By now, you should have an SEO ready website (read the previous post here) and now we look at the 4th and final stage of SEO work that you can do to help boost your ranking. External SEO work gives you the edge over any competitors who could essentially just copy the work that you do. The best about getting External SEO is that that there is no limit to the kind of work you can do and leave your competitors miles behind. External SEO essentially means linking your SEO ready pages and content to other “anchor texts” either on your website or another 3rd party website.
We do this with Cross-Links and Backlinks
Cross-links are links that are on a particular domain which point to another page on the same domain.
For example: On the Advensure pricing Page, a link to advensure.io/get-started would count as a cross-link.
Backlinks are the links that are on a 3rd party domain, which point to a page on your domain.
For example: On Quora, if I answer a question with a link back to advensure.io, it would count as a backlink.
Tips for adding cross-links on your page
Earlier in the blog, we went through how having more pages helps with cross-links. (In case you missed it, you can check it out here). A little meta, but what I just did with “in case you missed it” was a cross-link.
You can add such cross-links to your content, from one page to another, on related content to promote the page being linked to.
Here are some quick tips to cross-link some of your best content on your pages.
1. Footer:
At the end of your page, on the footer, you can add a section called “Quick Links” or highlights and add some of your highlight content with relevant anchor text and links to the pages. This way, the particular links get repeated on all the pages on your website, without doing much.
2. Home Page “Popular Searches”
On your home page (which is generally your most linked page) you can add a bottom section titled “Popular Searches or something similar, with the same concept as the footer links. However, since this is the main page and the links appear only once, you can add more links and spread the net as much as possible.
Please note – your website visitors will be seeing and using both, your footer links and homepage links, so you have to make them relevant and usable.
3. Previous and Next or Recommended/Similar
At the end of your content, you can add a “Recommended” or “Next” button/section to show your users the logical next page. This makes the website move navigable for your users and at the same time, adds to the backlinks.
Again, making the “Next” pages relevant is very important.
How to do this?
With popular websites like WordPress, the options to add these links are present either as plugins or based on the theme you select. With the theme, you can find a place to add the footers in “Appearance” on the menu bar in your backend.
If you’re using Advensure, we take care of your backlinks by adding your activities as next, previous, related activities. Advensure also lets you add rich text so you can link your content in the text, to content on Advensure or to another domain.
In the future, Advensure will also support footer links and other ways of adding links.
Tips for getting back-links
Getting back-links is one of the most difficult elements of search engine optimisation. However, backlinks also rank high in search engines matrix of placing your website. Search engines also have a range on which they place the websites that link back to your content.
For example, a reputed website, which ranks high on search engines’ algorithm, linking back to your website, will affect your SEO 10 times more than some other website, with terrible SEO linking to your website. For search engines, it’s a simple equation – higher the reputation of the linking website means the website being linked should also be reputable.
Social Media:
While this doesn’t count for much, it’s the easiest to do. Create social media profiles on whichever website you find. You generally get to add a link to your bio on most platforms, to add to back-links. Check out some social websites in other languages as well or the ones that aren’t popular as well.
Resource: Check out this article which has a list of social websites with do-follow links.
Forums:
Sign up and interact on some social and travel forums. Forums are an amazing resource to get customers, who are searching for what you have. People put up questions and look for answers and reviews on places to see and things to do. This is particularly heavy for the travel industry since people read and look for unique things to do when they are traveling.
- This lets you reach out to your potential audience
- By answering questions, you also get to put up backlinks to your website. This also brings in traffic in the future, from people who can have the same question even years after you have answered some question.
Resources: Quora, Yahoo answers, etc.
Guest Blogging:
Since you run a travel company, you must have a high number of stories about your domain. Pen down some short briefs of your stories and write to bloggers that accept guest blogs, with the potential stories you can write for their blog. This helps both you and the blogger, as they get to add a page with an interesting story to reach a wider audience, and you get access to the wide audience the blogger would have already built up.
Travel blogs that accept guest posts
Side note: You can also put up your content on websites that let people put up content as blogs – Ex- medium.com, Facebook articles, quora articles etc.
Constantly Optimising your website
These are just some of the quick fixes you can do to get your optimisation of content for search engines started, however, there are innumerable things you can do to improve your ranking and keep spreading your SEO net to add more keywords.
Just as a fisherman has to come back and check the net ever so often, to keep catching the fishes every day, you will have to work on SEO ever so often. I would suggest you to keep increasing your scope of work on SEO and spend time on improving your optimisation. While it is all small bits of work you have to do to increase your performance, in the long run, there is nothing like SEO to generate more business and grow organically.
We at Advensure are firm believers of the “give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he’ll never go hungry” proverb.
So get out there, go from fishing with an old stick, to a net, to a boat and grow steadily with great SEO.
Extra Resources:
If you want to learn more and widen the scope of SEO work you do, you can follow these amazing bloggers:
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He dons many hats. Professionally committing towards marketing, operations, product management, and business strategy skills while also being a hands-on scuba diving instructor. He approaches each problem with a leveled mind of an optimist. His taste in music and food is very specific and he enjoys a healthy work-life balance.
