It isn’t just the backlinks pointing into our site that we need to be concerned with. There are also the links going out, and the links internal as well. Both outbound links and internal linking are very important to optimization and both need to be tended to in their own ways.

Navigation is where your internal links will reside. The spiders will visit your site and go from link to link until they have indexed your entire site. As long as you provide a link to every page of your site, they will find the pages and index them.

While surfing around I’ll bet you have seen links with nondescript anchor text like “Home” or “Click Here”. It seems every site has its share of these links and the very non-search engine friendly anchor text. Anchor text is important for the engines because it helps to define the destination of the link. It’s important to make this descriptive.

I like to mix up the anchor text pointing to different pages of the site. I think this is an effective way to help the engines define different pages for different keywords and phrases. I don’t go overboard though. Generally speaking I don’t like to target any page for more than two keywords or phrases, and they are generally closely related. It just seems to make sense to me to keep a tight focus on one thing … rather than diluting the page with multiple focuses.

Site maps are one excellent way to show the spiders where all your pages are. This is why you always want to use the most important key phrase and words in the anchor text on the site map. My recommendation is to use the same key phrase (or keyword) that you use in the title tag of that page. This is a good optimization practice for any page.

Don’t overlook outbound links. The entire WWW is made up of websites that all interconnect. It’s a lot like a spider web, which is where the terms web and spider came from in the beginning. If you are not linking out to other sites when the spiders arrive they arrive at a dead end. This is not good. Link out to sites that are relevant to your market, compliment your site and are of use to your users.

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.

categories: internal linking,outbound linking

Tagged with: internal linking • Link Building • outbound linking

Filed under: Link Building

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