how to compete with big companies

with hundreds of links from product pages

[annej]

I have a educational/informational site. It takes me days to write each article. I usually sit around 6th or 7th in the serps for my top single keyword. I do link to my homepage from all related pages on my website but can't compete with sites with thousands of product pages. It takes me days to write each article. I hate to create a bunch of meaningless pages just to get more internal links. Would that be the only answer? How important are internal links anyway? Are they rated the same as external links?

I don't want to see my site dip down to the second page because of this.

Anne

[annej]

Any ideas on how to increase my internal links faster in a meaningful way. Or does it really make a difference?

[frup]

Internal links are nowhere near as important as external links. Having more pages is little help, actually, unless if you have external people linking to those individual pages.

[texasville]

All that internal linking really only translates in page rank not serps. If you feel that you have enough articles then concentrate on link building. That is where the serps are effected. Take one or two articles that you feel you can rewrite and do them over and publish the new articles on the web with free publishers. Be sure that you have an authors' box on each article with a stipulation that it is free to use so long as a hot link is left in place back to your site. Don't forget to add the hot link and a one or two sentence bio about you and the site.
Two articles have picked up about a hundred new links for me. Most are not very quality because they have no pr on the pages but a couple have pr4 now.
Good luck

[texasville]

One more thing. The reason I said rewrite them is so google doesn't get confused about duplicate content and come back and bite you. Plus a rewrite is quicker than coming up with a whole new subject.

[annej]

Having more pages is little help, actually, unless if you have external people linking to those individual pages.

Interesting. That kind of makes sense. Then it seems like it may help more to get more inbound links to individual articles since they link back to the homepage.

[2by4]

"Then it seems like it may help more to get more inbound links to individual articles since they link back to the homepage."

Don't give up on what you're doing, your method can work, if you're already at 6 or 7 in the serps, you're getting very close to where you want to be.

All it takes is some more links to your site, if your articles are reasonably good quality, if you reasonably clear and descriptive <title> tag text, and good, non repetitive header <h1, h2 etc> text, you'll be surprised how well you can do as a small site against the big ones.

If there are sites that you feel are quality and you're not competing with, see if you can get them to do one way linking to your site, for example, to specific articles. This works very well, the more internal links you get, from topically/thematically related sites, the better, I think that's one component of what google uses to determine the value of your site as a whole.

I've seen this approach work extremely well on non-commercial sites, but it takes ongoing work. If there are topically related forums, that permit either url containing signatures or links back to your resources, consider posting some real stuff there too, but avoid becoming a forum spammer. You're already doing almost everything right IMO.

[flicker]

Annej, get external deeplinks to your individual articles. Google really eats up external deeplinks. I work on a large educational site and it piles up links to its interior pages from grade schools and so on, and Google loves that site. (Though I don't know how competitive your searchterms are; our articles are historical and linguistic in nature and there are not many commercial sites fighting for those keywords.)

If the pages are really educational, try to find like homeschooling sites and kids' site directories and submit some of the pages to them. If your site is about history, you can sticky me and I may have some more specific ideas.

[RichTC]

Anne,

If you are working so hard on writing unique content each week i would look to write some short articles that you can publish on other sites that carry your signature link and provide a taste of what your site offers. This is a good way to get a link back and bring new visitors if they like what they read

I wouldnt worry about internal links as its spreading the page rank around your site. It sounds more like a case of more links required to your site, or at least more anchor links to your site with the keywords in.

To check this go to yahoo (which i find gives the most detail) and do linkdomain:www.yoursite.com see how many links it reports you as having and then do the same with the site that sits at Number 1. This is by no means perfect science but i find it a good acid test for clients of ours that want to know if they are short of links.

Final point, its link quality that counts also. If you can get a link to your site from a high page rank site that can be worth more than a volume of links from low rank pages. To be 7 in the SERPS for your primary key word is very good you must be doing things right anyway.