1. Set your goals. As I mentioned before, blogs are a great way to reach your audience, and give them up-to-date information about your industry, company, and even employees (because after all, they are the most important part of your business!).  However, which of these are important to YOU? What do YOU want to accomplish from your blog? Setting your goals up front will save you many headaches later on, because everyone involved will know what you are trying to do with each post. Based on your goal(s), identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you want to monitor, and make sure you have accurate tracking from the beginning.
2. Be consistent! Yes, I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times before – be consistent in your posting. However, this truly is important. If you sporadically post, how will your readers know when to check back? If you aren’t consistent you won’t create a solid reader base – no matter how great your articles are.

Solution: Create a calendar. There are a TON of ways to create a calendar (I like to use excel), you just need to make sure it’s functional for everyone involved. A good rule of thumb is to create a calendar one month in advance, and have it finalized about a week before the current month is over. That way your team can review the schedule, and let you know if there are any conflicts well in advance.

If you split the blog writing with your client or another team, don’t be afraid to use some color on the calendar so everyone knows what they are responsible for.

3. Be unique. When choosing your topic, keeping it fresh will also (more than likely) keep it interesting. Would you want to read a blog post about the same exact thing that 20 other industry blogs have covered….all this month? Nope. And neither would your audience. And if you find yourself in a position where you do have to cover the same topic as everyone else – find a new angle. Play devils advocate, and stir up some conversation – what better way is there to not only get people to read your post, but get them to interact with you? (Disclaimer – please do this with moderation, I’m not recommending you start a huge controversy!)
4. Length matters. Make sure your word count is exactly….well, exactly what you need it to be. There are multiple posts from respectable blogs out there that give a standard of anywhere from 250-600 (this number varies by industry). But instead of being focused on an exact length, it should be much more important that your posts are thorough and of high quality. If you are reaching to hit a minimum, you’ll more than likely add fluff words, and let’s face it – that’s really just wasting the valuable time of your readers.

On the other hand, each post should answer the questions of your readers. A great way to keep an eye on this is to review the comments. If you find that there are quite a few questions coming through asking for clarification or additional information, you should really try to challenge yourself to be more thorough in their research and writing. Before writing each post, write out a list of the questions you originally had, and be sure to answer them. You can also review other posts on the topic, and see what those comments were.

5. Make your English teacher proud. You don’t want people asking “who learned her to spoke?” so keep your grammar, spelling and punctuation in check.  We have all been in a place where you are up against a deadline, and you have to crank out a post. Though you may typically have plenty of time to review your article before posting, it’s always a good idea to get a fresh pair of eyes on it first. Set up a final review system with your team, and share the responsibility of reviewing each post.
6. Easy reading, please! Blog readers decide in the first minute if they are going to continue reading or not, so you need to format your blog post in a way that is easy to skim, and also easy to read. Keep your thoughts in a well-organized layout, being sure to use headlines, paragraphs and bullets.
7. Comments welcome! I know it’s hard to believe, but not everyone will agree with you on everything – and that’s ok! But before you begin blogging, you need to have a clearly defined plan for handling comments. First and foremost, you need to decide if you will allow them. If you decide to let them in, what guidelines will your internal team need to follow before approving them? And how will you handle less than positive comments? Having a plan of action in place BEFORE a negative comment happens will help your team be sure to respond in a timely manner.
8. Be social. Do you have an RSS feed set up? Can people request to be on your email list? Do you tweet about your latest and greatest posts? Can people like you on Facebook? You better hope so! It’s important to let your readers have options when they share your content, as they will more than likely all have a different favorite. Keep this in mind when writing too; a few tweetable phrases here and there never hurt anyone!
9. Be mindful of SEO. Yes, I saved this for last for a reason. A blog is a perfect way to enhance your SEO efforts. You are creating fresh, unique, highly relevant content, so why would you miss the opportunity to optimize each article? Before posting, be sure you create a catchy title that contains your core/target keyword, and an optimized meta description under 160 characters long. You should also be sure to crosslink throughout the post, using optimized anchor text for each. And if you include images, be sure to give them good alt tags.

One of the great benefits of blogging is increased link building, which makes sense. Each piece of content you create has the chance of being linked to, which in turn gives you more credibility with the search engines, and increases your ranking. In fact, Hubspot did a study about blogging for small businesses which showed the following pretty cool stats:

Whether you are planning on starting a blog in the coming year, or you want to dust the cobwebs off the one you forgot about long ago, I hope these 9 steps were a good recap for you of past posts of tips for bloggers new and old, and gets you off to a good start. We’re always looking for ways to stay organized and efficient, so please send along any other suggestions you have!

