This is the fifth in a series of posts that will explain what we do and what it all means for your small business SEO.  We’ll publish one new post per day at 9 am EST all this week.

SEO Service Explanation Posts

1. On page optimization
2. Off site link building, directories, listing services, etc.
3. Keyword research assistance with KEI values
4. Custom 404 error page directory
5. Internal link building
6. Competitors Analysis + Attack. (Saturday Feb. 18th)
7. “Popularity Contest.” (Sunday Feb. 19th)
8. Monthly Plans (Monday Feb 20th)

The SEO equation

Search engine optimization is very simple.  Ranking higher on Google is only: On site SEO + Off site SEO.  Internal links are helpful for on-site SEO.

Internal Link Building – what and why?

When you create a link to another page you’ve built an external link.  As we’ve talked about before, you want to accumulate as many external links from other sites as you can without being spammy.

See what I did there?  That’s called an “internal link” – it’s a link to our own content at High on SEO.

SEOMoz has a great article on internal links and why they’re so valuable at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

See what I did there?  That’s an external link to their site.   Now you see the difference. 

Best ways to link to your own content

When doing SEO for small business, this often means referring to similar topics.  A business I’m optimizing for real estate may have posted “last year’s numbers” – which I can link on this year’s report.  You want t create as much value on the page as possible for readers.  If a real estate client wants to know how last year’s figures compared to this, now it’s a simple click.  They don’t have to go search your whole site or worse, leave to find them on a search engine. 

The same goes for SEO for photographers.  You can create what are called “pillar posts.”  Pillar posts are the posts you write that clients (and search engines) come back to time & time again.  These are the posts that you create as “index page” much like for a book.  Ideas for a photographers pillar post may include: 2011 Weddings (link to all your weddings with descriptive links and tags), Favorite Vendors (links, locations), Engagement Sessions, Photo Locations in Denver or anything else that lets you re-use content.

On this SEO blog, we’ve decided to link content when it seems relevant.  The most obvious example of a pillar post for us was our 1 Year of Blogging last week.  We linked to many old posts, refreshing our readers minds about some of the topics we discussed this past year.  End of year / new website posts are great for this type of content organization.  

Our SEO pricing page also creates many internal links.  

How much does internal link building cost?

Internal pages are $25 per page.  While you can do much of this work on your own, maybe you want to save time or use some of our better ideas to create pillar posts and worthwhile site pages.  Many we haven’t talked about here but have previously, like sitemaps.   This cost covers our time in coming up with an idea, writing the post, organizing your content with links and if you’re really lucky, we’ll show you how to easily build internal links with WordPress.

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Tomorrow we’ll discuss my favorite topic for this series – Competitor’s Analysis and Attack.  Imagine if you had a way to take the best of what all your competitors were doing right for SEO, apply it to your own site and then go beyond what they’re doing.  Yep, see you tomorrow.