Use “Bread Crumb” Link Navigation

Effective link navigation between your pages can provide keyword-rich internal links
and assist your visitors in determining exactly where they are on your site. A popular
technique called “bread crumbs” can be used for this. For example, if this book were
in HTML format on the Web, I could insert a series of links at the top of each page.

For this particular page, the bread crumb links would be:

Optimizing Your Website > Linking Your Pages Correctly > Best Practices For Internal Linking


Note how this can increase both content and provide keyword-rich links.



10. Use the “NOFOLLOW” Attribute Link

The rel="NOFOLLOW" attribute in a link has been used on blog and forum sites to
block the Google spider from following a link to its target page, and hence blocking
the passing of PageRank. This is in an effort to reduce link spamming.

You can use the NOFOLLOW attribute to your advantage on your site to channel
PageRank to your most important pages. Here's the syntax:

<A HREF="yourpageURL" rel="NOFOLLOW">

Link from your “Related Links” page to every other page on your site

This page contains outgoing links that point to other websites and will “leak”
PageRank from this page (but not from any other pages). Since PageRank “voting
power” is shared evenly among all links on a page, having many links that point back
to your own page will minimize this effect.

As a rule of thumb, try to keep all links going to other sites on a single page – your
“Related Links” page. (If you have more than 100 links on a page, consider splitting
them up into multiple pages).

6. Link ONLY between pages that are related by keyword.

This helps distribute PageRank among pages that are related by keyword phrase.
These pages are likely important to your customers, which means you should
concentrate PageRank on these. These pages should also contain a link back to the
Home page.

7. Ensure every page links to at least one other page.

This will help Google crawl your site faster and help your customers navigate through
your site better. Pages with a link to them but without a link on them are called
orphan pages.


8. Use Absolute URLs to Link to Your Home Page

When linking back to your home page from other pages on your site, always use the
absolute URL instead of a relative URL or file path. For example, always use:

http://www.yourdomain.com (note the www)

instead of:

index.html (or whatever the file name of your Home page is)
or
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html

to link back to your Home page. I would also use absolute URLs for any subdomain,
subdirectory and other main "category" pages you might have on your site. Google
has had problems assigning an accurate PageRank value to a page if it uses
inconsistent or differing link URL forms to it.

Link from your home (or sitemap) page to every other page on your si

If your Web site is relatively small (less than 10 pages or so), your home page can
effectively function as your sitemap page. If you have a larger site, this becomes
unwieldy and you then need a separate sitemap page. Add some content to your
sitemap page - it should not consist of just links.

A sitemap page functions as an “index” to your site and is invaluable for the following
reasons:

   •   Helps Google find and crawl other pages on your site quickly
   •   Helps your customers find what they need quickly
   •   Helps distribute your site’s PageRank to other important pages

Tip: Because your home page likely has the highest PageRank in your site, you
should NOT put any outgoing links on this page. Ideally, the only page you should
have outgoing links on is your Related Links page. This will minimize the small
amount of PageRank “leakage” from that page. This concept will be discussed later.


4. Link from every “non-relevant” page back to your home page ONLY.

Non-relevant pages are defined here as those pages that are not keyword-rich and
do not likely contain the information that a visitor to your site is looking for while
searching on Google. You do not want these pages to receive as much PageRank
as your more important pages. Examples of non-relevant pages that should ONLY
link back to the Home page include the following:


   •   “Copyright” page
   •   “Privacy Policy” Page
   •   “Disclaimers” Page
   •   “About Us” page
   •   “Contact Us” page
   •   Order form, shopping cart pages
   •   “Link to Us” page
   •   “Testimonials” page

This helps return and concentrate PageRank back to your Home page. Remember,
you want to maximize PageRank for your most important pages.

to from all other pages in the site, but not all pages cross-link between each other. This concentrates PageRank on your most important pages.

Most sites should use a hierarchical linking structure, whereby the home page and
the most important product, service, or content pages are linked to more often than
other pages are. In this way, you can increase the chance that your most important
page is ranked the highest on Google for your most important keyword phrase. The
following figure illustrates this concept.



                                   PR=6 Home
                                         page
                                             link
                                             link




             PR=5 Product            PR=5 Product 1                  About Us
                                                               PR=4 page
                   main page               page
                       link                     link                     link
                       link                     link




       Hierarchical linking – only important page(s) get links from every other page


The home page typically has the highest PR value as this is the page most often
linked to, both externally and internally. This may not be ideal if your home page is
nothing but a splash page or contains little content. In this case, you should redesign
your home page to include more content and make it more relevant to Google (and
to your visitors). If this is not possible, you should re-link internally to your most
important keyword-relevant content page(s).

In the preceding figure, the About Us page is only linked to from a single page. This
is because the About Us page is not nearly as the other pages. So why funnel
precious PR value to it – instead flow PR value out of the page back to the home
page.

Mesh linking
Mesh linking is where all pages are considered equally important (to theme, topic,
and keywords). This is the simplest linking method in that each page on the site links
to every other page on the site. Most sites use mesh linking by default without




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Google SEO Secrets                                                          page 39 of 105



thinking about it by virtue of having the same menu navigation bar on each page that
contains the same links. This evenly distributes PageRank among all pages in the
site, which is not ideal. The following figure illustrates this concept.



