strategy that they can now get you to pay them for traffic.

Because of how well sites like this perform in the SERPs, these types of directories can be a good source of both relevant referral traffic as well as qualified admissions leads. It can be tough to justify paying to be listed in a directory, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore these opportunities entirely.

Think of it this way — if you can justify paying to be part of your local chamber of commerce, you could probably justify paying to be listed in a directory that can help grow your admissions. Outside of becoming listed in rehab focused directories, you can also apply a hyperlocal approach to your website. If you know zip codes, names of popular suburban areas, or names of specific cities and towns within a dedicated drive radius of your facility, then you can leverage localized content to rank for some highly targeted long-tail keyword searches.

Want to go into more depth on hyperlocal digital marketing? Here’s a few blog posts worth your click. 

• What is Hyperlocal SEO and Why Should I Be Doing it Right Now?
• How You Can Use Hyperlocal Ad Campaigns

8. Revise Your Past (Then Optimize It For Your Future) In Addiction Treatment Marketing

Historical optimization is the practice of updating old content on your site and improving its SEO value for the present and future. Over the past few years, this tactic has become an incredibly valuable SEO play for facilities with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find a blog post or article on your site that was published at least six months ago. Prioritize pages on your site that either:

1. Generate a lot of traffic, or
2. Convert into admission inquiries

Then refresh the content, improve the on-page SEO, add an author bio, and re-publish it with a more recent “updated” date.

Search engines reward webpages they can rely on being “there” when the crawl the internet. This tactic presents your facility with the opportunity to avoid writing about the same topics over and over again. Instead, it helps your website establish cornerstone pieces of content that will reliably provide your site with traffic from search engines. 

As an added bonus, historical optimization can help you establish your administrators and clinicians as thought leaders in the addiction and behavioral health industry.

Historical optimization in your addiction treatment marketing is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

9. Take Advantage of Question-Based Queries In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

According to research compiled by Jumpshot and analyzed by Moz in March 2017, roughly 8% of Google searches are phrased as questions. With voice search only continuing to rise in popularity, the percentage of question-based searches are sure to grow accordingly.

Do you have an FAQ page on your facility’s website?

When you publish blog content, are you writing titles and subheadings in your posts in the form of a question? Take the time to answer both common and uncommon questions. Try to compile questions you may often get from admission prospects and their families about your treatment approaches, facilities, or warning signs that a loved one needs to know. There are two major benefits to taking this approach with your addiction treatment marketing strategy:

1. You will be building trust and helping inform people who need help but are not ready to call.
2. Your site will benefit from a larger number of entry points from keyword searches, lessening the impact that SAMHSA’s top positioning will take away from search traffic to your facility.

What questions are your admissions team, or your clinical staffers, uniquely qualified to answer? Give them a laptop and have them start writing!

10. Don’t Forget About Your Program Features In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

Of the over 89,000+ keyword phrases where Google displays the SAMHSA National Helpline link in the top three results, above you will see just a small sample of the monetary worth of some of the terms, sorted by top monthly search volume estimates.* That’s a very small sampling of the data SEMrush has on rankings for the National Helpline page, but with a pretty quick glance, you will notice some trends across the keywords that Google is using to trigger this result.

• Different forms of addiction
• Someone researching reactions to substance abuse (withdrawal, side effects, etc.)
• Someone is looking to find/get help (AA, NA, rehab, etc.)

Now, in contrast to that, you may have noticed that keywords related to general program features were not in the above example. These days, no substance abuse or mental health facility is the same. Dig in to communicate what makes the approach of your recovery centers unique from other facilities.

3 Questions You Should Think About Answering In Your Content Marketing Plan For Your Rehabilitation Center

• Does your program take a mindfulness approach to relapse prevention?
• Do you leverage the outdoors as a therapy method?
• Does your staff have multiple advanced certifications or education credentials?

Whatever makes your facility stand out from the rest of the facilities out there, now is the time to capitalize on it. Make sure your site has dedicated pages related to those treatment programs and features and support those dedicated pages with press releases or blog post content. Optimize the dedicated pages for maximum search visibility by applying on-page SEO best practices and leverage link building strategies from the supporting content to heighten the importance of the dedicated pages to search engines.

With this addiction treatment marketing tactic, every page on your website can be an entry point to put you in touch with those in need of help.

