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Using links within your site for search optimization
Posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 under SEO by Dustin Brewer.Everyone has heard over and over again how important it is for your site to have more links coming to it from other (related) sites. It is true, the search market is a popularity contest and the more links that you have coming in to your site the better you can do in search results. If you want to rank for “web design in Oklahoma” or “search engine optimization in Oklahoma” you have to have incoming anchor text with those phrases. Something as simple as “Oklahoma web designer” or “SEO in Oklahoma” are all good terms to have linking in to your site. However, that is only half of the battle. Search engine optimization is all about relevance.The next step is making sure that your internal linking structure is setup so that once the search engines find your links from other sites they can understand what your site is about. You have to of course have some relevant copy but a lot of people forget that the anchor text inside of their sites is just as important. As part of search engine algorithms your site and pages can be ranked even higher by properly linking to other related pages with the right kind of anchor text.
Passing link juice internally in your web site
The best time to add links (not including your primary navigation, which should already have relevant anchor text) is on other related pages or blog posts. This helps to give more importance based on surrounding text within your site. To top it off you need to apply just the right anchor text that is related to your current page and the source page. So if you were linking to another page in your site about pointing your visitors at the content you would do just that. Equally you would assume the article is about getting visitors to direct their attention at your content. See what I did there?
If you are a blogger and are trying to setup your site to have appropriate internal linking for search engine optimization and are using Wordpress. The best option for you is to use the related articles plugin which will determine what possible related articles to your current articles would be. This plugin is very very handy and is a must if you have Wordpress (which I don’t, but in the process of migrating over to it- wish me luck).
Search engine optimization is about links, internal and external
Links are one of the major factors over all when it comes to getting ranked well in search engines. Anchor text in general will help to define relevant for a page. External links in to your site have more importance then internal links. That doesn’t mean that you should neglect having your site link internally though. How have you (or will you) creatively cross-link your site internally to maximize link juice and PageRank flow?
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4 Responses to “Using links within your site for search optimization”
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.
Good point Dustin. I recently worked on a client’s website to improve internal linking to a particular page and saw an almost immediate jump in rankings and traffic to the page.
Very good point of view dustin, linking is one of the key to increase traffic in your site…and the main key is to optimize your website, nice job dustin.
Great idea i need to be sure I am doing this for my web site. I had completely forgotten to make sure my site is crosslinked the right way.
[...] Dustin Brewer writes about how to increase SEO by properly wording links on your site. [...]