14.2. Linking Pages together
September 6, 2008 by Andy
OK, back to linking strategy. You have your main pages written, right?
Create a menu using text links, so that there is a text link to each of your main pages. At the top of this menu, insert a text link back to your homepage. You can remove this homepage link at a later date if you decide to use breadcrumb navigation on each page (but we will look at that later in the course).
If your site has 5 main pages, your menu should have six links – one to the homepage, and 5 to the main pages.
The link text you should use for each link should include the primary keywords of the page it points to. You can make the link text a little more descriptive than just the primary phrase (if you wish), but try to keep each link text short and sweet. The fewer words you add to your primary phrase in the link text, the more concentrated your primary phrase will be.
e.g. if a link was pointing to a page about blue widgets, the best (and most powerful in SEO terms) link text would be
"blue widgets"
If you decide to have a more descriptive link text, you might choose something like this:
"These Blue widgets will save you time"
This has your main phrase in the link text, but it is watered down by 5 other words. This type of link text is less effective, and my advise is to use as few extra words as possible. If you want descriptive, try to put your main phrase as the first word of the link text:
e.g. "Blue widgets save you time"
Once you have created a menu to all of your main pages, insert that menu on the homepage, and on all main pages.
What this does is create a navigation system on your site where each main page is only one click away from any other main page. Spiders love it, and visitors can find what they want quickly.
As a side benefit, each page now has multiple links pointing to it using a keyword rich link text. If your site has a homepage and 5 main pages, each main page will have 6 links pointing to it. As you will see next week, this increases Link Reputation and Page Rank of a page – two ingredients of high search engine rankings.
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