Linking is an essential part of SEOs and increasing page rankings, but at times it sounds forced or too repetitive. Here are some tips to make linking seamless and sound natural.

It is best to get links from various sources. Do not just rely on blogs, forums or directories. You can use all of them and add article sites, social bookmarking sites, new sites, editorial sites and many more other sources.

Keep in mind that the number of domains linking to you are much more important than the amount of links you have. Having many links from the same domain does not help much. It is better to have different links coming from different domains.

“Use the exact anchor text for 40% of your links”, but alter them in a way that they are combined with other words. For example, use “famous Italian restaurants” instead of just “Italian restaurants”, this type of anchor text must comprise 20% of the links. The remaining 40% of links should use anchor texts such as “check it out”, “click here”, “learn more” or showing the website itself.

If you create a page and optimize it for “Italian Restaurants”, direct 40% of the links to this page and 60% to your homepage. Do not lead all the links to the page you want to rank.

Lastly, use no-follow links. They help make linking more natural and less scripted.

Image from ivanpw

The Good

Cross linking benefits you in two ways: it helps you SEO-wise and helps your readers find related more easily. For the SEO part, cross linking is good because it helps establish relevancy between posts and pages. Pages containing related topics will, of course, be the ones linked to each other. Just make sure the anchor text for the links contain the keywords you need to help search engines know what the pages’ topics are.

When it comes to helping your readers, cross linking to older related posts will not only make access to these posts a whole lot easier for readers but will actually encourage them to stay on your blog longer.

The Bad

There are two things to avoid when cross linking: doing it excessively and misleading readers.

Linking excessively to your own posts can make you look either desperate or irritating. The main reason for linking to older posts should be to help readers find something of value to them and not just be means for self-promotion. That said, link only when it will provide value to your readers.

Misleading readers is even worse in my book. This happens when the anchor text you use is such that it makes readers think that they’ll be routed to an external page that’s the source of your post but instead gets routed to another post on the same topic. I hate it when that happens. It looks greedy because you’re caging readers in even when pointing them to an external page will help them find further information they need.

Both kinds of links are very important but when it comes to SEO external links carry more weight. The reason for this is that, as we know, one of the factors that search engines look at to determine a page’s rank is popularity. The number of external links is indicative of the popularity of a page, which is why search engines give this type of links more weight. However, always remember that when it comes to external links it is not just the number that matters but the relevance of the link to your page’s content as well as the authority of the page that point to you.

Just because external links carry more weight it doesn’t mean that you should neglect internal links. You need to pay attention to internal links for SEO purposes since they still do carry some weight and search engines also use your internal links to determine relevance of contents from page to page. Aside from this a good link structure is helpful to search bots. You to make things as easy as possible for bots if you want all pages crawled every time the bot visits. Furthermore the effects of good internal link structure carry over to user issues. If you don’t have internal links aside from the navigation bar (whether on the side bar on at the top of the page) you will be missing opportunities to usher users to another part of the site they may be interested in.

1. Canonicalize your URL – Use the canonical tag to let search engines know which version of the URL, for pages with multiple URLs, they should consider to be the authoritative or original URL. Here’s how to use the canonical tag:

2. Choose absolute links over relative links – Rick Dejarnette tells us that the use of an entire URL (absolute link) as opposed to a file address will reinforce the canonicalization as well as focus the link juice to your preferred URL.

3. Use proper URL syntax in the anchor tag – According to Mr. Dejarnette you should follow the standard formats listed below:

• For URLs that point to the default or index file of a directory, omit the default file name and instead end the URL with a folder name, always followed by the trailing “/” (as in href=”http://www.mysite.com/”>http://www.mysite.com/). This is even true for default file name URLs that use dynamic parameters (as in http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx?var=1)
• For URLs that are not the default file for a folder, it is fine to include the file name in the full URL, even if there is no dynamic parameter (as in http://www.mysite.com/article.htm)
• For URLs that include ampersands (typically used between sets of dynamic attributes), substitute the equivalent escape code & for the single ampersand character (&) to enable the page to pass HTML validation checks (as in http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx?var=1&var=2)

More on URL/links optimization next time…

Let us look at a situational example to make it clearer. Let us say that you join a certain forum where the members aim to amass a good amount of links. What the people do is to offer to create a link in their blog to your blog. In exchange, you create a link to their blog from your blog. Sounds like a good exchange, right? This is in fact reciprocal linking, which we have already discussed. One problem with this kind of linking is that sometimes, people merely create links without really looking into the other party that is linking back to their blog.

One consideration would be the quality of that blog. What kind of blog is linking back to your site? Does it have a decent Pagerank? Does it have a lot of fresh content? If the blog that is linking to you is spammy, then you will not really benefit from that link. Another consideration would be the blog’s relevance to your own blog. Personal blogs do not have much of a problem – they cover a lot of topics. But if you are maintaining a niche blog, you should get links from related sites. Otherwise, they are not really useful.

As you are probably sick of my posts on keywords I promise that this will be the last one on the topic…at least for a while. We’ve talked about the importance of keywords in your website content. However keywords are important not just as part of your content but also in your title tags and in links. Furthermore the way keywords are placed in proximity to each other as well in the sequence of words in a key phrase are also important.

When using title tags make sure you use descriptive words or phrases. Your title tag will act as the keyword. The keyword or phrase used as the title tag will get more emphasis or weight and will be taken by the search engines as a central topic in your site since it is part of the title tag.

When adding links to your site make sure you use a words or a short phrase that describes exactly what the link points to. Never simply paste the URL of the link nor use vague words to describe the link. In an attempt to be precise many people often make this mistake and write something like visit this blog. The SEO conscious way of doing it would be to write visit this blog on IT Security to learn more.

When using keywords be conscious about how you place the keywords. Try to scatter keywords an phrases related to each other in your content. Don’t just focus on a single term and try to use that term over and over again. Although term frequency does bear weight it is important that you cover your bases so that your site will contain the varied a lot of the varied search strings that are in demand. Try to change the sequencing of the? words within the phrases too since users tend to differ in the sequencing of words in their search string.

There is a saying that goes ?The good guys always finish last.? Perhaps that is why there are people who resort to black hat methods to get their page rankings up. Yet there is such a thing as ethical SEO, as featured in a previous post. Ethical SEO does not mean you will not get your site high up in search directories nor will it take you forever. In fact, it guarantees lasting results.

Just as there are black hat methods, at the other end of the spectrum we have white had methods. These are the recommended SEO techniques that will help you get where you want go ? in the acceptable way.

There are quite a few white hat practices that you can employ to make your page ranking improve dramatically. Here are some of the most common, but sometimes overlooked ones:

? Writing informational articles under a Creative Commons or another open source license. Your stipulation for the use of your article would be to link to your site.
? Get rid of session IDs ? this will allow spiders to navigate your pages without having to login
? Use anchor tag hyperlinks
? Utilise metadata and make sure they?re accurate
? Provide a unique and relevant name to each page in your site
? Employ specific wording instead of vague and ambiguous statements

You may employ all the white hat techniques in the world but the concept basically boils down to one thing ? content. Make high quality content your basic goal and the rest will follow.

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