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Don’t Forget the End-Goal of Your Link-Building Efforts

Why it’s critical to have one authority page, ideally a Rapid Conversion Landing Page, as the reservoir for all your internal and external link juice.

We often write about the importance of researching, documenting and managing your keyword universe. It’s a process you must pursue and manage with discipline if you want any chance of getting

Why it’s critical to have one authority page, ideally a Rapid Conversion Landing Page, as the reservoir for all your internal and external link juice

We often write about the importance of researching, documenting and managing your keyword universe. It’s a process you must pursue and manage with discipline if you want any chance of getting Google to drive you consistent, targeted website traffic.

However, your keyword universe is only as good as the website architecture that supports it. If your site isn’t built according to and around your keyword phrases, your chances of attracting traffic from the search engines will be limited.

The be-all-end-all of effective website architecture is the Rapid Conversion Landing Page (RCLP). Rapid Conversion Landing Pages contain detailed, search engine optimized descriptions of free, downloadable, long-form content.

The downloadable, long-form content typically comes in the form of a special report, which could be anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words long, complete with graphics and formatted into PDFs.

These PDFs are made available to the reader once they surrender their email address. This is a key strategy in growing your email circulation.

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But how do you make sure your link building efforts are concentrated enough to make it all worthwhile?

If you analyze the Mequoda Architecture Diagram below, you’ll notice that we’ve graphically shown the RCLP at the bottom, because it’s where every other relevant webpage points. This is where all the link juice within your website, for a given keyword phrase, should fall.

So you’ll notice that ideally, almost every landing page template on your site should point to your RCLPs:

  • your homepage should contain permanent links to all your RCLPs, usually found as part of your site navigation
  • your topic pages should contain permanent links to the RCLP most relevant to the topic, usually found in a topic description at the top of the page
  • every time you publish a new free special report and hence have a new RCLP, you should be posting multiple article pages that promote the free report, where each article points to the respective RCLP
  • if you have at least three RCLPs, you should create a free reports marketplace, which is simply a listing of all the free reports you’ve published
  • if you have author pages, be sure to include links, usually below the author bio, to the RCLPs that describe the free special reports written by the author

Never underestimate the power of internal links

A phrase we’d like to rank highly on at Mequoda Daily is “online publishing”. It’s a very popular and competitive phrase and we’d been doing some heavy link–building efforts around the phrase for about 3 months. We were seeing significant improvements in our position in Google, as we had gone from being extremely invisible on page 12 or so, to being a bit less invisible, having made it to page 6.

Then one day, we accidentally removed the link to the Seven Online Publishing Secrets RCLP in our homepage navigation and rather immediately we went from page 6 back down to page 12.

The lesson: Never underestimate the importance of your own internal links in generating high search engine rankings. Always keep the end-goal of your link building efforts in mind, which is to point any and all internal and external links to your RCLP, hyper-linking the name of the free report, which is optimized for a keyword phrase you’re trying to rank highly on.

And remember, the purpose of your link building efforts is to acquire email subscribers, as your email list, if acquired and managed properly, is the lifeblood of your entire online business.

By Don Nicholas

Founder & Executive Publisher

Don Nicholas serves as Executive Publisher for Food Gardening Network and GreenPrints. He is responsible for all creative, technical, and financial aspects of these multiplatform brands. As senior member of the editorial team, he provides structural guidance, sets standards, and coordinates activities with the technology and business teams. Don is an active gardener whose favorite crops include tomatoes, basil, blueberries, and corn. He and his wife Gail live and work in southern Massachusetts surrounded by forests, family farms, cranberry bogs, and nearby beaches. Don is also the Founder of Mequoda Systems, LLC, which operates and supports numerous online communities including I Like Crochet, I Like Knitting, and We Like Sewing.

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