Linking internally serves a couple of purposes:

1. Most important is the user experience – if users are going to be frustrated by your site once they arrive, there is no point in driving traffic through other SEO efforts. By having correct internal linking, visitors can easily access other information on your site rather than having to look it up for themselves or possibly, leave to find the information somewhere else. You want to be sure you have enough links that people can easily move about your site but not so many that they feel overwhelmed, forcing them to dive deep into the site to get what they are looking for.
2. Second purpose, is to help with SEO by providing target articles/information that are both relevant and have authority. By internal linking you are not only helping to make sure that information is shown to be relevant but it can also help you pass along PageRank from one page to another.

As you know from external link building, the more links a page has, the more “votes” or important something appears to be. Creating links to the important pages of your site helps to wave the flag saying “hey there is something here worth reading.”

So, now what? Before you dive in and just start creating a million links between your pages, the first step is to put together a plan.

One method to internal linking is to create a hub page. This can work well to position certain areas of your site as an authority on a certain subject, where all topics relate to one another. Search engines will see the pages in close proximity to each other, and gives them more relevance for having a common theme. And as always, updating the content frequently can help keep interest both from the consumer and search engine crawlers.

In order to identify what your hub page should be, first identify your content silos. What are the major topics and what is the common theme among all of them? For instance if you have information on princess story books, fairy tails, action books for boys and latest children’s authors, your hub page might be Children’s Books. Be sure that everything that links to your hub page is interrelated and that you follow SEO best practices when setting up that hub page.

Once that is complete, you aren’t quite done yet. You need to continue to add new content. Frequent content updates build the hub’s authority but you can’t just add content to add, it must be new, high quality and relevant. You need to not only keep the visitors interest but also the search engines, otherwise ranking benefits will be temporary. Going back to the Children’s Books example, you could add in a page on the latest books to be published, additional categories like mysteries or eBooks, or an article on top rated books for the holidays, etc.

Once you have your hub built, now begin working to attract external links to your hub page. The goal is to raise the hub page as the authority on the topic you covering so rather than spreading links among all of your different pages, focus your efforts at the center.

There are of course other ways to build out your internal links, especially if your site is well established and re-building it to a hub-page format would cause more harm that good. Remember, you don’t want to add internal links for the sake of links but you want to help visitors and link relevant information together.

Create a FAQ: One approach is a Frequently Asked Questions section. The hub page would be the main FAQ page where you outline questions readers commonly have and then partially answer the question within the page. From there, include a link to a blog post or specific page with additional information on your site.

Write a series of blog posts: ever tackled a blog series on your blog? This is a great way to create internal linking. As each post is published, each article should include links to the previous ones. As all of the topics are interrelated, this can help with not only internal linking but also page views and time on site. Be careful not to abuse this though, as people quickly catch on when you are sending them all over to get information.

Use 404 pages to re-direct traffic: No one likes error pages, but you can make them a little more helpful by adding links to other common areas of interest on your site. That way, maybe a person can still find what they are looking for rather than abandoning the page completely.

As you go through your site and start expanding your linking, be sure you are cleaning out pages that are off topic or don’t quite fit with the others. That outlier could be doing more harm that good. If anything, you can always re-write the content to help it better flow with the rest of the site or blog, to help give a little more value.

The key to all of this is to sit down and put together a plan before you start. We have all been to sites where it seems they have internally linked every other phrase and it quickly becomes annoying and not helpful at all. Be sure that every internal link serves a purpose and makes sense to a user navigating through. Also, be sure you are using keywords as your anchor text rather than very general statements. It is not only what pages you link together but also what terms.

Text Links and their Anchors

First, of the four limited methods I mentioned above, text links the best. Linking with pictures, buttons, or Flash can be useful in grabbing the emotion of a visitor, if used properly, but can’t context to a search engine like a text link can. The words in your anchor text and the words immediately surrounding your link play a part in how relevant the linked page is to those words. Explaining what you’re linking to in the link or around the link helps the search engine and visitor know exactly what they are about to see. Amber has written a great post regarding the details of internal linking and anchor text.

