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| Author: Jason Ciment |
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This section is really the transitional point between what you've been learning about for on-page optimization and what you will need for off-page optimization.
Linking structure includes a variety of considerations and instead of writing the usual introduction, this section will just go into detail of each option and you will just hopefully pick up the gist of what needs to be done.
Briefly, here is a list of linking options to consider:
- Whether links are relative or absolute.
- The anchor text of each link.
- The title tag of each link.
- The way links or URLs are named.
- How many levels of directories you have from the home page to the farthest internal page.
- Whether you use subdomains or subdirectories.
- How many pages you have on your site.
- Incoming link considerations
Day 2 (Learn about it), Day 3-8 (Apply it)
Absolute Linking:
Use absolute URL's (as opposed to relative URL's) when writing links into your source code of each web page. This means for example that you should use a link like <a href="http://www.webcart.net/webcart10/page-about.htm">title="about webcart shopping cart software">About us NOT <a href="webcart10/page-about.htm" title="about us">. I'm not sure why this matters but most likely it forces the search engines to always be consistent in the pages they spider so that you don't have two sets of pages in the engines (one with www and one without www).
Anchor Text:
I know this is mostly a review but it is so important that I don't want to leave to chance the idea that you missed the previous explanation of how to properly use the anchor text option.
The first guideline is to use the primary keyword of the targeted page the link is linking to. In the example above, "about us" is the anchor text. Probably a more optimized link would be "About WebCart Shopping Cart Software" since it highlights a keyword phrase (and "about us" could refer to any site).
The second guideline is that the anchor text of a link should correlate with the title tag of the page it is linking too.
This is really connected to the first guideline because logically if the primary keyword is About WebCart Shopping Cart Software, that should also be the <title< tag on that page (and most likely some variation of it will be first <h1> tag content on the About Us page too. So on the About Us page of WebCart, the <title> tag of that page should match the anchor text of the link on the current page pointing to the About Us page.
Remember, if you can "vote" for an inner webpage on your website by using your main keyword in the anchor text within the link linking to that page ALWAYS do it. Doing this can help you rank at the top for keywords that might not have a lot of competition.
For more info on anchor text, see this example:
Link Titles:
This one is pretty easy actually. Just make sure your link title matches your anchor text. The only caveat is to add one word to the end of the title so you let the engine know that this is a link title. Generally we would add the word "link" to the title. This is the same logic we apply when using the "alt" tag to add the word image or graphic when describing each image.
Naming Links:
This is connected to the first idea of absolute linking in the sense that the page name "aboutus.html" should probably be keyword rich so that you have an additional chance to notify the search engines that the page itself is connected to some particular keyword phrase.
You want to be sure that the directory where each page is located is keyword rich. So if you have a multi-level type of site where pages reside in different directories, then don't give up the chance to make the directory names keyword rich. So in this example, instead of just having the aboutus.html page inside the main domain folder, you could add a directory called "ecommerce" and put a few pages in that directory.
So the link would be http://www.webcart.net/ecommerce/aboutshoppingcartsoftware.html and that would give you a chance to be ranked not only for shopping cart software but also for ecommerce.
Part of the opportunity in setting up your directories is creating "pathways" for the spiders that are keyword oriented. So if you have a link to a directory with the name "ecommerce" and within that directory you have 5 pages of content that are oriented around the word "ecommerce", then the odds are greater that the search engines will consider this directory and all the pages within to be "ecommerce" rich. With this idea in mind, many optimizers will set up 5 different keyword oriented directories with 5 pages inside each directory. The goal is to convince the search engines that each of the 5 directories deserves high ranking for the keyword for which it is named.
One of the things you can do create further "authoritative" linking benefits is to populate more directories with keyword rich pages utilizing duplicate content from other pages. Here are some ways in which you can create parallel sets of pages with similar content:
- Create new sub-domains parallel to the original sub-directory pages (or vice versa) and use different naming conventions for the directory names and page names.
- Make sure the new pages are at least 30% different in the design/structure/format/content from the original pages.
- Try auto-generated articles where you link the article from the sub-directory page to the sub-domain using the targeted keywords.
Number of Pages on Your Site:
Quite simply, since one of the two backbones of SEO success is "content", the more content you have the more success you will likely have. The only guideline I can suggest here is that you should make sure not to have too many steps to get from the home page to the deepest internal page. Most studies suggest that you should not have to travel more than 4 links to get to an internal page. Of course, you can transgress this guideline but this is a good starting point for smaller sites when they site up their navigation structure.
Incoming Link Considerations:
- Relevance of the site that is linking to you. This means that you get higher points in the algorithms for sites that are more closely related to your site's content. This is probably the MOST IMPORTANT factor to follow in your entire SEO process.
- The C block of the site linking to your site should be completely different than your site in order to get the full effect of the incoming link. If you don't know what a C block is, then do a search in Google. Use www.linkvendor.com to see which other IPs are on the domain of a site that links to you.
- If the navigation links on your site are images, use duplicate text keyword rich static links at the bottom of your web pages.
- You should have no more then 100 links on any given page (either external or outbound). Having more than 100 links per page may give the search engines a reason to view your site or at least that page as "spammy".
- Things to value from people linking to you:
- Which websites link to you
- Number of websites linking to you
- Google PR of the website linking to you
- Page title of the website linking to you
- Anchor text used in the link linking to you
- Number of links linking to the website that's linking to you.
- Number of outbound links on the web page that is linking to you
- Number of links on the website that is linking to you
- Whether the web pages linking to you are deemed as authority sites
- IP address of the web pages linking to you
Google Webmaster Tools:
If you want to get a bunch of free tools to help you manage your web site, check out the Google Webmaster tools site. Below is a screenshot to give you an idea of what Google offers.
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