11. Addiction Treatment Marketing Should Cater Content to Your Audience

In response to these developments in Google search results, a lot of digital marketing agencies are going to suggest you try to leverage content marketing strategies only with the intention of generating interest from top-tier publishers. The idea here is that getting coverage in front of a national audience should generate backlinks and a lot of impressions. The concept can also be referred to as viral marketing — because “going viral” is super easy, right?

To us, this feels like an expensive fool’s errand; unless, of course, the idea of a campaign with a large expense and little to no attributable ROI sounds like something your facility wants to try out.

Addiction treatment marketing shouldn’t be about more awareness of your facility. Instead, it should be about connecting with people who love and care for those who need your help.

5 Content Ideas To Help Establish A Better Connection With Those Who Need Your Help

Going with a “10X content” approach that will have an impact on the attention your brand receives and little else, the more sensible approach is to cater your content directly to your audience. Here are several alternatives to making “viral” content that could be better suited to get your facility highly-relevant traffic:

• Answering questions for the family members of potential admits
• Recapping research conducted in the industry that validates your approach to healing
• Sharing video testimonials from alumni who have dramatically improved their lives after release
• Providing helpful guides on niche topics related to attending a treatment facility, such as a legal term glossary
• Reviewing national and international news topics and explaining how they are directly impacting addiction and mental health treatment

For all types of people, it’s tough dealing with substance abuse and mental health. If you seek to be a resource for people by providing useful information at the right time, they will reach out when they need you the most. Don’t rely on occasional brand mentions in big publications with the hopes that people will remember you when the time is right.

12. Barnacle Your Brand To Top Ranking Content Publishers

Barnacle SEO is not a new strategy, but it can be a highly successful approach when situations like this occur. The term was coined by Will Scott of Search Influence about a decade ago and there was a must-watch Whiteboard Friday about it several years ago, too.

The idea behind Barnacle SEO for rehab centers as an addiction treatment marketing tactic is pretty straightforward – leverage the top rankings of other sites for your gain. Ever since April 2018, ranking for the top keywords in the substance abuse and mental health space became exponentially harder due to the update of SAMHSA’s National Helpline. Now, in addition to competing with other facilities and online publishers for top keyword rankings, getting them is almost impossible because of the injection of SAMHSA.

What can you do? Create content specifically on other sites that rank for your targeted keywords. Five of our favorite target domains to leverage for this strategy include:

• Medium
• Pinterest
• Quora
• Wikipedia
• YouTube

The value of links from these domains to help boost your search rankings is debatable. However, the referral traffic opportunity from all of them is great, and the frequency with which content on these sites ranks on the first page of Google results is high. While getting a Wikipedia page about your facility may be difficult, creating a profile and submitting content to all of these platforms should become a high priority online marketing strategy this year.

Closing Thoughts On Addiction Treatment Marketing Strategies

Many people are turning to Google to find answers to their troubles. With locations in Wheeling, WV, and Pittsburgh, PA, the team at DOM is well aware of the US’s opioid crisis. We are also sensitive to the fact that there is no “one size fits all” fix.

We think it’s a good thing that Google is trying to get people help when they need it from a neutral source. This is also not unfamiliar territory for Google. Back in November 2016, they made a similar change to the top of results for searches related to suicide.

But this change over the last two years does force substance abuse and mental health treatment facilities to shift. They can still use search engine marketing strategies to create opportunities for themselves. 

They just need to get more creative in order to provide care to the nearly 23 million Americans in need.

The top 12 ways we suggest facilities shift their addiction treatment marketing strategies are:

1. Become a LegitScript certified advertiser so your facility can run Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising
2. Extend the reach of your commercials and video content with YouTube advertising
3. Strategically tap into the near-limitless advertising opportunities in the Google Display Network 
4. Get listed in the SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator
5. Find keywords you already rank well for and structure your content for Featured Snippets
6. Maximize visibility in local SEO by completing and verifying any available citations
7. Create content on your site dedicated to hyperlocal communities that are in need of your services
8. Keep top-performing pages up to date by adding more text and updating visual content every three to six months 
9. Invest time in creating a comprehensive FAQ or writing blog posts to answer common questions
10. Optimize pages on your site for rankings around the unique features of your programs
11. Create content tailored to the families and individuals struggling with these issues
12. “Barnacle” content published by your facility to top publishing platforms for better exposure

Want to check out more of our actionable ideas from our Pittsburgh marketing firm to grow confidently online in the medical and health industry? Check out some of these blog posts below.

