Everyone knows that your sites viability is as important as anything else.
You can have a beautiful site or one with expert information but if no one knows where it is then your visitors will be few and far between.
Links back to your site from sites that rank above you are your best bet for increasing your sites placement but there is a common mistake that many businesses make and that is under utilizing their own network of internet offerings.
Lets look at the difference of leverage and flashbang.
Have you ever seen a site come out of nowhere? All of a sudden everyone on the internet knows about some site showing a video of singing chipmunks.
The content has more to do with the popularity of the site then any planned or continued program of optimization. The fact is you can not plan these things.
On the other hand have you ever seen a group of sites that consistently place not at the top of ranking indexes but consistently in the range of view with very little fluctuation over time. This type of site or network of sites have a strategy.
What strategies work?
Well everyone will tell you that you need a lot of content if you want a lot of traffic. Keywords and relevant content play a big part in attracting and keeping your visitors.
Links in from outside sites are also very important. If you have a number of quality links into your site from sites that rank with or above your site then your statistics will improve.
But both of these strategies are well known and people naturally seek to achieve them. Developers are always adding content to their sites and will never turn away an incoming link.
So, how can you make the most of your content while continuing to implement standard SEO tactics.
Utilizing your own Assets
Whether you have a single site or a group of sites that you manage it is important to cross link, advertise and share content if you can.
Each page of your site should have relative links to alternative content within your domain and if possible links to content on your other sites.
Methods to achieve this can be found in CMS plugins, external services or simply by manually implementing linkage. When possible you should implement more then one method.
Hardcode links into your footers. This will instantly give you hundreds of cross site links to your other sites. Think of it this way 5 sites with 5 links in their footer each with 1000 pages of content is 5,000 cross links.
Implement a sidebar Ad rotation block featuring only your sites. Having uninterested users click one of your other sites ads or links keeps them within your network. This has to be weighed against their leaving your site for another google search or making you money by clicking one of your paying ads.
Place live / constantly updating Top5, Most current or other blocks in your content or sidebar when content on your other site is relevant to your current site browsers.
Final Note
The basic idea of leveraging assets is nothing new. Companies have been doing this for years and even though you might not be a multinational conglomerate, the process is one of the least costly and most effective ways to instantly build your total brand.
