How to Improve your SEO with User-Friendly Interlinking

How Internal Links Improve Your Site’s SEO

Web developers, marketers, and business owners understand the importance of search engine optimization – SEO – for ranking a website high on search engine results pages. There are many ways to improve SEO, from publishing helpful and relevant web content, to regularly updating that content, to using the best keywords and key phrases, and more. Proper internal linking is another.

What Is Internal Linking?

Internal linking, or interlinking, occurs when one page of a website (domain) is linked to a different page on the same website. Internal links are helpful for several reasons. Externally, they help users navigate a website, which provides for a positive user experience (UX). Internally, they define the website’s hierarchy and site architecture and also set each page’s ranking authority on the site. Interlinking also provides a number of more technical functions – all related to website organization and how well the site communicates with search engines. For now, we focus on easy ways any web manager can enhance their SEO through interlinking.

Optimum internal linking provides a great user experience, as it keeps the reader engaged on your website – moving around and always looking for more information. Interlinking should flow logically and naturally to align with what the reader will find helpful and useful. As a rule, interlinking has a pyramid hierarchy, with the homepage at the top, which allows its ranking power to pass to the entire site. Think of the hierarchy as categories and subcategories, all organized and linked for relevance and a positive user experience.

In addition to enhancing your UX, web managers and marketing experts strategically link their site content for the main purpose of improving SEO, and ultimately, search engine ranking. Internal links have the capacity to increase page authority, which means the page will be indexed more quickly by search engines and rank higher in search results. As an example, a home page with earned authority that contains links to a new blog posting (one with practically no authority) transfers its authority to the page with the blog post.

Let’s look at some of the ways interlinking can help improve your SEO.

Ways to Improve SEO with Interlinks

Place links in web content. These links, usually formatted in bold so they are clearly visible, indicate to the user that they can obtain additional information by clicking on the link. The link should work properly and take the reader to the proper – relevant – page.
The most important and relevant links should appear on your website’s home page, in the site navigation bar, and in drop-down lists.
When deciding how many links to use, place as many as a user would find helpful within the content. There is no hard and fast rule, but use what you consider reasonable in light of the length of your web content or post.
Link lower authority pages only to other relevant posts on the website; linking the content within lower authority pages to your contact page, for example, does not pass any value that improves SEO. Similarly, links in sidebars should also go to pages with relevant content.
Ensure anchor text – highlighted text within a hyperlink that a user clicks on to open a page – is relevant and an accurate indicator of the page it is being linked to.
Make sure call-to-action (CTA) buttons are clearly visible and within a user’s easy reach. Each page of your site should have a CTA that prompts them to click for more information.
Perform a link audit. A link audit achieves two purposes: 1) It tells you if existing links in your web content are all working properly and 2) it lets you know if you have enough (or too many) links in a given content area.

Interlinking for SEO is Not Complicated

Though interlinking to improve SEO may sound complicated, it is not. Follow the guidance on interlinking best practices presented here, and you’ll soon see improvements in your site’s SEO.

If you want to learn more about how interlinking can help your SEO or know how your own website stacks up in terms of user-friendly internal linking, Perfexion, Inc. can help. We are a Philadelphia-based web design and development company located in Plymouth Meeting just outside King of Prussia. We specialize in optimizing our clients’ web content and ensuring their sites perform to the best of their ability.

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Reasons Why Your Website Has a High Bounce Rate

9 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Bounce Rate

Every business owner should know the answer to the following two questions: What is the bounce rate of my website? What is the conversion rate? If the bounce rate is high, relatively speaking, and the conversion rate is low, it’s time to revisit the content on your website and the marketing strategy you follow to drive people to your site and keep them there.

First, let’s review the meanings of the terms bounce rate and conversion rate. The bounce rate is the frequency with which visitors to your website – the home page or a landing page – bounce away without any type of interaction on your page and return to the site that originally referred them. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who complete an action once they are on your website. That action could be buying something, downloading a coupon, completing a contact form to request more information – whatever you want them to do once they land on your website.

A high bounce rate means visitors to your site leave before you are able to convert them. The last thing a business owner wants is for a visitor to their website to leave without first taking time to look around. If you don’t know what the bounce rates are for your web pages, visit your site’s Google Analytics (under Audience Overview) to find out.

Here we look at 9 reasons why your website bounce rate might be high, and how to fix the problem.

High Bounce Rates, Improve High Bounce Rates, Technical SEO — Reasons for High Bounce Rates

If you want to improve your website bounce rate, first make sure you understand what the current bounce rate is, then systematically address each problem and measure improvement as you go. Without a doubt, by improving the bounce rate, you also improve your conversion rate and the ability of your site to rank well in searches. At Perfexion, Inc. we specialize in making sure clients’ websites are technically sound and perform to the best of their ability. We are a Philadelphia-based web design and development company located in Plymouth Meeting just outside King of Prussia.

