Here's a little tidbit of interesting information. The links throughout a single page of your website are not all created equal.
Every web page has a variety of different links. Top menus, left navigation, right navigations, breadcrumbs, ad links, and links in the copy of the page. As it turns out, Google has the ability to measure the context of the information before and after every link.
That additional context provides additional signals to Google regarding the validity and importance of the link. The more relevant the surrounding words are, the more they'll produce higher link validity.
This is a reasonable example of contextual relevance: "We have a great selection of diamond and 14kt _engagement_rings_ available." The words _engagement_rings_ represents a link to your product catalog page. It is preceded by the word diamond and the phrase 14kt, both of which are contextually relevant.
On the other hand, the following would not be as contextually relevant: "Make sure you remove your _engagement_ring_ before cleaning with bleach." Even though that's a valid statement found on your jewelry care page, it has zero relevance to the product catalog page that _engagement_ring_ is linking to.
Let's switch gears now and talk about the links in your navigations on the top menu and on the left or right sides of your site. These navigations have no real contextual relevance because they are nothing more than a list of links that look nice side by side or lined up.
Without the contextual relevance, Google is not using those links as a strong signal in their rank scoring.
Sometimes you will find websites with 4 or 5 word descriptive links on the side navigations. All 4 or 5 words are linked, so that doesn't count toward contextual weighting, but it does provide signals for long tail keyword discovery, which we'll cover tomorrow.
Footer links also have minimal impact as a ranking signal because they are nothing more than another list of links without contextual relevance.
In conclusion: A long navigation on the left and a link menu across the top is not as important as the links in the copy of the body of your page.
We will continue our basic SEO Nuggets tomorrow. Until then Google TFYQA and have a great day.
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
BEHIND THE SCENES jWAG is Free!
There's a lot of good SEO training stuff out there, but we're the only website who use jewelry terms in our examples...
jWAG is the research and training department of JewelerWebsites.com, and we provide our online training for free. No scam, no gimmick, everything you read on jWAG
is the same SEO and online marketing techniques that we provide our paying customers.
Our Daily Golden Nugget email subscribers are occasionally offered free services so we can evaluate new SEO techniques and emerging web technologies.
A typical SEO firm will request you fill out a "quote form" before they tell you exactly what they do for you or their price. We know that
many of you guys--our readers from the jewelry industry--are cautious about your technology investments and media buying. This is why we've created jWAG, to
help you learn a little and understand what it takes to have a successful jewelry website and online marketing.
With a little SEO knowledge you can better evaluate any SEO firm before hiring them.
Will you have time to do this yourself? Maybe not, but feel free to hire your own in-house web person and give them the job of reading and using jWAG.
That will be much less expensive than hiring us or someone else.
We try to write everything on jWAG so you can easily follow without too much geek speak. All our examples are written using jewelry lexicon so you can use them directly
or copy the techniques directly without rethinking. We hope it's a great time saver.
If you do decide to throw up your hands and give up we'd hope
you give us a call, but before you do, make sure to check out your options from your POS company because they might have an easy beginner website. Another beginner
website could come from one of your jewelry vendors.
When you are ready to use the power of jWAG you should just call JewelerWebsites.com or do a Google search
for "jewelry website design" for the other experts in the jewelry website design industry.
Here are some quick links into JewelerWebsites.com:
