It has been said a million time, search engine optimization is becoming more and more focused on links and the authority behind those links. If this is the case then you really do need to focus heavily on your one links.

Search engine bots follow links and pass the relevant information back to their masters. The killer for the bot is when it hits a dead link. I see so many web site owners working hard at their linking, even to the point of sitting down with a flowchart and mapping their internal links. This is probably a very good search engine optimization tactic, however, links are not set and forget tactics.

Your search engine optimization program must include a regular check on all links ensuring they are all active and all flowing according to your plans. One broken link can undo many months of hard work and stop the search engine bot right there in its tracks.

If you a moment, go and check your links. If there any of those links are broken - fix them. One of the biggest villains when it comes to broken links are graphics and videos from third party sites. Check your links and keep the bots happy along with your own search engine optimization program.

The next time you create a new page on your web site, consider internal linking as one of your first strategies in search engine optimization. The use of internal linking is often one of the last considerations when in reality it should be one of the first.

Many web site owners (and bloggers), when creating a new page, always think forward - they rarely think back. By this I mean that all their search engine optimization strategies are focused on the new page. Who can I link to? Who can I get to link into my page? Often the most useful links are right there in front of you - if you look back.

Pages that have already been indexed and ranked can give your new page and nice little shunt in the right Search Engine Optimization direction. You can go back into those older pages and place links from that previously indexed page forward to your new page. It is simply a matter of finding keywords or key phrases that you can optimize as links.

Those older pages are already optimized. They already have external links coming in and have plenty of that valuable commodity, link juice (pity you couldn’t buy it in bottles). It makes sense to have some of that link juice flowing forward to your new page. If you then link back to any other page, the link juice will continue to flow.

A simple search engine optimization technique to consider the next time you create a new page - internal linking can sometimes have more power initially than external links.

A reader asks Kalena Jordan this question:

Quick question for ya if you got a minute. If I’m targeting a keyword or phrase, lets say dogs. I write a 500 word article about dogs. I post it on my site. I want to target my main url i.e. www.dogs.com. How many times can I create anchor text in that one article that links to the main page?

Her answer was good, but it was incomplete. In terms of anchor text, one instance of it on one page is enough - at least as it relates to pointing toward another page. Let me explain.

Search engines look at anchor text, but they don’t want you spamming them. If you have a page that uses the same anchor text over and over again and each time you link to the same page then it will look like spam. That’s why I say alter the anchor text and point it to a different page. Here’s an example:

You have a website about the ways you can use bread dough in recipes. On that web site is a page about doughnuts and another page about chicken and dumplings (hungry yet?). On the doughnuts page you mention that you can roll your bread dough just like you did in the recipe for chicken and dumplings and you hyperlink chicken and dumplings to the appropriate page on your website. That’s good. Further down on the page you decide to make another reference to chicken and dumplings and link it to the same page again. It’s not really necessary for a couple of reasons.

No. 1, doughnuts and chicken and dumplings really don’t relate to each other too well. Yes, you can make both with bread dough. I got that. So does Google. Make your point then go on.

No. 2, Google will give you credit for the first anchor text but likely not the second. That is, you aren’t going to get two credits for two instances of anchor text from the one page to another twice. You’re wasting your links by doing that. Just use one instance of anchor text.

An alternative way to use anchor text is to pick two or three keywords per page as part the Search Engine Optimization. One time on your page, link each of those keywords to a different page on your website and (Kalena’s right) make sure that the page you are linking to is actually about what your anchor text link says it’s about.

There are often conflicting opinions when it comes to internal linking and site layout. Back in February we wrote a post on internal links using a tiered structure. I have also read articles that state, amongst other things, that ’sidebar links are actually harmful to your site when it comes to search engine spidering’.

I am not going to argue with the last statement, rather, I believe you can optimize your internal links to to get the most benefit from a search engine whilst still publishing a site that is easy for your visitors to navigate.

