How To Get The Most Bang For Your Buck With The Right Linking Strategy
This morning while participating over at ForumFinder [40,466 Alexa traffic rank], my eye was caught by a particular post at U-G-H [108,508 Alexa].
The post itself, One Step Closer to the Living Room YouTube Goes Widescreen is not only interesting in terms of YouTube, (can you guess what YouTube is up to now? LOL), but in the formatting – the WAY – in which the post is constructed.
And it’s done brilliantly!
The idea, your strategy, be it a website or a blog post, is always “think linking.” And U-G-H’s posts are examples of internet marketing strategy at its simplest, most effective.
Have you spotted it yet?
Just in case, let me pinpoint where this post is leading to…
Within one paragraph alone (and it’s a very small paragraph, more a run on sentence (well constructed) really, the U-G-H post incorporates the following:
o YouTube Goes Wide [Alexa 4.054]
o YouTube Goes Widescreen [Alexa 58,358]
and
o YouTube Goes Widescreen Today Users Still Unhappy [Alexa 86,264]
Now bear with because this isn’t the WAY the blogger links – Owen doesn’t use the titles of each of the other blog post pages, instead he’s linking up phrases he has naturally incorporated into his written paragraph.
These phrases are:
o “spotted on YouTube”
o “definite shift”
o “what user’s expect”
Are you getting my drift yet?
In simple terms, deep linking to pages inside your own website and/or blog is very important AND external linking to “forward looking” websites and blogs is equally, if not, more important as you incorporate strategic seo techniques.
Nothing pulls a site forward faster than the creation of new content on a continuous basis (making building a blog a great strategic first move) and valuable external links to relevant “ahead of yours in the seo food chain” sites.
But the WAY to do it is to take naturally occurring phrases and words within your content and link them up. Many concentrate solely on linking keyword phrases he or she believes (hopefully researched) are relevant to their search engine optimization (SEO). But Owen, and his lovely Alexa rank, provides proof that the natural combination of the written word incorporating strategic linking is highly effective in drawing traffic.
The fact is, unless you are running say Google Analytics or StatPress (wordpress blog plugin), and/or digging around in your domain’s logs and cpanel stats, many people are totally unaware of HOW people are getting to their site. For most, it’s lucky chance. For others, they spend way too much time focusing in on a few keyword phrases that (at the time) may have been right, but perhaps now are not so relevant.
I’m guilty myself of forgetting to do this often enough. We tend to hunker down and think a bit narrowly from time to time ourselves.
As our own November 25th post points out, PR isn’t all its cracked up to be, but traffic and placing well in the search engines still rank in the top two spots in terms of effective seo.
So, for today, we all have Owen of U-G-H to thank, who (naturally and unknowingly in terms of this post) provides the reminder that strategic relevant linking, along with quality content, is your best move to attract search engines, new readers, and (hopefully) potential clients and customers.
Thanks Owen for the swift kick “Remember!” moment you provided me with this morning. One of those “change the light bulb” moments really LOL! 
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