SEO - Optimizing Your Links

May 19, 2008

Recently I wrote a post on the Importance of Backlinks and why it is good for SEO reasons, now I want to shed a little light on how you should optimize the links on your site. Whether incoming or outgoing, they should all be optimized.

Here’s some tips on what a greatly optimized link consist of…

When making a link for your site anchor text is important. “Anchor” Text is the text on the link. To learn a little bit more on the subject check out this post - Anchor Text SEO. The “anchor text” should contain keywords related to the websites niche. So if your site is on the topic of blogging for dollars, then when you link back to your site your anchor text should be “blogging for dollars.”

You can do this by simply adding this code to the html section

<a href=”YourURLGoesHere” target=”_top”>Anchor Text Goes Here</a>

Then magically you would get this…

Blogging For Dollars

Now you have successfully optimized your link with anchor text and have included your keyword.

Deep Linking - Something else you might want to keep in mind is “deep linking.” This is when the link directs you to a related page within the website. Avoid committing the mistake of directing ALL of your incoming links to your home page. When you deep link, the link will send the person to a page more related to the link and the page it’s on, as opposed to directing them to your homepage where a lot of different topics and links related to other things will be - Which does not leak over much keyword value or “link juice.” Deep linking looks much more natural to search engines as well, as opposed to links that send people to the same page, or homepage. - Which can seem out of place to search engines, and could be considered an attempt to manipulate your PageRank.

Domain Age - How old a domain is can add more value to the link. Websites that have been around for a longer period of time are more reliable, and a link from a trusted site gives off more value. This was described in a post I wrote before on why people where choosing Blogger Over WordPress? and any new domain period because blogger was registered since 99′ therefore yoursite.blogpost.com as a domain weighs more and has more value then a brand new domain.

One Way Links - One way links are better then reciprocal links - A reciprocal link is when a site links to you and you link back to it as well, a link exchange. One way links you can pretty much already assume what these are. This is simply when a site links to you, with out you linking back to it. One way links weigh more and give off more value.

Site Updates - How often you update your site is always important, this won’t really add any more weight or value to a link but the search engine spiders will pick up your link more often, which is always good.

Try all of these tips for optimizing and increasing link weight and value, to make getting a higher PageRank an easier task to accomplish.