Photo credit: Steve Kay

By now you probably know that one of the most important strategies you can use to improve your website SEO is to interlink your posts – linking back to older posts when you create new posts and editing older posts to link forward to newer posts. Without an effective interlinking strategy each of your articles is out on an island of itself. With good interlinking you begin to build a mesh of content that is search engine friendly and sure to help your site rank higher and be more useful for searchers.

There are a number of different methods available to help you do this interlinking. Of course the simplest approach is to use the search function of your own website. Or use Google Search with the site modifier like [topic site:mysite.com]. Our own Dr. WordPress offered his tip of using the WordPress Admin interface to find old posts and link to them. Or instead of finding specific terms to link to you could use one of the plethora of related posts plugins to automatically insert some interlinking.

Any of these solutions works just fine when you are writing on a single blog but if you have multiple blogs then the solution is not so obvious. Interlinking within your own blog network is as important (if not more so!) than interlinking on a single site. But none of the strategies above apply to interlinking across multiples websites. So what is a budding media mogul to do?

Google Custom Search to the rescue!

What is Google Custom Search?

Google Custom Search is a free product from Google that allows you to build a unique Custom Search Engine (CSE), which according to Google is “a tailored search experience, built using Google’s core search technology, that prioritizes or restricts search results based on websites and pages you specify.” Many bloggers have replaced their blogs’ standard search functionality with a CSE which offers the power of Google – meaning better search results.

But this article isn’t about that – it’s about how to build a standalone CSE for your own purposes.

How to create a Google Custom Search Engine

Building a new CSE is easy – here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Create a Google Account – If you don’t already have a Google account then you need to create one.
2. Create a New Custom Search Engine – Once you are signed in to your Google account, go to Google’s Custom Search Engine page and press the big blue button that says Create a Custom Search Engine. This will bring you to a simple form that you complete to make your CSE.
3. Complete the CSE form – Give your new search engine a name and a description if you want, and then in the “sites to search” box give it the list of sites you want included. Put in all of the blogs in your blog network, one to a line, writing the domain like “mydomain.com”. Then check that you agree to the terms and conditions and click Next. On the next page you will be given an option to test the search engine but I wouldn’t bother as it seems to take a minute or so for it to work anyway. Just click the Finish button and you have created your first CSE!

Using Your New CSE

Once you have your Custom Search Engine built you have a number of options for how to use it. Your CSE is just a webpage so the easiest thing to do is to bookmark it. There are also a number of gadgets available to add it to your iGoogle page, if you use one. My personal favorite is the Custom Search Console gadget which gives you easy access to all of your CSEs.

Two things you can do with your CSE:

Linking backward
As you are writing a post you should search for some of the key terms in your CSE. If you have found that you have written about any of these terms before you should take this is an opportunity to link back to those older articles.

Linking forward
Same thing but in the other direction. Use your CSE to find older articles that relate to your freshly posted article, and then edit those older articles to include links to your new article.

This is classic interlinking, made easy even over a number of blogs by creating a Google Custom Search Engine.

Taking Your CSE to the Next Level

So we’ve seen how you can improve your interlinking across your own network of blogs but can we extend this out even further to include other websites in your niche or other friends’ blogs? Of course! Remember when you entered in your list of domains when you created your CSE? Well guess what – you can enter any domain there you want! It does not have to be a website that you maintain – it can just as easily be any website in your niche.

How might this be used? Well clearly it is good form to link back to others when writing a related article, and using CSE would help you do that. But you could also contact the other author and suggest they might want to link to your post from their older post. Of course this would go over better if you already know the person, but it’s worth a try either way. This kind of interlinking is not Black Hat SEO and is totally appropriate assuming the content is applicable.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article on utilizing Google Custom Search to improve your blog network interlinking. While I have utilized this technique myself writing this article has been a good reminder that I need to be even more vigilant in doing do as I write each post, not just periodically as I have been doing.

So let’s all make a New Year’s Resolution to improve our interlinking – and using Google Custom Search to do it.

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Post from: Secondary Income Blog - Make Money Online

How to Use Google Custom Search to Supercharge Your Blog Network Interlinking

Finding Internal Keywords on One Site

A quick and easy way to find this sort of internal content is to run a Google search that looks like this: site:myblog.com "my keyword"

Here are some example of where I search across this website: site:secondaryincomeblog.com "second income" or site:secondaryincomeblog.com income

This approach works well when you are only thinking about internal linking on one site, but what about if you write on multiple sites? You want to link to relevant keywords across all of your sites just like you do for internal linking on one site. Think of this as internal network linking. The problem is that the approach discussed above only works with one site, so you wold have to run multiple queries to search across all of your sites.

