Anchor Text - How many and what do with our old posts

[Romana]

Hello,

I have a two larger established websites that achieve over 1000 unique views a day.  The sites have done well but we have always had problem with SEO.  The vast majority of traffic is from our social media accounts -- we rank low on the SERP - below competitive pages that have less updates and much lower traffic.

When I set the sites up I misunderstood a number of key issues but with over 4500 posts and 600 pages it has takes a huge amount of time to change things.

I have now realised another issue -- we did not use Anchor Text to link to provide internal links to our keywords on our site.   We are now adding them.

My question is two fold:

1. How many internal links should we add?  From what I read on Moz - 5 to 6 internal links should be the right number.  Comments?

2)  We have numerous posts ie over 4000 that go back over 4 years. Should I change them all at once or will this flag a spam issue with Google?  Believe me after years of problems I do not want another set back.

Suggestions and advice would be welcome.

Thanks

[UmarKhan]

Hey Susan,

It's never too late if you're open to accept your mistakes.

Coming to your questions:

1. There is no fixed number for internal links.. It depends on the content length, flow and format. For an average, if the post is 700 words long with 5  sub-headings, I will add 3 links. But again, it depends.

2. You don't need to change all of them. Go to your analytics, filter out your most traffic acquiring pages and fix them first. Then, gradually fix the rest.

Susan, your traffic is indeed very good but I'd see the bounce rate as well. If social media is really driving a potential and good traffic, I believe if you start focussing on SEO, you will get the good rankings soon.

Hope this helps!

Umar

[Romana]

Umar,

Thanks for the reponse. All the traffic we have is good traffic. People read our site but they do skip away.  Any site with Social Media as it main feed tends to have people jump back away -- the bounce rate is between 70% and 80% depending .  And over 55% of our traffic is from phones and tablets.

We don't and have never done blacklist links.  In fact that is our biggest issue -- lack of links. I do not have the personality to ask people to link to us. I must admit I find it distasteful to request it.  We created problems with a move from Joomla to Wordpress, we broke old links everywhere and had over 15000 crawl issues.  As for moving SEO SERP -- I will believe it when I see it.  This has a been a two year slog and I have barely seen any improvement on the main key word that we need to rank on.

Back to the questionWhat I was thinking of doing was a Database change on a few key words.  i.e. this would link the key word across the full site.  Sound like you are suggesting not do do the global change which is really what my question was.

[UmarKhan]

Susan,

Yes, you got me right. I will not suggest you to do this database global change.

As far as your SEO approach is concerned, you don't beg people to link you. Although, this is what you want but you need to play your cards smartly. If your aim is to build relationship instead of links, all your campaigns will be transformed accordingly and the links will automatically comes.

TL;DR: Focus on SEO

[ClaytonJ]

Susan

Can you publish the url? I love a site with traffic though not appreciated by google. They are my favorites. If not then it is old fashioned hard work, but very rewarding - which you have to do at some stage regardless.  I would suggest you work through the below site audit.  It is a great Moz article.

https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

Do you publish all your articles on google+ another easy win, if not doing already. On backlinks, are many of your blog posts being re-published?  With that many blog posts it is hard to understand why you are not earning many backlinks.

Hope that assists.

[Romana]

This post is deleted!

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Susan!

I'm sorry that Google's been tough for you to crack, but glad to hear that social media has paid off for you! To be honest, this may be the best bang for your buck. David Tennant is kind of a big deal online, which means you have a lot of competition.

That's not to say we can't help you here, though. You've covered a lot in this conversation so far that I think I can help with, but let me start with the original anchor text question.

It's not a blanket rule that you can't rank unless you use keyword rich anchor text. Keyword rich anchor text helps pass Page Authority across the site and increase the destination page's relevance to the keyword. This means that you don't need to add anchor text to any links that are pointing to timely posts that are no longer popular/relevant. I'd spend some time identifying the pages on your site that you want to rank well, and only add anchor text links to those pages, not to every post on your site.

I mentioned that links pass Page Authority: the amount that they pass has to do with their own PA. Pages that have inbound links will have the most Page Authority to share. Start by updating the links and anchor text from pages with inbound links to best transfer Page Authority. If the pages that you want to rank aren't already in the top or side navigation, add them.

Other than that, you don't need to change links on historical posts. Google can see the date, and if a post has 0 inbound links and a date 2014+, my guess is Google is barely paying attention to it. Rather than worrying about doing a big audit, you may want to focus on changing your practices moving forward.

You brought up a lot of other issues in your posts, so I have a few other comments:

• You mentioned that you want to rank for "David Tennant" - that's going to be tough. Think about what makes you unique and go for those keywords.
• It looks like a lot of content on your site is timely, and you mentioned that you get some information early. In that case, I'd argue that you should get Google News status. I've never personally set that up for a client, but there are a lot of people on Moz who do.
• You said that you don't want to ask for links, which is why you've had a hard time increasing your DA. Rather than asking for links, focus on what you can do to make other site owners' lives easier: offer to guest post, syndicate content, create some partnerships. Think of link building as PR that Google can track.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

[Romana]

Kristine,

Thank you for your post.  I do appreciate the time

• You mentioned that you want to rank for xxxx  - that's going to be tough. Think about what makes you unique and go for those keywords.

ANS:  For the alternative key words and productions - films etc.  We do well in Google.  Our own site brand xxxx or xxxx we rank either 1 or 2.  And a number of the productions we do extremely well until the big news organisation start posting.   We have been involving this strategy.   But the search volume just isn't there for the alternative keywords.  I'm just dismayed when I see sites that haven't updated in months ahead of our site by 10 or 15 postes

• It looks like a lot of content on your site is timely, and you mentioned that you get some information early. In that case, I'd argue that you should get Google News status. I've never personally set that up for a client, but there are a lot of people on Moz who do.

ANSWER: We did try this a while back -- But were originally rejected.  I assumed this was due to the crawl erros -- We will be trying again soon.  We have eliminated our 404 on Moz and are just waiting for them to expire on Google.

• You said that you don't want to ask for links, which is why you've had a hard time increasing your DA. Rather than asking for links, focus on what you can do to make other site owners' lives easier: offer to guest post, syndicate content, create some partnerships. Think of link building as PR that Google can track.

ANSWER: we do all these things already.  I actually think the problems is the lack of understanding from the others we have relationships with.  OVERALL COMMENTS:

I have made some mistakes in the past but the site is looking cleaner and cleaner I resolved them.   The lack of internal linked anchor keywords was a big one.  We are getting there.   However as you said it is

It is just easier for us to get to a premiere red carpet event then it is to rank on Google.

I do appreciate everyone's comments.  Thank you all for the time. We will continue to slog onwards]

Susan