• Google Medic: How to SEO Proof Your Site in the Trust Authority Era
• How Do People Find Answers To Health Related Questions?
• How To Optimize Your Hospital for Local Search
• Healthcare Marketing Research & Survey Results

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post 12 Marketing Plans For Your Rehab Center To Kickstart Its Growth (Updated March 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

1. Optimize Your Title, and

2. Optimize Your Description

a. Place 2 primary keywords in the title and description

You already defined your keywords, right? Of course you did. You’ll need them because you’re going to use them a lot. The first step is to make sure they’re in your title and in the description. This helps generalize the video category so people know what they’re looking for. 

b. Use parentheses in the title

You’ll want to do this to help users understand the content a bit better than a plain ol’ title can. We also find that this generates more click-throughs by acting as an under-5-word summary of the content your audience can expect.

c. Use more than 100 words in the description

We don’t need to tell you why you want to provide a chunk of text to Google, but we will anyway: more text is better. Google, and therefore YouTube, like informative content. This doesn’t just apply to web pages—you’re going to want to make sure your video description includes a good bit of text that lets you outline the content. Make sure you use those keywords in the first paragraph since that’s where Google will focus.

3. Optimize Your Tags

a. Use those keywords

Keep those keywords handy, because you’re going to want to use them here, too. You’ll want to use any related keywords you might have come up with because a diversity of tags can help your videos rank higher. We employ services like Keyword Keg to generate a constellation of keywords to use in situations like this one.

4. Optimize Your Thumbnail

a. Upload your own 

Sure, you can use the thumbnail autogenerated by YouTube, but that’s not as good as uploading your own. YouTube prefers an uploaded thumbnail for the video and will reward you with higher search placements. Not only that, but you can design exactly what you want it to look like, including your logo or other brand markings. 

5. Optimize Your Playlist Descriptions

Yes, you’re going to want to use Playlists, which offer you opportunities for backlinks. And when you edit the playlist description, you get another opportunity to use those keywords.

6. Optimize your captions

Not only should you be captioning your videos for those of us who need them, but you’re also doing your SEO a big favor, too. Google will scan the video’s audio and create a transcript, but it prefers for you to provide one. Providing the transcript yourself makes sure it’s accurate, and you can get those keywords in there again.

7. Optimize Your End Screen

Should you tell people to like and subscribe? Yes, you should. Is it annoying to be constantly reminded of that? Maybe! But it’s a message you need to communicate, and an end screen/card is the best place for it. People expect to see it there, and it lets you get those keywords in again, but you can get your branding and logos up in front of your audience, too. 

For more help optimizing all of your SEO, and not just the kind you get on YouTube, get in touch with us today.

The post 7 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Page for SEO appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

SEO site migration plans must have a strategy to address crucial technical issues like (in order of importance) getting redirects in place, making sure all analytics and reporting software are in line and taking care of any outstanding duplicate content.

While those technical issues have the highest priority, there’s one more thing you need to keep in mind: how does the migration affect your backlink profile?

SEO Migration Plans And The Impact On Existing Backlinks

There’s really no such thing as a “typical” site migration since most websites are unique. If a backlink points to a link on a site that does not exist or does not have a proper redirect to the new URL, there is a lot of value lost from that backlink. Simply put, if a page’s URL changes during a site migration for any reason, any backlinks pointing to that original URL have reduced in value.

There are three common kinds of migration, each with possible impacts on existing backlinks:

Migration Type 1: Moving To A New CMS

Some websites that are quite old may have been created in an older framework or with an older programming language. If these sites move to a new CMS that does not support the older URL extension (e.g., .html), the URLs will have to be changed, even if none of the content itself does.

For example:

• Example.com/home.cfm was originally built in Adobe ColdFusion
• The site owners want to transition to a WordPress install
• Because WordPress doesn’t support the.cfm code, the URL will be changed to Example.com/home or simply the root

This switch will affect your URL or site structure after the migration, which will hurt your organic traffic and keyword rankings if not handled correctly. This is the most tedious type of SEO migration plan to prepare before starting on the project.

Migration Type 2: Moving To A New Domain Name

Sites that want to rebrand and take on their brand identity with a new domain name face the largest risk of adverse effects on their overall SEO. Not only will they have lost most branded search traffic, but all backlinks pointing to the previous domain have also significantly dropped in value since every URL will have changed. Even though 301 redirects still pass on “link juice” to the new URLs, the value is far less than a backlink pointing directly to the new URL.

