Link Building Course, Week 3

Wow… Another Great Free Video!

I enjoyed seeing the testing that was done with the term "advanced SEO class". It proves that your teachings work.

Jeff

Dan,
Thanks so much for sharing your videos! I have applied a lot of the SEO Fast Start text to my new website, and the videos help reinforce and clarify what I learned from the reading. I have three questions after watching this video:

1. Deep links - you said the pages should only be 2 or 3 clicks away; the way I have structured the site is as follows:
Home Page
Features - 2nd tier - linked from nav bar
Landing pages - I have 36 landing pages (12 for terms "learn German"/12 for terms "learn Spanish"/12 for terms "learn French"). From the home page, I have a nav bar link to the most significant landing page for German, Spanish, and French; however, the remaining 11 landing pages for each language are accessed through a circular link at the bottom of the page from "All Rights Reserved." You talked about this in another video for Stomper where landing page 1 links to landing page 2 which links to landing page 3, etc. Now, I'm concerned since all the landing pages are not 2-3 clicks from the web. Won't the Google spiders find them with my sitemap or do I need to change my internal linking structure?

2. I've implemented your strategies and submitted to directories last week; how long will it usually take before I start to see the site rising in the search rankings? Today, I searched on my keywords, but I stopped looking for my site on Google's results after page 50 still didn't show my website.

3. Google found my old site (MS Publisher based) before I submitted the new site (Wordpress SemiPro) to the Google/Yahoo/etc. directories, so now it's got a bunch of 404 messages for pages that were htm URLS under MS Publisher. I submitted a new sitemap from the Wordpress site today. Will they update their cache info periodically so that the accurate website shows up in their database?

Thanks, Dan, for all you help! I'm moving on to the next video ASAP.
Diane in IN

Diane,

1. I would recommend simply linking those landing pages together. In SIMPLE, the basic idea is something like this - if you have 12 landing pages to promote your French product, you link them together. Each one has a slightly different selling message and focus because you're using different keywords, so if I land on one page and click to another landing page, the persuasion builds on what I read from the previous page.

2. Stop worrying about it and keep working. A link may take a week to influence rankings, it may take longer. Directories can take much longer. You can't get bogged down by checking rankings.

3. The best thing to do is redirect those old URLs to the new ones. You can do this by editing your .htaccess file. I think Jerry West has a good tutorial on this in the portal.

Basically you add a bunch of lines at the end of your .htaccess file that look like:
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

There's a web tutorial here:
http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

Thanks,Dan!

Another great video with tons to think about.

The 3 click approach, does this include any search.

On my site I have;

Home > (1) Country page with list of regions > (2) list of ski chalet's in that region > (3) Info on the ski chalet.

The visitor can filter the results on click (2)

At the moment I am optimising the home page, and country pages, once I have improved SEO I am going to go to the next level.

Am I on the right track here?

Darren, if by "search" you mean that you create a new page at a unique URL with unique content because I clicked "southern bavaria" then that's another page, sounds like it's 3 clicks in from the home page. To make that work best you'll want to work on bringing links into the country & region pages.

Dan

Dan, on click (2) the visitor filters no. of bedrooms, from the long list of properties in ZXY region. The page generated is the same as the long list of properties, so same content, the URL is slighly different, but I have blocked the search engines from spidering the filter page, because I only want it to spider the long list of properties in ZXY region and to avoid dup content.

Hope this makes sense.

I have directed most of my links to the homepage but I am starting to look at ways to increase links to the country and region pages.

Makes good sense.

Dan, through your link building courses and most importantly, your Fast Start Book, I've learned more than I have by participating in most SEO forums. With this particular chapter, however, I can never seem to get through the lecture. It cuts off after about two minutes. So please review this particular link so that we can view the entire program.

Scott, I'm on the road for a seminar and some meetings, but I'll get someone to check on this Monday.

Works perfect now. Another informative video. It's one of the reason I purchased your updated Search Marketing Kit.

Hey Dan! Thanks for such informative videos, and SEOFS; changed the way I looked at SEO and web design.

After watching Week 3's tutorial I was wondering: you mentioned a ratio of 60% of incoming links to homepage, and 40% incoming links to deeper pages. Is this 'gospel' as such, i.e. if I were to make 90% of links to my homepage, and only 10% to inner pages, are the SE's likely to frown upon my site; reducing link weight, or imposing other such restrictions?

My original plan was to submit to 25 directories a day using a program called Link Directory Submitter, and also write one article daily and point it at one of my inner pages. Sound like a masterplan or a failure?

Thanks and kind regards,

David.

David,

Any percentages are rules of thumb. The main reason for getting deeper links is to get more of your site indexed. One of the easiest ways to the top is to have more pages than the competition, and beat them down with your own internal links.

That sounds like the beginnings of a plan. If you were working on my site, I'd want to hear more than that in terms of a master plan. Do you have some kind of other marketing plan that is more or less independent of linking for SEO?

Dan, I love how you think… –

"more pages than the competition, and beat them down with your own internal links".

It really works! And there are ways to benefit from internal pages even if product on those pages go out of stock or become discontinued.

Jeff

Hey Dan,
I recently started a blog with no static front page (the latest post is at the top of the home page), and my friends are bookmarking the post URLS (example: domain.com/date/post title) instead of the main domain (domain.com). David's comment above about 60/40 link allocation made me wonder if I need to start getting links for the home page only. What do you think?

Heh, Jeff I was thinking the same thing. It's weird how internal links aren't traditionally 'taught' or thought of in that way, SEOFS teaches you a completely new perspective. Looking back now, it makes so much sense.

@Dan, I'm quite unsure. I know I'd love to add a forum at some point. Getting feedback from users is pretty much my number one goal; besides making the money I need for University. The two just happen to go hand in hand

Another thing I'd like to do On-Site is add some entirely unique functionality, maybe a compare function (as of yet I've not seen one in my current niche), or something else that'd be helpful for my users and at the same time get people talking about my site.

Other things I can think of require more capital than I currently have, but will certainly be thought about more seriously in the future

Thanks for asking that, got me thinking. Do you have any suggestions or comments you could offer?

(Sorry this was a long 'un :P)

David.

You don't need a budget to write a marketing plan, David. If you can just pick one good cheap idea a month and implement it, you're moving ahead.

You're on the right track - create stuff that's worth talking about, and then it only takes a little kick to get people talking. And linking.

It can be tough to build an audience for a forum - empty forums tend to stay empty, nearly all of the successful forums I know about were launched off of something else.

@Diane, a blog tends to attract deep links on its own, because people link to the posts. If you promote the blog (home page) the deep links will come.