Factors that influence the position of your site in search results

Part 2 - Links

First of all, let's define different kinds of links that can be used to optimize your website.

Internal Links - hyperlinks that navigate to a webpage within the same website. Internal links can also be used to navigate between various sections of the same page (if this page is long).

Inbound Links - hypelinks that navigate from another website to your site. These links help improving Page Rank of your site. The inbound links pointing to webpages of your website enhance the correspondent pages popularity.

Outbound Links - hyperlinks that navigate from your website to another website.

How to use internal links:

1. Internal links

Anchor text of internal links:

Anchor text is the text that has a hyperlink attached to it. Example of anchor text:
<a href="http://www.bizi-marketing.co.il/articles.htm">Articles on Marketing and Advertising</a>

Your site visitors will see this as a link, which will navigate them to a corresponding page: Articles on Marketing and Andvertising.

It's recommended to include 2-3 keywords or a keyphrase in the anchor text of the internal links. By this you show relevance of the link to the content of the target page.

It's also useful to use named anchors for your internal links. Named anchor is a target place of internal links. By using named anchors your indicate to a search engine that the target page or paragraph is important.

Example of a named anchor in the code of your site:
<a href="#articles">Articles on Marketing and Advertising</a> where "#articles" is the named anchor.

Absolute links versus Relative links.

Absolute link is a link that shows the full path (full URL) of the target page. Example of absolute link: <a href="http://www.bizi-marketing.co.il/articles.htm">Articles on Marketing and Advertising</a>

Relatvie link is a link that shows only the second part of the path, omitting the indication of the root directory, for example: <a href="../articles.htm">Articles on Marketing and Advertising</a>

It is generally recommended to use absolute links due to hijacking related issues (making a SE think that there exists another web website at your URL).

2. Inbound links

Anchor text of inbound links - the same as for Internal links. Inbound links have greater sigivicance for search engines so that more peculiar attention should be paid to optimizing and creating inbound links.

Source of inbound links: It is crucially important to make sure that the sites that link to your site are reputable and that the content of these sites is relevant to the subject matter of your site. Usually you can define reputability of a site by checking its Google Ranking. The best is if you can obtain links from .edu or .gov sites. These sites are rated by Google higher than other sites.

The more inbound links navigate to your site, the better. However, links from low rated sites, link farms or other kind of suspicious sites may damage your site. Google "knows" that you can't always control what a links farm links to, so Google won't penalize your site for being linked to from a link farm, provided these links are not reciprocal.

3. Outbound links

It's not recommended to put a lot of outbound links on your site. Usually Google doesn't like it and having lots of outbound links may even damage the PR of your site.

DO NOT place any links to link farms and suspicious sites on your site. This may result in penalizing your site and it will take a long time to restore its listing in Google or other search engines.

TIP: to optimize the amount of outbound links you can use a special tag - <noindex> that forbids the indexation of the tagged content. Besides that you can you the "rel=nofollow" parameter inside the html <a> tag.

Reciprocal links and cross linking (site A links to site B, site B - to site C, site C - back to site A) are not recommended. It looks like link trading and Google knows how to identify this kind of linking strategy. It may damage your site's position in Google and your site may even be penalized.

To sum up:

Always use keywords in your links' anchor text; use tags, link back to the Home Page from all the pages of your site, don't use reciprocal or cross linking strategy, don't link to link farms, use absolute links rarther than relative links. Search Engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo are clever and they are learning all the time. It's hard to deceive them. Keep it simple, keep it "human-oriented", play WITH the search engines, not AGAINST them.

to be continued...

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