                  PR=5 Home                  PR=5 Products
                        page                       main page
                            link                       link
                            link                       link
                            link                       link




                  PR=5 Product 1             PR=5 About Us
                        page                       page
                            link                       link
                            link                       link
                            link                       link



                  Mesh linking – each page links to every other page


In this example, note that each page links to the lesser important About Us page. So
why funnel precious PR value to it? Use hierarchical linking whenever possible!


Best Practices for Internal Linking

The following are best practices for linking the pages of your site together:


1. Use text-based links if possible and use the proper link structure.


2. Use keywords in your link text for every link.

Part of the ranking algorithm includes checking the text of a link against text on the
linked-to page. Use your keywords in link text.

Don’t use “Click here” or “Home” as the text of a link, as these are not relevant.

Linking Your Pages Together

Before we continue, it is time to introduce the concept of Google PageRank (PR).
PageRank is discussed in more detail later, but is introduced here in order to
understand why it matters how you link pages on your website together.

PageRank is a numeric value that Google places on how important a page is on the
Web. PageRank is determined by how many incoming links there are that point to a
page. Incoming links are links that point to a page from another page. Such links
may be located on pages on the same website (internal links) or on pages on
different websites (external links). External links are valued more than internal links.

Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is in effect “casting a
vote” for the other page. The more incoming links (votes) there are for a page, the
more important the page is to Google.

Note: Some obsess over the importance of PageRank to the near exclusion of
everything else. As such, PageRank and its importance is truly over-hyped.

Proper linking between pages of your website, if done right, will help retain the total
PageRank of your site and will also distribute your site’s overall PageRank value to
your most important pages. Your site’s total “PR” value is simply the sum of the PR
values of all the individual web pages. But keep in mind that PR is calculated and
usually referred to on a per-page basis.

Internal links serve to share or distribute PageRank among all pages of your site.
Links on your site that point to other websites can decrease PR from those pages
that contain outbound links (and hence your site’s total available PR), while links
from other sites can increase your site’s total PageRank.

The more internal links there are between pages of your site, the more evenly
distributed the PageRank becomes in your site. Let’s see why this is important.



Structuring Your Internal Links

There are two main types of internal linking – hierarchical and mesh.

Hierarchical linking
Hierarchical linking is where one or more pages on your site (such as the home
page) are considered more important than other pages. Important pages are linked

Keywords in link text should match keywords found on the page that the link points to – especially in the title of the page

Here is an example of the ideal link structure for Google. Of primary importance is
the use of keywords in link anchor text (text between the <A HREF> </A> tags). Note
also the use of keywords in the actual name of the graphics file.


Text-Based (Ideal) Link Structure:

<A HREF=”your-keywords.html”>your keywords</A>

If you must use graphics-based links on your web pages, be sure and fill in the ALT
text attribute of the image tag as follows:

Graphics Link Structure:

<A HREF=”your-keywords.html”>
<IMG SRC=”your-keywords.gif” ALT=”your keywords” BORDER=”0”></A>


What Google Ignores

Google ignores the following elements on your web pages. Due to their abuse and
misuse, META tags are a thing of the past with Google!

•   Information in the <META name= “Keywords”> tag

•   Information in all other META tags (see META “Description” tag caveat)

•   Information within the <!—Comments --> tag

•   Information within the <STYLE>

•   Information within <SCRIPT> tags (JavaScript and other client-side code)

•   Duplicate links to the same page (only counted once)

•   Links that point to the same page they are on

•   Any graphics or multimedia (menu buttons, photos, animations, Flash)

•   Stop words (“a”, “the”, “is”, etc), single letters and numbers, punctuation.

•   Link (anchor) text: <A HREF>keywords</A>. The clickable portion of links.

•   Headings: <H1>keywords</H1>, <H2>keywords</H2>, etc. Use a stylesheet
    (CSS file) to control the size of heading text to make it blend in better.

•   First paragraph of page (first 20 words): <BODY><P>keywords</P> Bold
    and/or italicize keywords also.

•   Last paragraph of page: <P>keywords </P></BODY>

•   Drop-down boxes: <FORM><OPTION>keywords</OPTION></FORM>

•   URLs: <A HREF=”http://www.keywords.com/”></A>

•   Folder & file names: keywords/keywords.html, keywords.gif

•   Image ALT text: <IMG SRC=” ” ALT=”keywords” > for graphical links


Some people abuse H1 tags by wrapping them around entire pages of content or by
using multiple H1 tags on a page.
This is a bad idea and borders on spam – the H1 tag should be used as a page
headline. It is perfectly legitimate to reduce the size of H1 text using a style sheet but
that’s about it. As a result, Google may be discounting H1 so it may carry less weight
for ranking moving forward.
The same can be said about image ALT text – some people put entire paragraphs of
content in them for each image on a page. It is perfectly legitimate to put keywords
relating to the image but that’s it. Similarly, image ALT text now carries less weight
than before. Images that are clickable (wrapped in a HREF link tag) do not appear to
have a discounting - yet.



Proper Internal Link Structure
Besides the title of a page, Google places special importance on the use of keywords
in the text of links. This means you need to structure your links correctly.

Ideally, you should only use text links on your site as opposed to graphical “button”
links. Google looks for keywords contained in link anchor text – the clickable portion
of the link. Google cannot see graphics-based links – all it has to go on is the ALT
attribute for image tags, which doesn’t carry as much weight.