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Home Page Must Haves

Website Home Page Must-Haves

The home page of a website has mere seconds to impress and engage those who visit it. People who visit a website for the first time are usually looking for certain information upfront – information that indicates they are in the right place. When users’ initial questions are addressed right away, they’ll be more likely to remain on the website, look around, and respond to a call to action. Think about what you look for or expect to find on the home page of a website you visit for the first time. Then think about what you do if you are unable to quickly or easily find the information you’re looking for. Chances are, you click away and search elsewhere.

The content on your website home page should inform, build reader confidence in your business, and showcase you as credible and trustworthy. Every business is different, so content will vary from one website to another. But the following nine elements are must-haves for every home page.

Spell out what you do – Inform visitors in simple, straightforward terms exactly what your business does. If the purpose of your business is not immediately clear, people will leave your website and go to one that clearly spells out what they do.
Explain how visitors benefit from using your products or services – Beyond saying what you do, make clear the main benefit (or benefits) your offering provides or the problem it solves.
Client testimonials – Strategically place several customer reviews on the home page, as these highlight your experience and build trust. Testimonials that mention the service you provided and the clients’ satisfaction are all you need.
Awards, recognitions, associations, certifications – These showcase your professionalism and expertise, and give you credibility in your industry.
Overview of service offerings – Mentioning your products and services on your home page and linking them to more detailed information serves you three ways. You: 1) better inform visitors about what you do or sell, 2) make it easier for them to click the link for more detailed information, and 3) help your home page rank higher in search engine results.
Contact information – Don’t hide or bury key information such as your phone number, email address, and mailing address. By providing this information, you let customers know your business is legitimate and that they can easily communicate with you. The footer of the page is where most companies place their contact information.
Social media links – If you also market your business on social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, or Twitter, you probably want to get the word out as much and as often as possible. Your homepage should include clearly identifiable icons for each to make it easy for users to Like, Follow, Share, and Retweet!
Images and graphics – Quality images that are unique to your business let visitors know what to expect and go far in building credibility. Use stock images sparingly, and make sure all images are high resolution and sized properly.
Call to action – Decide what you want visitors to your website to do once they’re there. Do you want them to subscribe to your email list? Clip a coupon for the offer of the week? Complete a form for more information? Place a logical and clear call to action for whatever makes the most sense for your business.

A home page should provide upfront information about your business that your target customers most want and need to know. Incorrect or insufficient information either forces the user to click around to find what they want, or worse, causes them to leave the website without looking any further. Even if other pages on your website contain exactly what they are looking for, if the home page is unclear, visitors are more likely than not to click away. And when visitors click away after visiting just one page, the bounce rate for your website goes up.

Look at the home page of your website with a critical eye. Does it contain the information a new visitor needs to understand who you are, what you do, and the value you bring? If not, take time to update the home page to add these critical elements, or hire a professional web design and development company with the digital marketing expertise to make sure the home page for your business makes the best first impression it possibly can.

Philadelphia web design company Perfexion, Inc. specializes in web design and development, including search engine and digital marketing. They are experts at building websites that meet users’ needs and add value to the business they represent. Perfexion thrives on helping clients be as successful as possible. They collaborate closely with you to understand your business and put that information to work in every website they build.

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Technical SEO

Don’t Let Your SEO Efforts Go to Waste

Any web developer worth his or her salt is an expert at both off-page and on-page SEO. Simply put, good on-page SEO means a website contains content that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases so that the site’s search rankings and relevance to users are improved. Good off-page SEO means a site gains authority and relevance by building and effectively managing backlinks from other relevant, authoritative sources.

All that attention and focus on having just the right on- and off-page SEO will go to waste if the technical aspects of SEO are ignored or improperly handled. The following checklist contains recommendations for achieving the best results in terms of your site’s user experience, search engine crawling, indexing, and of course, ranking.

