SEO Tips #5: Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
Recently, we’ve been focusing on important factors that can affect your Web site’s visibility in the search engines. Last month, we focused on improving a site’s accessibility. This month, we cover your internal page linking structure.
A specific page’s importance in a site’s overall architecture can be measured by the importance and depth of other pages on the site that refer to that page in question. So if a product page, for example, is linked from the home and other important (this is key) pages, it’s overall importance in the site will be high. If it is linked from pages that have no overall value (e.g. Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy), this will negate the linking.
Also, if you link to that page using the receiving page’s keywords in the “anchor text”, that also helps to improve performance. This shows the search engines that the page being linked TO is regarded as important for those specific words by you, the site owner.
You can add links in the following places:
- Site map page
- Footer text navigation
- Sidebar include files (they are basically snippets of code called into each page - update one file, you update every place it appears)
- Headings (H1, H2 tags)
- Captions under images
- Images which also have ALT text
- Copy within the first paragraph, surrounded by strong keywords - avoid CLICK HERE when you can
- If flash menu buttons are used, additional HTML links should be included as a precaution against possible search engine spider omissions
Don’t forget that the free Google XML Sitemap file will help to remind Google that all of your pages exist and should be spidered. This won’t help your rankings but keeps Google informed of any new or deleted pages.
If you can edit that useful 404 error page, then duplicate your Site Map page but replace the H1 heading with:
“Oops! Page or File Not Found…
That page may not exist anymore or you may have mistyped the address. Please use our Site Map below to find your way!”
Finally, don’t forget to add the title attribute to text links with a brief description of what page is being linked to.
Next month, we’ll focus on #6: global link popularity of the web site.
