2007 has been the biggest year ever for new blogs. At the current rate of growth, over 30 million new blogs will be created this year. Blogs have taken internet marketing to the people, and have made it so almost anyone can get a piece of internet pie.

A Disturbing Internet Marketing Trend

As more and more people start making money blogging, I can see the fundamentals of successful internet marketing being lost. A lot of information that I learned when I started is now very hard to find. Most top bloggers are converted webmasters - they know what it was like to create a site from scratch. The sad truth is that most of them talk about what they’re currently doing, and give little insight into what got them where they are.

Creating sites from scratch and watching them grow gives you an invaluable education. You learn what does and doesn’t work - and you learn how the navigation and link structure of your site has to be created to get traffic from search engines.

When I created my first site back in 2005, I didn’t know what a blog even was so I had to create the site in pure HTML. I had to learn HTML to do it! That site was a great learning experience. I tested out a ton of different ideas and changed the structure of the site almost weekly.

What Did I Learn When I Transitioned Into Blogging?

Three things stood out to me immediately when I made the jump to blogging:

1. Blogs aren’t very search engine friendly without some tweaking.
2. Blogs are much more search engine friendly than regular sites once they’re set up properly.
3. For the most part, blogs have the potential to become much more highly trafficked than traditional sites.

The Link Structure Of Most Blogs Is Terrible

I have seen quite a few blogs that almost have no link structure at all. To find all of the old posts, you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click ‘previous posts’. You then have to scroll down to the bottom of page 2 and click ‘previous posts’, and so on. Theses blogs are missing several key opportunites to create a better link structure including:

• Categories - When you set your blog up with categories, you are increasing the internal linking of your site.
• HTML Sitemap - Without question, every single blog should have an HTML sitemap. A sitemap is a list of all of the pages and posts in your site. You can find my sitemap here. I use the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress to create my sitemap.
• Tag Pages - Creating tag pages gives you another way you can increase the internal linking of your site. My ‘make money online‘ tag page links to my posts that I tagged with ‘make money online’. Since each post I write is tagged with multiple tags, each post gets linked to multiple times from multiple tag pages. I use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to create my tag pages.
• Link Boxes - My colored link boxes allow visitors to find the sections they’re looking for more easily, and also provide yet one more link path to my posts.
• Manual Linking In Posts - Never pass up an opportunity to link to an old post that helps explain a concept in a new post. Those links will add up.

Using these five methods, I have been able to link to almost all of my posts between 10-30 times. This makes each of them more important to search engines. Google is the engine that places the most emphasis on internal link weight, and following these techniques will increase your Google search traffic significantly.

Ask yourself how many times each post in your site is linked to from other pages in your site. If it’s only one or two, you may be sitting on a huge opportunity to increase your search engine traffic.