Calls to Action in Links and the Human Need

If you’re worried about getting visitors to click your links, use an appropriate call to action before, within, or after your link. Don’t try to overdo the linking, too. This can be an eye-sore for users and search engines can also notice a spammy quality to links. Using the anchor text “hot dog vendor” fifteen times on a page of 300 words can be a bit much. Consider mixing on the words and wording to catch relevancy for other search phrases. Finding a balance with all of these aspects can make your site appear as if you were not even trying to rank higher in search engines, while having great SEO success.

Passing the Page Relevancy Through Linking

Having a URL standard for your internal linking can make your efforts all that much more potent. By URL standard, I mean deciding on using specific URL rules from start to finish. For example, at the base-level using both http://hotdogcartel.com and http://www.hotdogcartel.com can split the relevancy, as the search engines see these as two different pages. Additionally, using http://www.hotdogcartel.com/locations/index.html and http://www.hotdogcartel.com/locations/ simultaneously splits the relevancy for the same reason as above. Include “www” or not, include index.html or not; just be sure it is consistent across the site from the beginning of the URL to the end. This will be sure to pass all available relevancy in your site to a single page (in the search engines eyes) and give you the most benefit.

Square-Peg, Round-Hole Internal Linking

Finally, while many people would like to control the relevancy for some pages, you often need to create anchor text within the guidelines of what your page actually pertains to. Trying to pass “franchise” relevancy to your page http://www.hotdogcartel.com/locations/ if you have no content regarding franchises won’t work most likely. Building your internal linking around what content you already have is your best bet for effectiveness. Joe has posted in the past regarding linking within content silos and how it can benefit your site.

Most everyone knows that links coming into your site are what truly makes your SEO sing.  It’s also a good idea to link internally to pages within your website in order to increase PageRank and organic traffic. The purpose of doing this is two fold:

1. Distribute PageRank from one page to another

2. Add keyword rich anchor text on a targeted page within your site so you can rank better for that keyword

9 times out of 10, your homepage is going to be the page with the highest PageRank. If you’re linking from your homepage to another page within your site, you’re going to help distribute that PageRank. I don’t just mean linking to other pages in a left or top hand navigation (although that helps too) but more directly I mean, adding in keyword-rich anchor texts that will allow PageRank to flow from your homepage to another page of your site.

If you’ve done your keyword research correctly, you should have 2–3 targeted keywords for each page of your site. While including these keywords on each page is great for on-page optimization, however, links pointing to this page should also include your targeted keywords within their referring anchor texts. When you link from one page to another page using anchor text, it’s the page that you link to that gets the link juice (direct benefit) of that keyword.

For example, if on your homepage your targeting keywords 1, 2 and 3; And on your main category page you’re targeting keywords a, b and c. On your homepage you need to not only include keywords 1, 2 and 3 but also include keyword a, b or c using anchor text and link to that main category page.

Also, on your main category page, you should target keyword 1, 2 or 3 using anchor text and link back to your homepage to distribute PageRank evenly throughout your site.

Take the diagram below for example. Our homepage targets keywords pet food, organic pet food and natural pet food. But we’re adding anchor text to our category pages for dog food, cat food and fish food. Adding in anchor text with these keywords from the homepage is distributing link juice from the homepage to these other category pages.

But also, we’re using anchor text on the category pages using the homepage’s target keyword to give back some of that link juice using our homepage’s target keywords.

The point is to think of distributing link juice evenly from your homepage to other pages of your site and back using keyword rich anchor text. Remember, when you’re using anchor text, the page you’re linking to is the page that gets the link juice with that keyword.

First impressions mean a lot to me, and I’ve got to say this plugin is pretty cool stuff.  It isn’t really ground breaking in the data it’s presenting, but it makes up for that in sheer simplicity.  Just to experiment – I walked through the process of requesting a Yahoo! API key, loading the plugin into one of my personal blogs and getting access to the data in a matter of 5 minutes or less.  Like I said, simple.  And beyond speed, for any SEO to have back link and crawler data so easily accessible (directly from your WordPress Settings) and malleable (sort by any data point asc/desc) is just fantastic.  That is if you’re using WordPress!

Now you can start to see those posts that get very little traffic, though have great inbound link equity. These are prime candidates for 301 redirection to more “current” posts struggling to rank.

Within the scope of blogging, this tool is great for assessing the popularity of old posts vs. new posts.  The author (and I presume designer of the plugin) Jeff Quipp specifically mentions looking at old posts that have a great back link profile but are suffering from low pageview and traffic counts.  Taking this element of analysis to the extreme, IMHO, this plugin also comes equipped with an almost too easy format for creating 301 redirects from those old posts to relevant new posts.