This is comparable to moving from one office location to another in real life. The search engines need to know where your new site lives. To make sure your site maintains all of its search engine visibility, you will also need to update as many of your backlinks as possible.

One piece of good news to keep in mind: if a site moves to a new hosting provider but does not change URLs or the URL structure, there is no impact to the backlink profile.

However, if the site owners decide to change the URL structure or retitle URLs to fit with a rebranding, then there is a loss of value from existing backlinks.

Migration Type 3: Moving To A Secure Site From An Unsecured Site

Probably the most common type of site migration we find in today’s modern Internet is the migration from an unsecured site (one which the URL starts in HTTP) to a secure site (one that starts in https).

This update should be a boost to your SEO efforts but doesn’t come without risks. When you go secure, everything on your site needs to be made secure, too. Linking to unsecured sites from a secure site will negatively impact your rankings and traffic, so only link from https to https pages.

So it’s clear that in most cases a site migration means that backlinks will pass on considerably less link juice after everything’s said and done. Luckily, taking advantage of link reclamation is a sure-fire way to regain what may have been lost during the site migration, but this is just one tactic to consider.

Link reclamation should not be the focus forever, so here’s how to plan out a long-term link building strategy for any site facing an imminent site migration.

Prioritizing Link Building As You Create Your SEO Migration Plan

One of the first things to take on before completing your SEO migration plan is to pull any data from your site’s backlink profile. Using tools like Google Search Console, Moz Explorer, or Majestic SEO, having a complete list of all relevant backlink data will provide an idea of where to go once the new site has launched.

The next step is to rope in whoever is in charge of the site’s public relations and make sure they are included before the migration.

Having a properly optimized press release will go a long way to maximizing any benefits both from brand awareness and SEO perspective. This should be prepared well in advance as well as a highly targeted list of publisher contacts to ensure the press release is delivered to the appropriate sites and other media outlets.

Once PR efforts are taken care of, make sure to update all social profile links if the domain/brand name is changing following the new site launch. 

Prioritizing Link Building During Your SEO Site Migration

For this stage, the site is either within several days or immediately after the new site has launched and users can now visit the site. During this time, the main link building tactic to focus on is performing manual outreach for link reclamation.

This can be a daunting task if a site has an extremely large backlink profile, so here’s where data pulled before the site launch will come in handy. Using factors such as Moz’s Domain Authority or Alexa Rank, sort the list of backlinks and try to identify websites with high value to qualify them for link reclamation.

Site owners could potentially perform link reclamation for months on end to regain the link juice lost from a site migration. But over time, this tactic will provide less SEO value compared to other link building tactics.

Depending on the diversity of a site’s previous backlink profile, try to sort external backlinks by domain authority and eliminate any sites below a certain score.

The types of sites worth targeting during this reclamation phase will focus on the following by priority:

1. .edu, .gov domains
2. High domain authority publishers
3. Relevant industry directories

Outreach to these sites will generally be easier than other link building tactics since the link already exists. As always, remain polite and courteous, and you’ll rarely encounter negative feedback from your link update request.

Avoid the Rabbit Hole, Alice

Having laid out which sites to target during this reclamation phase, there are a few caveats to keep in mind. Even if a link is from a high authority site, this doesn’t mean it’s worth the time reaching out to get it updated as you journey into your SEO site migration.

For example, a lot of backlinks may be from news stories or press releases dating several years back. It will be extremely difficult to get a publisher to update a news story from 2011 just because your site has changed domain names.

Another example is if a backlink is from a site that is in no way related to your industry. Topical relevance is very important in regards to the quality of a backlink profile, so there will be times where link reclamation to irrelevant websites may not be the best use of time. 

Feeling Overwhelmed By Your Site Change?
Handle This Project With Confidence.
Download Our 7-Step SEO Site Migration Checklist.

Prioritizing Link Building After You Complete Your SEO Migration Plan

Link reclamation, when done correctly, will take several weeks, if not months, following a site migration. But as mentioned earlier, there will come a point where reclamation will provide fewer returns relative to time and resources invested.

This will ultimately fall on personal analysis, but once outreach has been completed on the targeted list of qualified sites for link reclamation, it’s time to consider moving on to a more comprehensive link building strategy. This is the time to refocus on building up internal pages on the site relative to a site’s keyword focus.