Set up and manage your website’s sitemap: A sitemap informs search engines about how your website is structured. Make sure your sitemap is clean/error-free, updated when content is posted or removed, concise so crawls can be more effective, and registered in Google Search Console.
Check the pages on your website that are indexed by the various search engines, including those that have been restricted from indexing, to make sure the number of pages indexed is about the same as the number of pages on your website.
Use an SEO crawler, not just robots.txt, to check that every critical resource on your website is crawlable and not blocked from indexing. An SEO crawler performs a more comprehensive check that includes CSS and JavaScript files, orphan pages (those that are on your site but are not internally linked), and more that might be restricted but should not be.
Enhance the frequency with which search engines crawl the pages of your website during a specific period of time – your crawl budget. Google statistics provide the average number of times the pages of your site are crawled daily, and from that you can calculate your monthly crawl budget. Use that intelligence to maximize the crawls that are being performed. How? By removing duplicate content, restricting indexing on pages that don’t support SEO, making crawling more efficient by adding URL parameters, and fixing broken links and redirects.
Audit your site’s internal links to make sure the structure of your site is both logical and shallow. For example, check to ensure your site’s important pages are reachable within three clicks of the homepage (the depth of your pages). When fixing broken links, look for those that could be hidden in link tags, sitemaps, and HTTP headers. Address linking on orphan pages to make it easier for visitors and search engines to find them.
Audit your website for HTTPS issues that could affect your site’s ranking. Check the different types of content on pages you believe are secure; if you have mixed content, it could be coming from an HTTP connection that is not secure which, in effect, makes your page less secure and can even stop a browser from loading it altogether. Make sure all the links, redirects, and canonical URLs point directly to HTTPS pages to reduce/eliminate the number of unnecessary redirects, which make a website appear slow and eat away at your crawl budget. If your site is still HTTP, consider migrating to HTTPS, given that Google uses HTTPS as one of its ranking signals.
Make sure your site’s pages load in two seconds or less. Google factors speed when ranking a site, and a page that loads quickly and efficiently provides an optimum user experience as well as improves your bounce and conversion rates because users will be less inclined to click away from a page that has loaded quickly.
Prioritize the mobile friendliness of your website and perform an in-depth audit of the site. With search queries from mobile devices on a steady rise, Google is planning to change how it indexes website pages. They will soon begin indexing mobile versions of websites first, rather than their desktop versions. Google provides a mobile-friendly test that lets you check a variety of criteria such as text size, plugins, how pages are viewed, and more. The key is to perform the test on every landing page of your site, since Google determines mobile friendliness on a page by page basis.
Just as you need to restart your computer for software updates to take effect, you should have search engines re-crawl your website to make sure fixes and changes you make to your site go immediately into effect. You can submit requests to Google and Bing to re-crawl and re-index on a URL basis or on your entire website.

By systematically addressing the technical areas of your website that impact SEO, you both improve the ability of your site to rank well in searches and enhance the user experience across the entire site. The end results are well worth the effort. At Perfexion, Inc. we specialize in making sure clients’ websites are technically sound and perform to the best of their ability.

Note: Thanks to Link-Assistant.com (https://www.link-assistant.com/news/technical-seo-audit.html) for the valuable tips presented here.

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Website Issues and Website Ranking Concerns

Website Issues – Technical SEO

Top 5 Website Issues

You’ve spent hours building and setting up your website. It’s finally done. You set up analytics to track how well your website performs. At the end of that arduous journey, you even give yourself a pat on the back as congratulations for your accomplishment. Unfortunately, you’re the only one passing out congratulations. Why? Because the average user finds the aesthetic presentation of your website unattractive and the organization and information lacking. Along the way, you failed to treat the design and development of your website the way you would build and design a bricks-and-mortar store.

A user’s experience on a website should be every bit as good as a customer’s physical in-store experience. Customers and potential customers who walk into a store off the street should feel welcome and be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. If the products in your store are set up willy nilly on the shelves, sales people shout out to you from opposite sides of the building, and dust bunnies float around your ankles, chances are good you are going to turn around and walk right out. The same holds true for your website. One mistake on your site is all it takes to destroy credibility in your business and can keep a user away for life.

Most people have heard the phrase “Build it, and they will come,” and understand the meaning it espouses. But, the phrase “Build it well, and they will come” more correctly promotes the analogous idea that a website must be done well for people to not only come, but to stay and conduct business – shop, buy, call, contact – whatever you want them to do.

Most people look at a variety of websites on any given day, whether on their phones, their laptops, or their tablets. Most of these same people don’t give the websites they view a second thought because these sites look nice, feel comfortable, and function properly. The user achieves whatever it is they went to the site for in the first place. In a word, their user experience is optimum. And when user experience is good, the website’s bounce rate – the rate at which users leave a site after visiting just a single page – is low.

What do good websites have (or do) that bad ones don’t? Because your website is your virtual store, ease and convenience of use are not all that matter. Consider the distinct aspects of your website’s design and development, and how they might affect a user’s decision to stay or leave. By addressing these appropriately, you ensure visitors have the best possible experience and will want to keep coming back for more.

Top Website Issues

Top Website Technical Issues, Technical SEO

The design and function of your website is just as important as the information your site provides and the products and services you sell there. Professional web designers and developers are trained to build websites that appeal visually, function appropriately, attract users, and keep bounce rates down. Don’t jeopardize the profitability of your business by building your own website and missing the mark on any of these key details.

