Internal linking is built around your navigation. The spiders will suck all of your links into their database and then return to visit each of them in turn. This is how they find their way around your site and this is how you will get all of your pages indexed.

“Home” … or “Click Here” … how many times have you seen these used as anchor text? OK, so if your anchor text is being used by the engines to help them define the page the link points at … what on earth do we use anchor text like “Home” or “Click Here”??? It’s insanity! Yet we see it all the time.

Differing the anchor text pointing at your pages helps the engines to see things in a different light. Since your home page is more than likely defined by the broadest of your categories you may be able to use a few different key phrases as anchor text pointing at it. Be careful on other pages of your site though. Don’t try and target too many keywords to any one page, it will lose focus and be less targeted at the phrases you are trying to target through it.

Use your site map to define your pages via the anchor text with the most important keyword or phrase for that particular page. Good SEO says to use anchor text that is repeated in the title tag. You won’t go wrong here!

Outbound links carry importance just like inbound links do. You want to link out to places that are similar in some way to what your site, or at least whatever page you are on, is all about. Make the outbound link relevant so that it holds value for your users. Don’t be an internet dead end … always have links out to other sites to complete the connection of the world wide web.

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The value of a link can be bantered about by SEO types but the bottom line is really one of the most basic premises of any website … it’s overall value and worth. Not all websites are created equal, so how can links be? Well, let’s look a step deeper into this idea of the value of a link … beyond all relevance of the site itself.

In all it’s basics when we try to find a good link we look at the website itself, and what the subject matter is. We are looking for relevance. Shoe laces to shoes or blue widget to red widgets type of market comparison, where relevance lives large. But, what about the page itself, are there any reasons here that will make this particular link better than any other?

Here are some factors that a good webmaster with an eye towards making a very valuable web page will be attentive to:

• Often the domain.com name itself.
• The filename.html.
• The title tag, of course.
• The H1 tag, perhaps H2 as well.

So, our subject at hand is finding valuable pages to get a link “from”. Let us evaluate the pages we find for these factors. What I am trying to point out here is … a page that meets these values will be a much more valuable link than one that does not. A page that meets these values will have importance in the Google algorithm and will share that importance with any outgoing link from it.

So what else then is there to determine the value of a page to get a link from? Links of course!

• Inbound links from other sites pointing to this page.

So here we have five ways of judging the value of a link pointing to our site.

I know this makes getting a “good” link a lot more of a chore than it is without meeting these factors but the fact remains … these are things that make for a super valuable inbound link.

There is a lot more to learn about linking within the Advanced SEO Training Course as well as some good basics within the free eBook called SEO Basics 101.

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I like to provide good navigation for the spiders to find all of the links to all of my pages. I like to add in a sitemap as well, to be sure they are getting all the links. On a very large site, where there are a lot of sections, or categories, I want to get as many of the page linked as possible … not just one link to the page, but them repeated, somewhere.

One often used way to do this is by adding a block of links, to every page, at the bottom of the site, along with the footer and copyright. This seems to work well, and I have used this many times, and will continue to do so as well. When a site is so large that this block of links becomes huge, it’s time for another strategy … but what? I have not really come up with a solution here other than having each category link only to all the pages within that particular category, with main category links elsewhere. I’ve used a top horizontal nav bar for the main categories, and listing all the pages within each category down the left nav column. This works, and is perhaps the best solution for a large site with lots and lots of pages.

Internal links are important. I also like to get them within the content itself. I feel this is important in the same way that it is very valuable to get a text link from another site … these links within the actual content of the site are excellent to get. I believe they are excellent in showing importance to another page on the same site as well.

Think out your internal linking strategy and provide the engines with plenty of places to find your links … and make it as easy for your users to get around your site as well. When your users get to the bottom of your page … do they have to scroll back up to find another link to go to? This isn’t the best way to have your site set up. Consider a block of links at the bottom of the content, or along with the footer.

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Well, duplicate content is not a good thing, but we need to really define duplicate content as in the eyes of the search engines.

Article are seen much like news where many sites may publish the same story. This is very important to understand. There is a distinct difference between content that is the same on every page of your site, and content that is the same on your site as it is on other sites. Go one step further and determine what kind of content it is. If it’s newsy, or an article, then it is probably seen by the engines as OK.

To keep it short, any content that is considered to be news, or timely information, is more than likely published elsewhere on the web as well as on whatever site you are on. This is a given, as no one site can be entitled to have all the news, or information.

Keep writing articles and keep them informative.

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I believe Jill is right on the money. See, Google wants sites with merit to be high in their listings. When we, as optimizers, improve a site so that it more closely meets the requirements of their algorithm, we are actually pushing a site into the top listings that Google would not normally put there.

So, and I have mentioned this before (Jill I’m thinking all the time too!) too much of a good thing can turn bad. Things like alt= tags don’t necessarily always need to have your keywords in them. It can become overkill. All of your anchor text doesn’t have to be your most important keywords and phrases. Think about this … how many times have you seen a link where the anchor text says … “Click Here”. Quite a number, I’m sure. So, in the natural order of things, within the Google database, there should be a significant number of links pointing at your site that say “Click Here”. My point is, you don’t want to have every single one of them, and this is important if the majority of the links pointing at your site are generated by you, be your most important keywords. Mix it up … and yes, use some that are not keywords and don’t … from an SEO point of view … help you out.

I may be out on a limb here, but I even like the reciprocal link for this reason … but not when it is on a page called links.html, or resources.html, but when it is from within the actual content of the site … and vice versa. Long gone are the days of reciprocal linking, and in particular, the links page. I believe links like this are natural and should exist.

The bottom line for optimization, and Ma Google won’t fight you on this one, provide valuable content that can’t be found anywhere else and that which makes your reader happy to have found your site. You’ll always win if you can do this!

