Increasing website traffic might seem like it’s rocket science or something that may take years to accomplish. The so called “Gurus” would have you believe so, but here’s the honest truth- Take baby steps, just one thing at a time like everything else in life. In todays post I’m going to discuss how to increase website traffic by creating a Link Hierarchy for your website.  Taking time to create a proper internal linking strategy between pages/categories on your website helps search engines crawl, index and properly rank your website. Proper internal linking also helps direct end users from your home page to different categories and pages that might be buried in your website. This is in your interest because it ultimately increases the total number of page views per visit (something you should be tracking in Google analytics) which leads to users staying on your site longer.

Since your homepage typically achieves the highest PR (Page Rank), you should link your home page to major categories of your website. It’s important that you avoid linking directly from  your homepage to individual articles, but rather link to the category first. Then simply link from the category to the article it pertains to. This creates a logical link hierarchy that will promote more pages in your website to be indexed and also guides end users to other relevant pages that they may be interested in.

Search engines place a tremendous amount of weight on the linking structure of a website. They monitor incoming and outgoing links and use the data to tell the relevance of one page to another. Make sure the categories/pages you’re linking are directly relevant and the keyword you’re using as the anchor text correctly describes the page or topic. If you want to link two pages together that do not directly correlate be sure to use the no follow attribute. An example is below:

• <a href=”http://nima.co/” rel=”nofollow”>Domain Investing</a> (simply replace “nima.co” and “domain investing” with your own url and keyword term)

Domain investing isn’t just about the acquisition, it’s primarily about cultivating a business first and then finding the right domain name to jump start your branding efforts. This is a baby step that will help you maximize your existing traffic and increase website traffic overall.  In later articles I’ll touch on the importance of a solid back link campaign also known as off site SEO.

Quote: “Never let your ads write checks that your website can’t cash.” -Avinash Kaushik