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The Most Commonly Overlooked Element That Can Boost Your SEO Performance

When Marketing Sherpa called for bits of wisdom from readers for its 2005 Marketing Wisdom Report, I polled Stone, Pat, and Mike about any lessons we could offer. After all, organic search engine optimization seems to be still a very fuzzy area for marketers.

While there is no shortage of advice we could give and there are plenty of lessons from 2005, I thought this tip, illustrated with two cases of actual results, would prove handy to any web marketer looking for immediate, actionable wisdom. I hope Marketing Sherpa also thinks so and publishes it, as I learned upon submission that only 99 of 350 or more entries will make the cut!

"We offer comprehensive SEO evaluations, so naturally we see all the blunders and mishaps of web sites that are not performing well in the search engines.

One of the most common structural mistakes we see contributing to a weak organic search engine presence is inconsistent linking to the index page.

Inconsistent linking to your most important pages can dilute the search engines' perception of the importance of those pages. When you link to your index page in different ways, the search engines treat each as a separate page. For example, if you link to your index page with http://www.domain.com/index.htm in one place and http://www.domain.com in another place, search engines do not recognize this as two links to the same page. This applies to links throughout your site as well as inbound links from other web sites.

In 2005, we saw the importance of consistent link structures play a major role in at least two cases:

1. A new client whose website was suffering from inconsistent linking throughout the site realized a major jump in search engine performance within one month of SEO implementation, increasing website leads by 4 times. Other SEO tactics were also employed, but it's likely that correcting the link structure accounted for much of the immediate result. 

2. Another client had some work performed by a designer who inadvertently used inconsistent linking structure. Google PageRank fell by 2 points immediately, and the site's performance suffered until the structural corrections could be made.

While effective search engine optimization is the combination of many factors, maintaining consistent link structure seems to be one of the most commonly overlooked elements that can contribute to your success."

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