Gradiva Couzin, Author at Gravity Search Marketing

Ask the Experts: Should I Link Out to Other…

February 23, 2010
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: Hi! I’m very confused about outbound links. I was told by a SEO firm that outbound links were A Bad Thing as they canceled out your inbound links. But it seems this is not the case.

A: Outbound links are not A Bad Thing and they don’t cancel out your inbound links. In fact, a “natural” linking profile for a quality website would normally include outbound links, as it is natural for most quality sites to provide links to other resources.

Outbound links are only bad if they are done as a part of a link exchange or if you’re being paid for providing links that are not tagged with “nofollow.” In that case, your site could be penalized by search engines. I would certainly get rid of any outbound links that you may have created as a part of a link exchange scheme of any sort.

You should also check your outbound links periodically to make sure that they aren’t pointing to “bad neighborhoods.” Sometimes good sites go under, and the domains are taken over by squatters, spammers, malware, porn, etc. Your site’s status on search engines could be damaged if you link to these – not to mention your credibility with your human audience!

Lastly, it’s reasonable to link to your own website pages as a priority, rather than other sites. For example, if you have a page on your site that features “tea cozies” it certainly makes more sense from an SEO perspective for your home page text to link to your own “tea cozies” page rather than pointing to some other site’s “tea cozies” page.

My advice is to link out to sites if you think they will benefit your human visitors. This might include sites that offer related, but not necessarily competing services or products. For example, if you market tea cozies, you might link out to your favorite brands of tea. Outbound links are also important as part of an overall strategy of social marketing and participatory blogging. Outbound links can also be linkbait – for example, let’s say you link to a travel blog while criticizing it for missing the mark on the most charming high tea destinations. People in your target audience might be drawn into a conversation.

Naturally, if providing links to other resources feels forced or unnatural on your website, or if you don’t think it will benefit your human visitors, then you shouldn’t do it.

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Human Readable, Semantic URLs Will Help Your SEO

February 10, 2010
by Gradiva Couzin

If you’re building a new site or redesigning one, we think you should switch to meaningful, human readable (aka “semantic”) URLs. But don’t do it just because we think you should. Do it because the research backs us up.

If you’re launching a new website, or getting started on a redesign that will require changes to your page URLs, you may be considering the benefits of human-readable, semantic URLs. We are proponents of these URLs, which we think make good common sense. But if you need more than common sense to justify an increased level of effort for implementing human-readable URLs, here’s some hard data to back it up:

Semantic URLs Help Search Engine Ranks

The consensus in the SEO industry is that keywords in page URLs are a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. In our experience, sitewide semantic URLs gives a modest, across-the-boards ranking lift. Don’t expect to jump from third page to #1; but a lift from #11 to #6 is feasible.
Page URLs are sometimes used as the linking text from other websites; this translates into more keywords in the linking text pointing to your site, which plays a role in the ranking algorithm
Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed that it is helpful to have keywords in the URL – as long as it’s done in a sensible way. (See http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-the-url-16976)

Semantic URLs Increase Clickthrough Rates

Not only can human-readable, meaningful, keyword-rich URLs improve search rankings, they may increase your clickthrough rates. Here are salient research highlights:

In one eye-tracking study, business professionals viewing a search engine listing with a long URL ended up clicking on the URL immediately after it 2.5 times as often as those viewing a short URL. (1)
In another eye-tracking study, when searchers scan through search engine listings, 13-33% of time is spent looking at URLs. (2)
In yet another eye-tracking study, searchers spend 30% of their time reading the listing title, 43% of the time reading the listing description, and 21% of their time reading the URL. (3)
There was “overwhelming endorsement” when participants where asked the question: “When I’m searching the Web, I often look at the URL of each search result to help me decide if the page will be useful.” (on a 7-point scale, 6.4 was the average). (2)

There are, of course, a few caveats on the effect of semantic URLs on clickthrough rates:

The effect is greater for navigational searches, and lower for informational searches. Navigational searches are people who already know exactly what they are looking for (for example, they might type “flickr.com” into the Google search box), and they are probably most interested in your domain name, not so much the individual filenames.
The effect may be diminished if Google is showing breadcrumbs, rather than a URL, in your site snippets.

We’re pleased that common sense and scientific research are in alignment on semantic URLs. We typically would not recommend changing page URLs for the sole purpose of SEO improvements, but if you’re making changes to your website anyway, we hope you’ll take advantage of this rare SEO “no brainer.”

FOOTNOTES

(1) Marketing Sherpa (2008). Search Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2008 (www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Search08Excerpt.pdf)

(2) Cutrell, E., & Guan, Z. (2007). Eye tracking in MSN Search: Investigating snippet length, target position and task types (research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70395)

(3) Granka, L., Joachims, T., & Gay, G. (2004). Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 478-479). New York: ACM Press. (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/granka_etal_04a.pdf)