Formatting Links for Strong SEO
Everybody knows that links are an important aspect of how search engine crawlers index your website. They’re at least as, if not more important, than the actual text on your pages. They can be followed by spiders in order to index other pages of your website and you can add your keywords to them so that they can also be part of the indexing process. Below are a few tips on how to use hyperlinks to improve SEO.
1. When formatting links you should try to include keywords that pertain to your site as often as possible. You should also include as much descriptive text surrounding the keyword as you can in order to catch any keyword phrase searches. Most users search for specific phrases rather than single keywords.
2. Link to other sites and get them to reciprocate. Linking to other sites can drive traffic through your website. A user might be following a link through your website, but if your content and design is good it might catch their eye and they might stop to visit your site along their journey.
3. Use links in javascript menus and dropdowns. This will provide clear text that a visiting web crawler can read.
4. Try to construct a collection of quality back links. You don’t want just any site linking to you. If you have disreputable sites linking back to you it might damage the reputation of your site by association.
5. Add keyword phrases to your links in order to help drive local search traffic to your site. For example, if you have a commerce site that sells baseball uniforms try including your location in the keyword phrase of your link such as “Tuscaloosa Baseball Equipment” instead of just “baseball uniforms”. This will help attract searchers looking for specific topics relative to their area.
6. Make sure that you don’t have specific pages inside your site included as part of your domain name. For example, http://www.mydomain.com/home.html should not be part of your domain name. Leave off the home.html and setup your web server to automatically use this as the start page. By using the page title in the domain name you’re splitting your links and degrading your page rank.
7. The quickest way to get a spider to visit your site is to get links to your site included on another reputable site. If those sites are being indexed then the spider will eventually follow those links to your site and index your pages. This is much faster than going through the lengthy search engine application process. You shouldn’t count on this method as an alternative to the search engine application processes, but you should use this method in conjunction with it to go ahead and get the ball rolling while you’re going through the application process.
The use of links is one of the most important SEO strategies. Internal, external, back, and forward links are all important in how they’re formatted and where they go to and come from. By using your SEO savvy to construct your links you’ll be rewarded with the page rank you’re seeking.
