So it has taken me about 6 years and a lot of mistakes to figure out how to slowly but surely build links into your site (and across your site) and thus build your Page Rank as well. I will describe the techniques and ideas that I have used with THE Canadian Personal Finance Site .

Old “Dead” Content

This is the big problem, if you don’t have internal links to your old content, it is as good as dead (not making you any money, or giving your readers a feel for your ideas).  If you do not link to it, once the post is off your front page, and it does not have any links to it, the only way that a reader will find it is via SEO trickery (which is snake oil in my opinion) to manipulate searching, or via a blind luck search hit. This is why you need to create a tight lattice of internal links to your own content, to make sure your old content is still useful (and by useful I mean money making).

I have heard many times that External Links are the most important thing for a new site, and existing sites to pick up, to increase Page Rank and other ratings, but I like to think that an internal linking structure is also a key to making sure that all of your content has the capability to make money for you, which is really why you are running this business.

Best practices for internal linking? Read on, here are some of mine:

Favorites or Best of Page

This is the first and easiest thing to do. There are posts that you like, and that other folk have liked over time, that you should make available to them in the easiest way possible (eye catchers in the marketing world). How do you do that? There are a few ways that I have seen:

• Have a title and short description rolling widget on your front page, that simply runs through these posts and may catch a new reader’s eye, and thus cause them to read more of your content (and increase their stay on your site). This is a great idea, if that is the way your web site is laid out (don’t just shove this widget on your page, if it doesn’t fit with your theme).
• Create a Best Of/Favorites Menu item at the top of the page. This is really useful too, you then create a static, Best of Page, where you put links to your Keystone posts, that hopefully grab you more readership.

These two methods are easy to implement, and is a must for any new web site, after it has been up long enough to have some older content you still want to monetize.

Weekly Round Up Links

In my weekly round ups on Friday (which I may move to another day since everyone seems to be doing one now), the first set of links on this page is a set of links to all my previous posts for that week. Is this sneaky? Not really, it’s pretty darn obvious.  Have a look at Random Thoughts Slash Into Lent, and see that the first section of links are actually all to my own posts.

Why do this? My guess is that most folks who end up at a page with lots of links, get overwhelmed with the sheer number and will stop clicking after the 3rd or 4th link (I checked with a few other bloggers on this theory and they tend to agree as well), so make sure it is my content that they get to first (yup, self-serving stuff like this is how you get more eyes on your stuff).

Normal Linking

Another trick I have been doing lately is posting a lot of my older content onto Twitter (with the tage OBG, (Oldie but Goodie)) to see if I can get more eyes on my older content. I didn’t touch on that in Twitter Etiquette (see what I did there, I linked to some older content on this site, tricky eh?), but it is another way to get older content a little more life (but I will talk about that in my post about External Linking). With these OBG posts, I sometimes try to link them into my new content as well, thus creating a more complex linking map on my site.

Linking old content from new content just freshens your money making capabilities that much more.

These are just a few of the tricks I have tried to keep my older content fresh, but you must make sure that the old content is “Green and Fresh“, so linking to a post you did about something that happened 5 years ago, and has specifics about it isn’t going to help much (unless you couch the link with a title like Historical Background: then you can sneak those in as well.
Next post will be about external linking, hopefully soon. Sorry my writing here is not as prolific as my regular site, but I need some spare time to think about these things (and discuss them with my blogging peers as well).

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It’s been a long time since I have posted here and sometimes I forget that I do have this blog to do experiments and just bluster about life in general.

This post is allegedly testing the Postie Plug-in for allowing folks to post an entry from an e-mail account. We shall see where this might lead. I tried the default wordpress version and it is woefully lacking so far.

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After the fiasco that was my attempt at hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance (although that post is one of the most popular I have ever had), I ran into yet another interesting whine from one of the many posters who I included in the overly long post (this was found in Stumbleupon):

Host left out a large number of articles from a large number of excellent personal finance bloggers for no apparent reason. Not good carnival etiquette.

This is what I really have problems with in the whole Carnival world, just because you send in a post, why do you think it should be included? Especially if there are over 100 posts to choose from? Most of the larger carnivals I have seen (and stopped reading) are just so bloody long, I gave up reading them (unless they had an “editors choice” at the starting, where I read those 5 and ignored the rest). Witness this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance #202, at least it has an Editor’s choice box so I can ignore the rest of the over 100 entries.

This is why writers ridicule bloggers so much, the whole “… we should be inclusive…” mentality of, just because I wrote it someone must want to read it (this post included) is lazy, and will never make you a better writer.

I had 1 or two queries which were by normal writers who simply asked why, so that they could hone their skills, but the deluge of whining and complaining drowned out these writers. Why anyone wants to host a Carnival these days is beyond me.

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I have been trying to find a smart way to clean up my old blog on blog spot Canadian Financial Rants, but I finally bit the bullet and deleted it and then recreated it.  That purged all of the entries on the site, and now it has a single entry telling whoever trips over the site to go to Canadian Personal Finance Opinions, instead. My concern is with the old site still around if Google’s bots found it and went through it my page rank would get set back to zero (again), as it stands now, the only official copies of my content are now on Canadian Financial Opinions, so I am happy with that.

I also noticed that Alexa has 82 sites that link into Canadian Financial Rants, so I used Alexa to point out these sites and then started sending the Blog owners where the links are that the blog they are pointing at has moved to Canadian Financial Opinions. Where it was not possible, I simply left a comment on the site that also pointed to Canadian Financial Opinions, so hopefully this will add to my Alexa IN-Link count and this might help my Page Rank as well, we shall see on that part, but a useful way to find messed up links too.

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Figured Walter’s Turkey story was a sure fire winner, but I guess there just isn’t a market for psychotic, pseudo farmers who don’t know how to kill poultry. It was an idea.

The traffic on this site continues to be a little flat, but then again, it is not like I am posting a great deal of useful information either.

On the Canadian Financial Views web site, traffic continues to be it’s normal brisk self of about 200 visitors and over 500 RSS subscribers as well. I really need to figure out a way to make money on the RSS side of things, given that I have so few folks that actually visit the site (and all of it’s advertising whore-dom).

Still tinkering with moving away from Blogspot, but might take this and my family blog away first and see how much work it actually is. Blogspot is so darn easy to use, not sure why I would be changing except to get away from the “Oh you are only a Blogspot Blogger”, crap that you read about from the “Blog Snobs” out there.

Another Adsense cheque is in the off’ing, so we shall see I might crack $1K for profits on the web site this year. Whoo Hoo, almost above slave wages!

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