This is my only point of critique for an otherwise great WordPress plugin: Are 301 redirects REALLY the answer here?  I suppose that in a few instances, it could make sense to essentially “delete” an old post by 301ing it to new content.  But most blogs, especially those aiming to be thought leaders and information hubs could lose a piece of their credibility by eliminating old content in this manner!  Any post, especially one that has a strong back link profile is likely also a popular bookmark for individuals coming back for more.  If you place a 301 redirect on that post, their bookmark is rendered useless.  Maybe, just maybe, your new content is similar enough to be helpful.  But my guess is you will alienate that reader by removing their bookmarked, favorite content.

My 2 cents on this would be to assess this process on a post-by-post basis.  If you can find no other workable solution, OK, go with the 301 redirect.  But I would suggest you try updating the old post with a header or footer link that points readers to your new content.  This is good for readers/usability and will also help to distribute that old post’s PageRank to your new content.  I would go one step further and suggest that you test different strategies before settling on the 301 option.

To wrap things up, my main point here is this is a great plugin – and if you’re managing SEO for a blog (or even a full website) on WordPress, you should definitely start using it today!  My critique on the 301 redirects may be a bit nit-picky, but I felt it was important to push a bit on that point.  All SEOs should carefully review the thought process behind a 301 redirect before implementing.  301s have a lasting effect that can’t be undone.  Otherwise, hats off to Jeff Quipp and Search Engine People on a job well done.  I’m looking forward to seeing future updates and additions!

Internal links can be used for several purposes. The biggy is improving internal link structure (PageRank distribution). However, internal links also attribute keywords to certain pages/content via anchor text, and internal links can also be used to enhance user engagement. There are several ways to incorporate text links within your site (and for discounting them when necessary).

Internal Links and PageRank Distribution

I like to think of PageRank (or link juice) as lightening thrown down by Thor himself. Your homepage is a massive lightening rod waiting to absorb that energy. If there are no links on your homepage, that energy will sit there, unused. When links are present, they act as a conduit, safely spreading PageRank’s energy to each corresponding page.

The first step is determining your website’s hierarchical structure (i.e. Home > Categories > Blog Post). Your linking structure should follow a similar pattern. In my example, Category pages would be of high importance and necessitate a link from the homepage. From each Category page then, individual blog posts would be linked to. PageRank would be funneled to each individual post via its Category page.

Links count as votes in the PageRank system, so the more internal links a page has, the higher it’s PageRank will be. So you can experiment with increasing (or decreasing) the number of internal links to a particular page to try and affect its PageRank and rank.

Assign Keyword Importance with Anchor Text

Just like you would with a traditional link building campaign, be hyper-aware of the anchor text you use with internal links. Especially since you have 100% control! As you execute your internal linking structure, make sure that your anchor text contains those keywords your linked-to page is targeting. As the search engines crawl those links, they will use the anchor text in the process of determining what that page is about!

A great way to point internal links to your site’s content with great anchor text is to maintain an HTML sitemap. This is yet another argument for using traditional sitemaps. They aid your users, help the search engines to understand your site’s structure, and provide the search engines with keyword-rich anchor text pointing to your content!

Linking to Enhance User Engagement

My first brush with internal linking was to use cross-linking of content for decreasing bounce rates and increasing page views. The idea boiled down to if a user was on my site – how could I make their experience that much better? The process involved finding relevant content on the site that provided additional information or would lead them to their ultimate goal (i.e. a conversion trigger).

Before I ever understood how internal links distributed PageRank, I had hard data to prove that internal links can (and do) lower bounce rates and increase page views. Now that I understand the full power of internal links, I realize that cross-linking must be done as part of a PageRank oriented internal linking structure. But rest assured, you can have your cake and eat it, too!

Discounting a Link’s Power

You eventually will discover that you have links on your site that point to unnecessary content.  Perhaps unnecessary isn’t the write word – but think of it as content you don’t want or need to be ranked.  The simplest way to discount a link’s PageRank distributing power is to use “no-follow.”  This tool can be used for an entire page (not recommended) or on inidividual links (preferred).  When you place the no-follow tag within a link’s code, you are telling search engines that the page behind that link is not important.  Google specifically states that they do not follow links with this tag.  Period.  

There are volumes more to be read and written on PageRank distribution and the full extent of internal linking structure and strategy. So, take this information as a solid first-step to understanding internal linking. Leave a comment if you have any questions or would like to add your 2 cents!