Link reclamation shouldn’t necessarily be abandoned completely long-term, but it’s important to weigh the value of time invested and the overall returns when diving into the multitude of link building tactics. If acquiring new links begins to slow down, link reclamation is worth revisiting so that some link building activity can continue.

Site migrations will always have some degree of negative impact on the site’s SEO. Provided that all technical concerns are squared away, link building should still be part of a site migration plan to help reduce these negative effects.

Still, don’t feel fully prepared for your upcoming site migration? Click above to download our site migration checklist, contact us for a no-obligation consultation, or check out one of these helpful blog posts:

• The Complete Beginner’s Guide To SEO Website Migrations
• Craft CMS vs. WordPress: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
• Sr. SEO Strategist Bentz Talks Site Migrations On BluHorn TV
• What To Do When Your Traffic Takes A Nosedive After Your Redesign

The post How To Prioritize Link Building Tactics During A Site Migration (Updated September 2019) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Bing now offers a new Webmaster function called Disavow Links that might help ease your pain and let you cut those binding, negative SEO ties. According to Bing, you can “use the Disavow links tool to submit page, folder, or domain URLs that may contain links to your site that seem “unnatural” or appear to be from spammy or low quality sites.” You can add shady domains, directories, and pages, letting Bing know that you don’t want to be associated with them.

Will it fix things?

Probably not completely. First of all, Bing’s Disavow Links tool doesn’t really have anything to do with Google, and you may have noticed that Google is a pretty big player when it comes to search. Second, while disavowing links will help Bing understand your intent, the official word is that it won’t drastically boost your rankings in Bing search results. So if you’re only concerned with search engine rank, this may not help you. In my opinion, though, it can’t hurt to identify and clean up bad links.

So?

Overall, I think it’s a pretty awesome concept and it’s a tool that I will definitely be exploring more in depth. It’ll be interesting to see if Google will offer something similar anytime soon, especially if their tool does have an effect on rank. After all, it may have been their idea in the first place…

The post Bing’s ‘Disavow Links’ Tool Makes it Easier to Cut Ties appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

One new feature in Google Analytics that I have enjoyed exploring lately is Social. Its main purpose is to measure your social impact across different networks and channels. You can also monitor the performance of your social pages and profiles and identify what specific content is performing well through social networks.

According to Google, being able to track user interactions allows you to identify valuable networks and content, ultimately providing additional insight for helping you reach goals or increase conversions.

The Social section shows traffic from the major social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as from blog and social bookmarking sites. Here is a short overview of what each section offers:

Sources

Identify networks and communities where people engage with your content and view basic metrics, like Average Visit Duration or Pages/Visit. This section allows you to see what content is performing well across each individual network.

Pages

The Pages section provides additional engagement metrics for individual URLs. Once you click on a URL, you’ll be able to see which networks referred the most traffic to that page.

Conversions

Measure the success and impact of your social campaigns by aligning them with your on-site goals and conversions (or eCommerce transactions, if you’re into that). From this section, you can identify which networks provide the highest ROI or monetary value. Of course, you’ll need to define goals and goal values to see conversion data.

Social Plugins

The Social Plugin report shows you how many people shared your content through social actions. You know those little buttons on your site that let people instantly share anything and everything? You can view that data in this section, but you’ll have to do some preliminary setup to track non-Google+ actions, obviously.

Social Visitors Flow:

The Social Visitors Flow section is especially handy when you’re tired of all those numbers. If you’re familiar with the Visitors Flow feature in the Audience section of Analytics, this is essentially the same tool for social. You can easily see the paths your visitors took through your site from specific social networks. The flowchart also clearly shows dropoff points.

The Verdict

Social analytics is a great way to monitor your social media impact, discover valuable social networks, and identify shareable content. If you’re new to Social analytics, I really recommend checking it out in-depth. If you’re an Analytics whiz and have been using Social since its release in late March, read on, as they added a few changes this week.

New Feature: The Backlinks Report in Google Social Analytics

According to Google, they monitor the web for sites linking to your published content. Once they find those links, they provide all the important data right in Social analytics. This data includes backlink URLs, post titles, dates, and sometimes even a particular user.

To get to this feature, you’ll need to navigate to the Pages section.

Select a specific URL, and then click on the Activity Stream tab.

Scroll down, and below the chart, you’ll find the blink-and-miss-it Events section, which is where your links are documented.

