Neil from QuickSprout is one of our favorite go to guys. Why? Well because he simply provides good, informative and actionable marketing advice. In one of his most recent articles, Neil goes through 7 simple ways to help you understand why your rankings have dropped and how, if this happens, to quickly fix it. Neil starts by saying…
One of the most common questions I get on a daily basis is this:
My rankings are dropping, what should I do?
Now, I’m not a big believer in tracking rankings because search has moved towards a long tail game. And as long as your search traffic keeps going up quarter after quarter, you are fine.
But if you insist on tracking rankings, and you want to ensure that you maintain your positioning, there are 7 things you can do when you start noticing a drop for a specific keyword.
Solution #1: Internal linking
The biggest mistake I see sites making right now is that they tend to forget to use internal linking, in which you link one of your web pages to another. And if you happen to use internal linking, you are probably using rich anchor text, which isn’t a good thing.
In the introduction above, I linked the phrase “search has moved towards a long tail game” to a Quick Sprout blog on long tail SEO. This is an example of internal linking.
Doing this will help that article rank for long tail SEO-related keywords. The key to leveraging internal linking is to avoid using rich anchor text. For this reason, I wouldn’t link that long tail SEO article 10 times with the anchor text “long tail SEO”.
The tactic of using non-rich anchor text is so effective that Mashable ranks on the first page of Google for terms like “YouTube” because of internal linking efforts.
Don’t expect immediate results when you start adding internal links. It typically takes 3 plus months for the links to start kicking in. And you can’t just go into your old web pages and posts and shove tons of internal links. You need to do this slowly, over time, and add internal links to new pages as well.
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