Google Custom Search Engine to the Rescue

Google has a product called Custom Search Engine that will allow you to easily search across all of your sites with one query. Once your CSE is setup you will be able to easily find older content that you can link back to if appropriate or link from to your new content. Remember, as long is the links are relevant and helpful to your readers, Google will love you for it.

Here are the steps to take to build a simple search engine for your needs:

Create a Google Account
If you don’t already have a Google account then you need to create one.

Create a New Custom Search Engine
Once you are signed in to your Google account, go to Google’s Custom Search Engine page and press the big blue button that says Create a Custom Search Engine. You will be presented with a form requesting some information. These are the only fields you need to change:

Search engine name: – Give it a name like “My Websites”
Search engine description: – This is a required field but it really can be anything like “A search engine to span all of my blogs”
Sites to search: – This is where you will entire all of your website URLs, one to a line. Just use the domain like “secondaryincomeblog.com” or “johnsjottings.com” – you don’t need to include the http, the www or anything else.
Check that you have read and agree to the Terms of Service, and press the Next button.

On the next page you will be given an option to test the search engine but I wouldn’t bother as it seems to take a minute or so for it to work anyway. Just click the Finish button.

And that’s all you need to do to create your custom search engine. On the last page you will see your search engine with some links to its homepage and control panel, among other things, for now all you need to do is to go to the homepage link and try out your new search engine. You will see that the results come back just like a normal Google search, only it is only bringing back results for your websites.

Create a bookmark to your search engine and you then have a great tool for improving your internal network linking.

How To Make This Even Better

One of the very cool things about this approach is that Google allows you to include sites other than your own. So why not include the websites of other friends in your niche? Now you will find content not only on your internal network but also on your friend’s websites. So using the example I started with, you have written a new article on laptop computers and after using your CSE you find that one of your friends wrote about laptop computers last month. Why not send him an email pointing out your new content and asking if he would link to you? Now you are truly expanding your internal network.

Because they say that a picture speaks a thousand words I have put together a short video demonstrating what I have written about here. Let me know what you think about this method and whether it has been useful for you. Video quality sucks as I haven’t yet figured out how to do this well, but I think the point is put forth.

For another view of the same topic check out How to Use Google Custom Search to Supercharge Your Blog Network Interlinking.

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Post from: Secondary Income Blog - Make Money Online

Using Google Custom Search Engine To Improve Network Linking

How did they do that? Why did they do that? Should you do that? Read on for more!

Does Google See You?

Even if you blog for the love of writing and you don’t care at all about making money through a second income online you should care about this topic. Writers want readers, right? If your website is not in the search engines index then when people search for “purple mushrooms” your blog ilovepurplemushrooms.com is not going to be presented to them. As a writer you want people who are interested in your topic to find you.

Here is a simple way to make sure that Google can see you. If Google sees you then the other search engines will see you too – but lets face it, as of right now it is most important that you are in Google’s index.

Use the following search in Google, replacing MYWEBSITE with the name of your blog:
site:www.MYWEBSITE.com

So for example for this website the search would look like this: site:www.secondaryincomeblog.com

It should work whether you add the www. or not. In fact if your results are different in that case then you have another problem which I will write about some other time!

Were all the pages in your blog returned? Then you are good! In my friends’ cases only 1 page was returned – the main page. That is because Google is smart enough to know that there is something there because you refered to it by URL, not because it knows anything about the page.

If only the main page returned in your query then you need to read on to learn more about what happened and how to fix it.

The Robots <META> tag

The HTML code that makes up your website includes a number of special terms that instruct search engines how to behave when visiting the website. One such term is the The Robots <META> tag. Here is an example of how this tag might look:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

And in fact that is exactly how it looked on my friends’ sites. In a nutshell what that is saying is what I said in the opening paragraph of this article: GOOGLE STAY AWAY! You can read more about this tag at the Web Robots Pages.

I believe in both cases the reason for including this tag was a misunderstanding between it and the “rel=nofollow” tag. The former is used to hide entire pages (and should be used sparingly, not across the entire site) and the latter is used for a specific link where you are telling Google not to follow that one link only. For the vast majority of people this is the one you want to use.

What Now?

If you have identified that your blog has this problem and you have fixed it by removing that tag from the <HEAD> section of your HTML code, then you might be wondering what you need to do to make sure Google finds you. In my opinion the answer is simple:

1. Make sure you have a Sitemap
2. Write new content
3. Update old content

While it certainly is a bummer that you had this problem it is easily rectified through the passage of time. Remove the offending code and eventually the search engines will love you again and new readers will be pouring into your blog.

Good luck!

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Post from: Secondary Income Blog - Make Money Online

Make Sure The Search Engines See Your Website!