When I redesigned my website about 2 years ago, I created a blog category called ‘website design’ with a view to helping the site rank on Google for the search term ‘website design’.
Despite posting a lot of good content in that category over a two-year period, my website still failed to make much impression in Google search results.
About 3 weeks ago, I was browsing through the site and noticed something that hit me right between the eyes. I had mis-spelled the link of the website design category, so it actually read /website-designm/ i.e. I had inadvertently tacked an ‘m’ on the end. I’d never noticed that in 2 years!
So, I removed the stray ‘m’ and, as an experiment, changed the slug to ‘website-design-christchurch’.
Well, in the short period since, my website has jumped about 10 places in Google search results for the term ‘website design christchurch’ and still appears to be climbing.
I can only attribute this sudden improvement to the change in the internal link name. Of course, I’ve always known that Google places some importance on internal links. But so often, SEO practices tend to focus on building incoming links, that we overlook the importance of internal links as well.