Each one of us is on a quest to achieve to maximum amount of traffic we can. Search engine optimization is a critical aspect of internet marketing because it allows us to get residual, free traffic.

Here’s A Not-So-Often-Used SEO Technique

In-site link popularity is a very important aspect of SEO, in fact it made the top ten list of important ranking factors at Seomoz.org at #5. The idea is that you can increase the rankings of a page by increasing the amount of pages that link to it from within your site. The fact of the matter is that it is an oft-discarded factor that most of us can improve upon significantly.

A Practical Example Of In-Site Link Popularity

A friend of mine was asking me recently about a ranking that was lost. He apparently had a very good ranking for a keyword, and lost it nearly overnight. The page that was ranked wasn’t his homepage, and since his site is a blog I suggested that the page was ranking well for the keyword while the page was being linked to from the homepage. This wasn’t the case, and I found myself a little stumped.

After thinking this through for some time, the answer came to me. I can’t remember if I told him yet, so he might get his answer while reading this entry.

His ‘Recent Posts’ Section Was Giving The Page A Sitewide Link

I now believe that the page was ranked well because he was inadvertently linking to the page with all of the pages in his site. When you publish recent posts on a blog, a section appears on each page, and links to the most recent 10 or so posts. While that page was in the recent posts section, it had outstanding ‘in-site link popularity’ because it was being linked to from every page in his site.

In my opinion, he could recover his ranking by creating a link in his sidebar that linked to that page from all of his pages. He would, of course want to use his keyword as the anchor text for the link.

This being the case, you’re going to want to ask yourself which of your pages have the best chance of getting ranked well. You could use site-wide links for those pages. However, you don’t want to have too many pages like that - I would limit it to about 15.

Creating Clusters To Increase In-Site Link Popularity Of Pages

One method I’ve used on some of my traditional sites is creating clusters of pages that are related. To create an example of what I mean, let’s assume that you have a site about cell phones. You probably have more than one page about each phone. Let’s say you have 20 pages about the Motorola Krzr K1m. You can turn them into a cluster by linking them all together. This increases the in-site link popularity of each of the pages, and also increases their relevance for keywords related to the Motorola Krzr K1m.

With this lesson, it doesn’t matter at all if you have a traditional site or a blog. Either way the principles apply and you can really increase your rankings by taking these concepts into consideration.