Overall, the Google Analytics backlinks report is a simple, easy-to-read list, even if you don’t know a lot of link logistics. For seasoned link builders and SEO specialists, it’s not necessarily Webmaster Tools, but it is updated much more quickly and is at least worth exploring.

The post A Google Social Analytics Summary + the New Backlinks Report appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Somewhere like Engadget or your average online news outfit.

The problem is they’ll link any mention of an iPhone to their category or tag page about iPhones. As much as I’m interested in Engadget’s particular take on the particular service, I still want to be taken to the Web page of the service they happen to be talking about.

Certain Web properties do this in part because they’re petrified of losing link juice by linking away from their own site. Think of links to your site as trickles or gushes of water entering your pond, river, lake, or ocean of a Website. The better related to your site’s topic or authoritative the link tributary is the more juice will flow.

Now, when you yourself link out from your Web site it’s a bit like opening another tributary that will invariably lose you some juice.

Sites like Engadget open up these tributaries only for you to come to a dead end. Sites that link out to the actual site provide a fully connected tributary from one to the other.

Imagine you’re the captain of a boat and you’re sailing through these waterways wanting to reach a final destination. You think that by going down the various tributaries and rivers that have been signposted you will be led to your destination, when all you’re doing is sailing around the same chop of water.

And that is the end of today’s ‘Bobby Jindal Talks Linking’ section.

Is Bobby Jindal is one of the people in your (linking) neighborhood?

I’ve never been a hoarder. For example, when I had a shop, or worked behind a bar, if somebody came in and asked for directions to anywhere – even a competitor – I’d point them in that direction. I didn’t point them in the direction of a side room that explained the place they were looking for in more detail.

Last week I came upon a rather intriguing post discussing the merits of linking out from your Website. They give four reasons as to why people think they shouldn’t:

• Harm their reputation
• Damage their search engine rankings
• Cost them PageRank
• Create exit portals where users will drop off

Then gave five reasons why they think you should:

#5 – Linking Out Sends Trackable Traffic
#4 – It Makes Your Site a More Valuable, Scalable Resource
#3 – Search Engines Likely Reward the Behavior Algorithmically
#2 – Linking Out Incentivizes Links In
#1 – Linking Out Encourages Positive Participation & Contribution

It’s a most enlightening read and requires your divided attention. Now I’d like to give a bit of empirical evidence supporting #3 if I may.

Go and do a search for ‘Prices of Potatoes’ on Google and see what comes up #4.

Yes, it’s a Tinbasher post. To be precise it’s a Tinbasher post consisting of 89 words talking about how another post ranks #7 for the same term. It doesn’t talk about potatoes in any meaningful way and it’s woefully short. It only manages to mention the keyword in the title and once in the post. The page doesn’t have any links and it was written over four years ago (when the blog was barely five months old). However, it does link out to a rather authoritative source of potato pricing information.

Now I recall on writing the post that if it were to rank again I’d be extremely annoyed to click on said post and it offer no information about the price of potatoes. Hence I slipped what I thought at the time the best link pertaining to potato pricing information I could find.

Now I’m hardly going to claim that potato prices are as competitive as gold or steel prices, but it’s still there.

And it’s also vilified by the only comment on the post thanking me for having put the link in there as they were looking for potato prices. (Although to this day it still strikes me as a bit of a spoof comment).

But, as I felt it was important not to lead people a merry dance via an empty referral click, I have a funny feeling Google takes this approach as well.

And that’s it, do unto searchers as you would have done unto you were you the searcher.

Be a user. Understand what they might be looking for and provide it. After all, is that not all search engines are trying to do?

It requires some chutzpah to think you can provide all the answers or are deserving of delivering them.

The post Why Linking Out is a Bobby Jindal No-Brainer appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

The first time I referred to myself as a Webmaster I’d been taken to the NEC in Birmingham (West Midlands, UK, not Alabama) by the brothers Butler, who I was Webmastering for, to attend a sheet metal machinery trade show. On signing up I was asked to give my role within the company, and rather than have ‘technical buffoon dragged along for the ride’ that wouldn’t read legibly on my name tag, I offered Webmaster. Matt and John found this highly amusing, and for the next twelve months they’d refer to me as ‘The Webmaster’ in a quizzical Darth Vader tone.