A quick recap of the February article. Building a 3 tiered page structure where you have a ‘home’ page as tier one, dedicated pages A, B and C as tier two and sub pages on each of the dedicated pages, A1, A2, A3 etc. The tiered approach sees links to pages A, B and C only on the home page. Each dedicated page would then cross link to its own sub pages. The sub pages would not link from the home page. Thats the design in a simple nutshell.

If, as some Search Engine Optimization experts state, linking from a sidebar for as well as from within a pages content may harm your site you are left in a quandary. Your site is well optimized and appears in the top five results for keyword searches. You are receiving a ton of traffic from those searches. The least you can do is make easy for those visitors to navigate through your site with clear and easy to understand menus.

Sidebar or menu links are not worth a lot when it comes to Search Engine Optimization practices. Linking from the content is worth far more. The simple solution is to include a side bar or menu system with links leading to your A, B and C pages. If you include the noFollow tag on each of these links then the search engines are not going to follow them.

By restricting the movement of the search engine spider the only links with relevance will be the links withing the articles. The nofollow and noindex tags can be very useful when it comes to controlling what areas of your site you want followed and indexed. This includes areas like site wide links that may clash with more important in content links.

One of the most important aspects of your website infrastructure is your internal linking structure. You really need to give it some thought as to how to make the most use of your internal links. There is one site structure that I recommend for most websites that will help you keep a handle on this very important aspect of website maintenance.

Using a tiered page system, you can ensure that you drive traffic and spread your PageRank around so that you get the best benefits from your search engine optimization efforts. The tiered page system looks like this:

Don’t add any pages below tier three - the bottom run of this structure. The home page is your hub. It should be optimized for the one or two most generic keywords related to your niche. The second tier of your website are the pages that are optimized for your best keywords (designated above as Page A, Page B, Page C, and Page D). Each page links from your home page menu bar, which will also appear on every page of your website unless there is a compelling reason not to use the menu bar on a certain page. Because you are linking to these pages from your menu bar, you will effectively have internal links from your home page to each of these tier two pages, from each of your tier 3 pages to each of those pages, and from all other tier 2 pages to each one. Such an internal linking structure allows your visitors to visit the pages that are most important to them in terms of their interests.

Tier 2 And Tier 3 Pages
You have any number of tier 2 pages that you can feasibly include in your menu bar. But I wouldn’t overdo. There are some other things that you can do to make sure that your site doesn’t look over full of links and that your menu bar isn’t too crowded, but that’s another blog post. Suffice it to say, your tier two pages will get the most traffic when you use this internal linking structure.

Your tier 3 pages (designated above as A1 / A2, B1 / B2, etc.) are spin offs from your tier 2 pages. Each tier 2 page should have several tier 3 pages linking from it, but don’t put tier 3 pages on your menu bar. They only link from the tier 2 page that is most closely related to them. The only cross-linking at this level of your site should be between tier 3 pages that are related to each other in a lateral sense but are not so closely related that they deserve to be under the same tier 2 page.

You can have any number of tier 3 pages you want and they should all be highly optimized around a specific long-tail keyword. These are good pages to sell your items on because they are optimized for very specific keywords.

If you utilize the three-level tiered site structure, you can manage your internal linking very effectively. If you pay close attention to your links, you should never have a broken link. But if you do it will be very easy to monitor and track your internal links and their effectiveness and how it impacts your overal search engine optimization.

One of the best blog posts I’ve seen in a long time addressing anchor text links and alt tags is on Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Quite frankly, I don’t like Aaron’s new tagline. It doesn’t really say much. The “Rank” and “Dominate” are clear enough. It’s the “Learn” part that really bothers me. But it’s his tagline. I think the blog post has a lot to offer and because it’s Aaron Wall, I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt:

One of my hobby sites has a fairly flat file structure, and some of the internal pages are somewhat linkworthy. The site was not marketed aggressively and the only sitewide link to the homepage was the logo, which I forgot to put an image alt tag on. Google ranked 2 pages on the site well for the core keyword, but neither of those pages were the homepage. I noticed the lacking image alt tag, fixed it, and within a week my homepage was outranking the other pages.