Philadelphia web design company Perfexion, Inc. specializes in web design and development, including monitoring and managing the performance of clients’ websites. They are experts at building brands and all types of online marketing. Because they thrive on helping clients be as successful as possible, they collaborate with you to understand your business and build a website that targets your ideal customer and increases relevant traffic.

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SEO in Non Techy Terms

What is SEO? SEO Basics

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – is a tool used by web developers and digital marketers. Its purpose is to enhance the visibility of a website or web page in search engine results so that, when a user performs a search using their preferred search engine – Google, Yahoo, or Bing – the website or information the user searched for appears at or near the top of the list on the search engine results page, or SERP.

When a user performs a search, they enter a word or series of words in their search engine’s search box and wait for the search engine to provide its results. The words a user types are called keywords, and users generally know the keywords they type should be specific, rather than general, to get the best results from their search. For example, if a user enters the word “sweater,” they’ll receive hundreds of billions of results. But, if they enter “fuchsia cardigan sweater under $20 in size 8,” the number of results returned decreases considerably.

This type of search query is called a natural search, and the results returned are called organic or unpaid search results. In a matter of seconds, or split seconds, search engines process through billions of entries in their index and return results that are the most relevant to the search terms used. They analyze the keywords entered as well as the larger context of the query to match these with websites, web pages, etc., that are useful, informational, and relevant. These results are typically listed on the left-hand side of the search engine results page. Websites and webpages with a well-organized, well-managed SEO strategy have increased chances of appearing at or near the top of the list on SERP.

SEO Algorithm & Strategy

Early on, SEO relied on the repeated use of keywords and links in web pages. Copywriters crammed pages with keywords to the point the content was both awkward and poorly written – all in an attempt to outsmart the likes of Google. In time, search engines saw what was happening and updated and changed their search algorithms. In effect, so users would be satisfied with the search results they received and so businesses would improve the content on their websites and basically have to compete to appear high on the SERPs.

If you’re starting to see a connection between users, websites, search engines, and search engine results pages, it’s because one exists. A user performs a query using certain key words and phrases. A website is written and designed in anticipation of how a user – the business’s target audience or customer – searches for the product/service offering or information provided on the website. Search engines look for web content that contains indicators of value in response to the user’s search, such as links, images, and other relevant content on a website. The SERP lists websites/web pages that have the highest SEO relevance and value based on 1) how the user queried and 2) how valuable web content is.

SEO for Beginners, SEO Best Practices, What is SEO

SEO Strategy

The successful marketing of any business online requires a thoughtful SEO strategy. SEO requires business owners and marketers to fully understand their audience – both existing customers and their target market – and work to align web content to react appropriately to what the customer wants and how they ask for it.

Businesses need to closely examine just how their target market searches for products/services online. Today, SEO and the power behind search engines go far beyond filling a web page with keywords and matching a user’s search terms with the keywords on the website. That is because search engines rely on more than keywords when providing results to a query. They look for web content that is appealing. Content must be useful, informative, and interesting. It must respond to whatever type of request a user makes, whether it is to buy a product, solve a problem, learn how to do something, hire a service, watch a video, and more.

While SEO values the content that is visible on-screen, that is, the words, images, etc., everything that goes on behind the scenes – technical SEO – is equally important. Technical SEO is what helps search engines crawl to your website and index it. Web developers, those who handle the technical aspects of SEO, understand the techniques search engines use to access and crawl to websites, and they make sure their clients’ websites are in alignment with those techniques.

SEO Audit & Strategies

Developers are necessary for improving SEO for a variety of reasons, such as conducting SEO audits to locate issues that impede crawling; eliminating duplicate content; fixing errors; and making sure content all links and pages work the way they’re supposed to. They, along with digital marketing experts, follow all trends, practices, and updates relating to search engine optimization. As experts, they understand the trends and how they relate to the digital marketing efforts of their clients.

The web developers at Perfexion, Inc. specialize in SEO and the entire gamut of online marketing channels and strategies. They pride themselves on ensuring clients’ SEO and digital marketing efforts perform at optimum levels and that their digital marketing investment always provides a positive return. We are a Philadelphia based web design and development company located in Plymouth Meeting just outside King of Prussia.

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How Internal Links Improve Your Site’s SEO

What Is Internal Linking?

Ways to Improve SEO with Interlinks

Interlinking for SEO is Not Complicated

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9 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Bounce Rate

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Website Home Page Must-Haves

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Don’t Let Your SEO Efforts Go to Waste

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Website Issues – Technical SEO

Top 5 Website Issues

Top Website Issues

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What is SEO? SEO Basics

SEO Algorithm & Strategy

SEO Strategy

SEO Audit & Strategies

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