SEO Hosting Blog

Normally, when we discuss linking in blogging, the conversation is about building links back to your blog. But in this post, I want to talk about creating a sound internal linking structure for your blog. Internal linking almost always gets overlooked, but using it properly can create a host of powerful benefits.

First, internal linking can enhance the experience for your readers. For example, let’s suppose you’re writing a post about important steps for maintaining your computer. In one of the steps, you might mention something about keeping your virus protection up to date. Here, you could link to a more expansive previous post you had written detailing the steps for picking out virus protection software, keeping it up to date, running it regularly, etc.

For readers, having this link to a previous related post can help them learn more about topics they’re interested in, enhancing the education they receive from your blog. Additionally, having this link in your post keeps readers on your blog for a longer period of time. The longer someone sticks around on your blog, the likelier it is that they’ll subscribe to your blog and become a loyal reader.

Beyond enhancing the user experience, a sound internal linking structure is good for search engine optimization. You probably already know that keyword-rich links from other websites help the search engines more accurately classify the pages on your website, thus increasing your search rankings for relevant keywords. Well, the same concept applies to internal linking on your website. Use keyword-rich links to old posts to help give them a boost in their search engine placement.

Now, when linking internally on your blog, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

1. Don’t overdo it—Okay, so internal linking in your blog can be beneficial, but you need to be careful not to overdo it. I’ve come across more than a few blogs that literally include 5-10 internal links in every single post. That’s just too much. If you have a link in every other sentence, you need to dial things down a notch. Also, don’t make the mistake of constantly linking to sales pages from your blogs. Your readers won’t enjoy the constant pitches.
2. Always use keyword-rich anchor text—To maximize the SEO benefits of internal linking, you should always use keyword-rich anchor text. Make sure the keywords in the anchor text are relevant to the page you’re linking to.
3. Help lower-ranking pages—If there are pages on your blog that aren’t performing well in the search engines, try to link to them whenever it makes sense to do so. Over time, internal links to low-performing pages could increase their presence in the search engines.

Do you use internal linking in your blog? How has it helped? Share your thoughts in the replies.

Feedage.com is a site owned by Mark Savoca that I have known about for almost two years. I first discovered the site after glancing at a web site traffic report and noticing some incoming traffic. From that time to now, I haven’t really paid much attention to the site. Feedage.com has my attention because I believe that it’s a decent resource that helps increase traffic and SEO value.

Feedage.com is a categorized and searchable RSS feed directory. It’s further explained that their goal is to categorize and organize large numbers of RSS data feeds to make viewing them more easier for end users. The directory was created and grown by adding RSS feeds into queue. Machine readable pages are then created off the partial item syndication of each RSS feed queued. In other words, when a new RSS feed is added into their directory, a new webpage is created that syndicates the partial feed of each entry.

The problem that I have with Feedage.com is that syndicated content is being used to display contextual based ads. This is nothing new, and in fact, many site do this. However, many blog authors and site owners take offense to other people using their content to earn revenue.

And then there are some sites such as Digg.com, don’t necessarily syndicate content, but instead monetize the user submitted content that is geared towards introducing a full story. That then creates a deterrence towards allowing people to actually click and view the story. This method is more accepted and tolerated, especially when sites such as Digg.com deliver traffic to the source site.

In the case with sites such as Feedage.com, majority are considered spam, splog, or sponge sites. That is of course is until the site in question is proven to generate incoming traffic to the source site. And that is where I am at with Feedage.com. This site syndicates the RSS feeds from blogs and uses the content to overly saturate pages with contextual based ads. Also, and in many cases with newer blogs, Feedage.com can rob source sites from their position in search engines. Since Feedage.com is more established than many of the source blogs its content is originating, many of the cases, the Feedage.com page will rank better than the source page.

Having that said, you might then question whether it’s worth submitting your RSS feed into their directory. Many people obviously would feel like it’s not. However, before a decision is made, there are a two benefits towards using Feedage.com which are the potential to increase traffic and potential to increase SEO value of your source site.

If you decide to submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, my past records have shown that I have received traffic from their site. It isn’t a lot, but it’s traffic I received without applying any tweaks or optimizations to. Here is what I recommend doing to make the best of your listing.

If you’re using WordPress, I recommend installing the Feedage.com Plugin and allowing a percentage visitors subscribe to your Feedage.com RSS Feed rather than your source feed, or FeedBurner feed. If you don’t have a WordPress blog, or you do and simply don’t want to install the plugin, I recommend redirecting your source feed to the Feedage.com RSS feed.

