Posts Tagged ‘links’
You probably know by now that Google values links from other sites in ranking your site. But, did you know that the way your own pages link together can have a big impact on how your pages, and therefor, your site ranks?
Maximizing Internal Links
Many Webmasters think that as long as users have a logical way to get through the site they have done their job. However, the search engines see things a little differently. Google and other search engines determine how important a page is by what other pages it is linked to. So, if the Google spiders need to go through a series of five links to get to a page they are not going to rank it as highly as one that was two pages from the main page. Ideally all of your pages should be no more than two links away from the home page or even linked directly on the home page.
Easy for Small Sites – Not so Much or Big Sites
If you only have ten or fifteen pages on the site then you can easily link all pages from the home page and link back from all the pages. If you can do that, they do it and you will maximize the value of all your pages. But what if you have a thousand pages or even more. Linking everything from the home page would be a disaster. What can you do?
Hubs of Content
If you organize your site into topics and create content hubs you can solve the big site linking problem. Create an index for each hub and link to all content on that topic from that index. Then link from those pages back to the hub and to the home page. Cross linking between content pages is also valuable where practical. When you do this with a large site be prepared for a lot of search engine spider traffic. The spiders live internal links and will bounce around for hours at a time indexing and ranking your pages.
Anchor Tags
Anchor tags are simple the text phrases you use in links. Just was with incoming links it is important to use the correct keyword phrases when you link to other pages on your site. If you are linking to chocolate cake recipes and you are targeting the phrase “chocolate cake recipes” on that page then use “chocolate cake recipes” as your link text. As with external links you will want to vary those links somewhat and target multiple keywords.
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