According to SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking factors, alt tags rank moderately high in importance for ranking factors. I agree with that since search engines don’t crawl images. The alt tag is almost the only clue search engines have for ranking images. They do look at surrounding text on the page and page quality factors, etc. But what is missing in the study is the importance of the link title attribute. I went looking for it and couldn’t find it.

That said, I do believe that the title attribute is of some importance, though probably not as important as the image alt tag. An image hot linked to a website with a strong alt tag will likely draw much more mojo than the the title attribute on an anchor text link. However, I don’t see how the hot linked image, no matter how strong the alt tag is, can even come close to strong anchor text, with or without the title attribute. I think the reason the title attribute isn’t as important as the anchor text itself is because the anchor text is so important that the title attribute pales in comparison. Still, I would include the title attribute in every link possible.

According to the same SEOmoz study, bold text with keyword usage is only slightly less important than the alt tag. I disagree with this somewhat. When it comes to search engine optimization, I think bold and italics indicates importance to the page content writer, but that doesn’t always equate to search engine importance, although it may. It depends on the other on-page qualities. Nevertheless, if we use the .3 difference between alt tag importance and bold text importance as a benchmark, I think the difference in importance between alt tags and title attributes is only slightly more than that - maybe a .5 or .6. What that says to me is that, given two web pages that are equivalent in all factors except that one uses an image alt tag with a missing title attribute on the page and the other includes a title attribute but misses the image alt tag then the page that has the alt tag is going to win out, only by a nudge. I don’t know if Aaron would agree with that, but it makes sense to me.

Should you set your links to open in a new window or have them open in the same browser window that your visitors have open? Do you know how to do it either way?

This is a question for serious webmasters. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. It really depends on your goals and what you want your links to do. As a general rule, I would make all my internal links - links that take site visitors from one page to another within my website - open in the same browser. To have every link open up a new browser window is very annoying for many people so you want to do that sparingly. That doesn’t mean you’ll never do it.

Some times when you might want to have a link open in a new browser window are:

• When you are sending visitors to a resource outside of your own website but you don’t want them to leave your website
• When you want to collect specific information from the visitor, you might want to open your survey or info-collection box in a pop up window initiated by a click
• When you have information on a product or service that should be accessed by clicking on a specific link but the page your visitors is on also has other information that you want them to continue reading or browsing
• When you have a site feature that will hold your visitor’s interest for awhile, such as a blog or a forum, and you think they might still be interested in viewing the information on the current page after they’ve had a chance to see what your other feature offers

As you can see, there are several good reasons why a new browser window might be in order, but for most links I would say it isn’t necessary. If you want a browser window to open in the same window, you generally don’t need any code to make that happen. It’s the default for most browsers. But if you want a new browser window to open up when a visitor clicks on a link, just add target=”new” to the a href tag between your brackets. That link will open in a new window.

(Source) There are good reasons to use internal links (I think the one I used above is a good one), but overall, it is just a sleazy practice meant to do nothing else but keep people on your property. To me, the idea of a link is to send people away and have them come back for more.

I must admit, I don’t understand this at all. If it can be proven that internal linking keeps people on your website longer and leads to increased revenue (which it does) then why should anyone object? Is it because they aren’t getting the revenue and the traffic? Is this a type of professional jealousy?

The last sentence - about sending people away so they’ll come back for more - is just naive. There’s no reason to believe that if you send people away from your website that they will come back for more. If they’re browsing and just stumble upon your website then it is likely they won’t come back as there is no guarantee that they will ever find you again. It’s not that I’m against external linking. I’m not. But it has been proven that internal linking has SEO benefits, increases traffic to all of your pages, keeps people on your website longer, and leads to increased revenues. My question is, what could be wrong with any of that?