In either case, the purpose of directing traffic to your Feedage.com RSS feed is to gain subscribers. The reason why you want to increase the number of subscribers assigned to your Feedage.com feed is because the more you have subscribed, the higher you rank in the Feedage.com directory.

You don’t have to convert your entire RSS reader base to Feedage.com. Simply observe the number of subscribers it will take to rank #1 in their directory. Once you reach that number, then you can pull the plug and point your blogs RSS feed back to the source URL or FeedBurner.

The next element that might interest you is backlinks. When you submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, your content is syndicated on a webpage. Links to your homepage, and individual post page are made. These are all dofollow intext links. By default, many people might discount the value in these Feedage.com pages; however, I have seen a quite a few, and many have established PageRank as high as 5. The trick is to point links to your Feedage.com page.

If you take your Feedage.com page seriously, you’re going to generate a natural flow of traffic and links pointing to it. Over time, and a shorter period than many believe, your Feedage.com page will establish PageRank. Also, one thing to consider is the more popular your Feedage.com page gets, the more internal exposure it receives within Feedage.com itself. Ultimately, your Feedage.com page could become the featured blog on the homepage.

In summary, I think sites like Feedage.com tend to be very spammy, and low in quality. Typically, search engines feel the same. However, and for whatever reason, both people and search engines approve of Feedage.com. I think they should reduce the number contextual ads and also re-position them slightly.

If your blog is somewhat new and doesn’t rank well in the search engines already, you may find Feedage.com stealing your position. Which I guess is fine if you’re site isn’t ranking anyway. Keep in mind, only a small percentage of Feedage.com traffic will reach your site. The majority will click on the ads or click back after being subjected to viewing the ads.

What are your thoughts about Feedage.com, and similar sites? Do you think there is more harm than good allowing your content to be syndicated on a site that could potentially outrank your own blog posts? Do you think that it’s acceptable for other people to syndicate your content for the purpose of displaying contextual based ads and earning revenue?

(image from lotus0718)

Last week, I wrote a post that contained a list of the latest and greatest WordPress plugins that I have come across. The first plugin on this list was WP-Hive, which allows you to create multiple WordPress installations (on one domain or multiple domains) from a single database and set of WordPress files.

One of the biggest reasons I like this plugin so much is because it makes it very easy to keep all of your WordPress files up to date. Instead of logging into each blog or website that you have running WordPress, you can update your plugins or WordPress version one time, and your files will be updated across all of your blogs and websites running off of WP Hive. Since keeping your WordPress files up to date is one of the most effective ways to keep WordPress secure, this plugin can save you from a lot of trouble down the road.

While my experience with WP Hive has been very smooth, there was one issue that I ran into which wasn’t actually related to the plugin itself. Because I wanted to consolidate as many of my blogs and websites as possible, I actually converted some static HTML websites to WordPress. While the process went smoothly, once I had finished converting these sites, I realized that it was going to cause my indexed pages to lead to a 404 page.

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Last Tuesday, TechCrunch published a post titled “In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents.” In the post, Michael Arrington explained that they had received 310 different corporate and personal Twitter documents from a hacker. Over the next two days, they published several of these documents, including Twitter’s financial forecast and internal strategy. Because these were confidential documents, these posts generated a lot of attention and controversy.

Although TechCrunch obviously attracted a lot of traffic and links by publishing these documents, they weren’t the only ones to benefit. Another person who took advantage of this situation was Alex Tew. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because of his famous MillionDollarHomePage project. Alex decided to take this situation and turn it into linkbait by creating a Flash game called The EV Files.

Like many Flash games, The EV Files is quite simple to play. You have thirty seconds to throw iPhones at an alien version of Michael Arrington (who pops up at different locations on the screen) and hit him as many times as possible.

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Increasing PageRank can be a huge challenge and can take a lot of hard work, but what if there was an easier way to increase PageRank quickly?

There is actually! And, it’s a darn good way too. For a long time I have know about this, but couldn’t figure out a good way to do this. I searched for software and never found anything, and the only thing I found that could do this for me was a half functional website.

But, before I get too far ahead here, I need to explain to you how you can increase your PageRank. As you may know, backlinks are needed in order to get more PageRank. More so, backlinks with high PageRank are even more important.

So, who the heck is going to give you free links from pages with high PageRank? Well, the answer is simple… you are! You might not realize this, but many of your own pages within your site have established their own level of PageRank. (more…)