A Webmaster is not only the single point of joy for businesses that entertain them, but they generally serve as the one administrative contact for all things mentioned in the definition above. One of the more common emails you receive that contain the term Webmaster are those requesting a link from your site. Yesterday I received one such email:

Dear Web Master

Apologise (sic) if I have already been in contact with you about this before. I was merely enquiring whether you offer any advertising on your Butler Sheetmetal site.

I have a client/s that would be willing to pay you an annual charge for a text link (advert) on your site. My client/s website are either in the Home Improvement industry or related to Home Improvement, also the websites are well indexed with quality content and I think your site is suitable for a link partnership.

Please let me know if you are interested as you have a really suitable site.

I thought I’d tag him along a bit as I was interested in his offer, especially as he’d sent me an identical email for their sister site Tinpot Alley. I’d once been offered $500 for an annual link on The Tinbasher, and I’m not ashamed to say that the thought of at least doubling that had me tempted as it’d free up a new laptop purchase.

However, I originally turned down the $500 link and really had no intention of taking this guy up on his offer either. It was nothing more than professional curiosity. You see, the whole link buying and selling thing along with the guy’s lame email pitch and his company’s odd reputation left me positively stone cold. Any one of the three would have been sufficient for me to turn heel, but put them all together and we’re talking the mother of all moonwalks.

Anyway, let’s break this this thing down.

Why Buying and Selling Links is Wrong

I’ve never bought a link and I’ve never sold one. This is because (to paraphrase some old chap who invented the Blackberry) the fundamentals of ‘teh Google’ are strong. When you search for something you want the results of that search to return you an answer as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Google and the other search engines know this and we, as searchers, demand it. Now before I go off on some tautological ramble, Google does this by factoring in over 100 elements within its algorithm, with the glue being that of links between sites. A link from one site to another vouches for that site and, dependent on how important and relevant the link and the site giving the link are seen as being by Google, will in some way determine where you rank for a given keyword. While it may seem to all concerned that there are search engine fairies that arbitrarily assign ranking positions, that isn’t the case. Google wants this to happen naturally out of the goodness of our hearts. Great, amazing, worthwhile information will get linked to and poor, redundant filth won’t. It’s beautifully simple until you throw a cash spanner in the works. If you pay for these links and artificially increase your rankings by doing so you game the system. Search engines then return nothing but sites that have the largest link buying budgets. Then the search engine is dead. Oh, and if you get caught by Google selling links your offending site will be dead to them.

You can read everything you ever wanted to know and more about buying and selling links that pass pagerank in this post on the Google Webmaster Blog.

Time for Tools: The Dreaded Impersonal Email Pitch

As much as I am entertained by my brother-in-law calling me ‘The Webmaster’ it’s darned lazy to pump off an email with that as a salutation. They don’t even know if there is a Webmaster, just an assumption. The time it took to find an email address couldn’t have been too long and it would only have taken an extra 8.4 seconds to find a name. Blimey, it should only take half an hour to craft a reasonable email tuned to the sender and less than a minute to run a spell check so you don’t look like an illiterate doofus when you start your email with apologise as opposed to apologies. And then you lie. Why say the sites are home improvement related when they’re home insurance sites? I’d have been all over a link to Tim Allen.

How Shifty an SEO Company Were They?

Now because I’m not as lazy as the bunch who’d just emailed me, or perhaps I can just multitask, it took me all of a couple of minutes to click on their company link. After all, the home insurance links they were asking for were big UK brands. One look at their client list and they were responsible for the SEO accounts of some very big UK companies indeed. Was this their general modus operandi? Do their link building efforts consist of buying links from whoever they can get them from? Can they string a coherent email together? Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised after this week’s financial escapades, but I do wonder how hapless and haphazard certain companies become. I could have forgiven myself for thinking they were some small fly-by-night outfit operating out of some illustrious part of West Virginia < ./sarcasm >. But we don’t buy and sell links against Google guidelines and we’d be appalled at the thought of firing off a thoughtless email such as the one above. We may make a mistake or two, but it isn’t because we’re shifty or unprofessional. They’re of the ‘honest’ variety – not because we’re short term blackhat SEO impresarios. I’d heard of this bunch before, but I couldn’t quite remember where. I’m also no snitch. But, if you read this post about shifty insurance SEO practices, they’re spoken of fondly along with a couple of sites that I was asked to link to.

And the clincher? The reason I’m tentatively outing these SEO shysters?

They only offered me $100 a year for each link.

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