Link Structure within Your Website: SEO Basics – Part One

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 4:02 pm

This is probably the most obvious, but certainly one of the most overlooked aspects of search engine optimization. This helps to make sure that search engine spiders can actually find (crawl) all of your site’s pages. If they can not find them, then they won’t get spidered, and this means that they won’t get indexed.

In this SEO basics tutorial I give you some link structure tips you should apply to your website.

First, it is important that you make sure that all pages on your site link to at least one other page. Pages which do not link out are known as “dangling links”. It is important that you structure the internal links so that targeted keywords are reinforced. So make sure that you organize your links so that your topic’s sub topic pages are linked to it (ensuring that you use the right link text that is specific to the page being linked to) and vice versa.

Link Text (<a href=”url”>some link text</a>)
This is one of the 2 most important elements to ensure good rankings for a site. It can either be on pages within the site, or on other sites’ pages.

It is vital that you include the target page’s main keyword in the link text. Also, whenever possible, do not use identical text for every link that links to a page. But you can include the target page’s main keyword in the link text instead.

Title Tag <title>some title words</title>
This is probably the second most important element in order to get good rankings for a site. It is important that you make sure the page’s keyword is contained within this tag. So try to place the keyword first in your title while ensuring that the title reads well.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with you placing the main keyword up front on its own and then follow it with a period such as “Page Rank. Google Page Rank and how do I make the most of it?” As you can see, the target keyword here is of course “Page Rank”.

What you should obviously do is make sure that each page’s title tag is different from the title tags on your site’s other pages.

Description Tag <meta name=”description” content=”a nice description”>
You will find that some search engines, such as Google, do not always display the description. To increase the probability that your description shows up, use an SEO plugin, for Wordpress All in One SEO Pack works very well. Then, write a description that is appealing and incorporates the page’s keyword into it.

Keywords Tag <meta=”keywords” content=”some keywords”>
It is important to remember that the keywords tag is never actually treated by search engines as keywords. They will be treated as text on a page. Although this tag is not effective as it used to be, there is no reason to leave it out.

Instead, make sure that you put your most relevant keywords, one or two is best, and never more than 5 because that will make you appear as a spammer.

H Tag <Hn>some heading words</Hn>
The “n” in this tag represents a number from 1 to 6. The biggest heading is represented by 1. You will find that H tags are given more weight than ordinary text in a page, and so the bigger the H size, the more weight it will have.

So it is important that you include your target search term in the H tags at least once on the page. Also place your first H Tag as near to the top of the site page as possible.

Read Part Two of this tutorial:

Additional Resources:

Why Use SEO – Part One

Why Use SEO – Part Two