I want to start looking at the most important aspect of SEO today - links.

There are two broad categories of links we need to look at:

a) Links used to join the pages of your site together, and

b) Links coming into your site from other sites.

We will look at them in that order, since your most pressing task is to link your pages together into a site so you can get it uploaded. Once the site is created, you can then worry about the links from other sites.

14.1. Internal Site Links

The links used to join your pages into a site, are important for a variety of reasons.

1. They provide a navigation system for your visitors, to help them quickly and easily find what they are looking for.
2. They provide a navigation system used by search engine robots, so that they can find all of your pages, and ultimately index your entire site.
3. They give the visitor an idea of what the page being linked to is about, because of the link text.
4. They give the search engines an idea of what the page being linked to is about, because of the link text.
5. They help spread Page Rank to other pages.
6. They build up the reputation of a page (called Link Reputation).

As you can see, there are two distinct groups of visitors that you need to please with your links. Human visitors, and search engine robots.

Let’s just cover link basics here, before we discuss link strategy.

14.1.1. Text links

There are two main ways to link pages to together (there are others, but we wont be discussing them). These are text links and graphics links.

Here is the HTML code of a simple text link:

<a href="a-web-page.html">Link Text</a>

This HTML code can be split into three main parts:

<a href=

This HTML just tells your web browser that there is going to be a link. The link code will be terminated by </a>

"a-web-page.html"

This part tells your web browser where the link points to

>Link Text</a>

This is the link text (the bit that appears underlined on the web page), and is your most powerful SEO "tool" so far discussed.

Text links might also contain a tag called "nofollow". Here is an example:

<a href="a-web-page.html" rel="nofollow" >Link Text</a>

When a link contains a nofollow tag, it does not look any different on the web page, so human visitors can see and follow the link. However, Google, Yahoo and MSN have made it clear that their spiders will not follow a link that has the nofollow tag in it. This means, you can make pages available to your visitors, but effectively hide them from the search engines.

Why is this useful? Well, we will look at that later on in the course when we discuss dynamic linking. If you want to read some more on the nofollow tag now, you should read this article by leading SEO Expert, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch.

14.1.2.Graphic links

The other main way of linking to a webpage is to use a graphic link. With these links, an image is linked to a web page, so that if your visitor clicks on the image, they are sent to the page it links to. Search engines can also follow these graphics links.

Here is an example of a simple graphics link:

<a href="a-web-page.html"><img src="image.gif" alt="ALT TEXT"></a>

This can be split into five sections:

<a href=

As with a standard text link, this HTML just tells your web browser that there is going to be a link. The link code will be terminated by </a>

"a-web-page.html">

The page the link will point to.

<img src=

This tells the web browser to expect a graphic.

"image.gif"

This is the graphic name

alt="ALT TEXT"></a>

This is the text that will be displayed if the visitor has graphics turned off (typical for blind users), and is also the text used by search engines to gauge the page topic (similar, but less effective than link text found in text links).

This type of link can also have the nofollow tag, which is used in the same way as a text link:

<a href="a-web-page.html" rel="nofollow"><img src="image.gif" alt="ALT TEXT"></a>

We stated at the start that links give the visitor and search engine spiders an idea of what the page being linked to is about.

With a text link, that is obvious. It is the link text that provides this information to both visitor and spider. That is the text that is underlined on the web page.

With graphics links, it is slightly different. The ALT text is used by the search engine spiders to decide what the page is going to be about. The ALT text is not visible to your human visitors unless they have graphics turned off (which is usual for blind surfers).

For the typical human visitor, the graphic image is going to be the clue as to what the page is about.

One problem you have with graphic links is that they are not always obvious to your visitor as links to be clicked on.

As just mentioned far, as a search engine is concerned, the graphic link "Alt text" has a similar role to the Text Link "link text", although not as powerful an optimization trick.

The big problem with ALT text is that because it is almost always hidden from human visitors, it has been abused by webmasters in the past, who are trying to stuff keywords into their pages. They can get high keyword density on their pages by stuffing ALT tags (since the Search engines do see the alt text), without the page looking like just a bunch of keywords.

This abuse has lead to the ALT tag becoming less and less effective as an SEO "tool" (although if you abuse them, they could easily get you into trouble).

For these reasons, standard text links are far more effective for linking pages together. They will give you a bigger SEO advantage than graphic links.

A lot of newbie webmasters ignore this. They use templates with graphic based navigation systems, because they think it looks better. This might be the case (although not always), but the navigation bar wont help your rankings much (Some of the javascript nav bars that you can get make it very difficult for search engine spiders to follow).

It is very possible to create nice looking navigation systems using standard text links or text links combined with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and this is what I recommend. If you do not know CSS, don’t worry – just use standard text links in your menus and links pointing to important pages.

Don’t make the life of your visitor, or that of the spider difficult, or they will just get fed up and leave. Text links are easy for visitors to identify and follow, and easy for search engine spiders to identify and follow. They are the link strategy of choice.