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Ever consider submitting a testimonial to another site? This could work well for you if you have the right complementary market. For instance, if you can include a link back to your site within the testimonial, or signature included within it, you have a nice backlink. But you need to have a complimentary market to do this. You don’t want irrelevant links, but very relevant links.

Perhaps a good example would be a restaurant site who sends in a testimonial about a brand of frying pans.

Get the idea.

Good, now make use of it.

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The links pointing in to your site, for the most part, are all very important.

One link pointing to your site from a very well established, important, authority site … is worth 100 other basic links.

When you are looking for links try hard to find sites that are super super relevant to you, and are important authority type of sites. These sites are also sometimes referred to as trusted sites. They are not easy to find, and even harder to get in touch with to get a link, and they won’t link out if it has no purpose for them.

But … here is where you could get lucky … if the relevance is there, they may see where their users could benefit from reading something on your site.

Try adding some content that goes hand in hand with some of their content. Get in touch and say … “hey, you mention this on your site … I go into more detail here …” and maybe you’ll get lucky and have them link back to you to provide a more thorough explanation to their users!

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One thing holding true is the anchor text used in the links pointing to your site … as well as those throughout your site. You want to utilize your most important key phrase, or keyword, as anchor text.

But don’t jump out the window with this information! Over the years the algorithm has been fine tuned, and believe me, it will continue to be fine tuned. Today, repeating the same anchor text over and over is not going to help you out. Having every inbound link to your site have the same anchor text isn’t going to help you out as you think either. You need variety.

Use variations, similar keywords, completely different keywords. Link to more than just your main home page so that you utilize many different keywords for these inbound links.

Nothing is cut and dry any more in SEO … everything is forever changing and you need to be part of the flow. Just keep in mind that you can’t appear as SPAM, or some sort of commercial exploitation … and you will probably keep yourself OK.

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Well, this is really a plain stupid question.

Let’s define “Link Bait”. Link bait is the act of placing content on your site. The whole idea is to get another webmaster to link to that content, so it goes without question that you are adding valuable content to your site … content that is worthwhile to link to.

So, of course it is a good idea to add “link bait” to your site! It can’t hurt you at all, and definitely will help you.

Content, valuable content anyway, is always a good addition to your site. I had a site years and years ago originated as an aid to people who were new to Internet Relay Chat (IRC). At the time I was a Network Administrator on one IRC Network and consequently met with a lot of people who were new to the IRC phenomenon … newbies we called them. Yes, we spelled it “newbies”. During that time I put up a chart on the site that explained how to get oddball characters to display on screen. Accents, pi characters, bullets etc., etc., etc. This was a really popular chart. You could look at the chart and then type in the corresponding code and you would have that character on your screen. This was a popular thing to do within the IRC channels and it caught on huge. I got hundreds of visitors to it on a regular basis. This was the first exposure to link bait for me … I understand it’s value.

But what can be utilized for link bait? Well, that story should tell you something. A glossary of terms is another fairly good idea for link bait. I have had some mixed success with that. What you need is anything that is very relevant to what your site is about, and … hear this … meets a need.

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Authority.

It seems to all boil down to authority, or … importance … or whatever word you want to give to it … it’s the main reason “why” your website is ranked where it is.

Let’s trip back when Google first appeared on the scene. The search world was pretty much awash in irrelevant search engine results. You could search for something and come up with a whole page full of results that hardly even touched upon the subject you were searching for. A better method for search engines to rank pages was being begged for.

Google appeared and one very large part (if not the largest) of their algorithm was what we today call “inbound links”. Google looked at all the links on your site. They noted what sites you linked to, and what text you used within that link. Above all, they considered a link “away” from any website to be a good positive vote for the other site. After all, when someone willingly lets their users know of another website that may be interesting to them … and further … willingly sends them there … it must be for a good reason.

This “human” vote is a very good indication of the quality of the other site. This became the one driving force behind Google (in my opinion anyway) that made them the success they are today.

Of course it was discovered over time that this is what is behind the Google algorithm and people began this long quest to generate inbound links. Originally everyone jumped onto the bandwagon and began trading links with anyone and everyone. This had a short lived boost in importance as Google (of course) caught on to this and relevancy became the buzz word in regards to links.

Now everyone wanted inbound links from sites that were relevant to the same market your site was all about. So a link from a shoe store was a fairly good match for the guy who is selling socks. This made getting links harder to get because not everyone who is running a store wants to link out to anyone who is in the same market. Fear of competition made inbound linking become harder and harder.

Well, I don’t want to go over the entire history of linking and what all of us SEO types have had to slop through over the years since Google came on board … but this little scenario should be enough to educate you as to why links are so important.

Today, we still need and want these inbound links. The way we get them has undergone change after change after change … and the change has even undergone change … lol.

There are lots of ways to get links today … none of them exactly easy, and of course, the relevance is still of primary concern. As is the importance (PageRank) and authority of the site that links to you.

That more or less covers this lightly which is all I wanted to do, but I want to mention spam here as well, for those of you who are actively learning about linking and are heading off now to do some.

There is software available for inbound linking that automates the process. I’ll discuss this type of thing more in another posting. A rule of thumb is that whenever something becomes automated, it’s probably not going to work for you. Think of automation as “automatic spam”. That is generally what it is.

These automatic linking programs will add senseless content in the way of comments to blogs all over the internet. Here is a very, very good example of it.

This blog has been out of commission for quite a while. I’ll bet it’s been six months since it was corrupted and went offline. I reinstalled the software behind the scenes and then simply left it alone. I didn’t have time to post even one posting … or in reality, get myself ready to being running the blog again. It’s a daily (or at least regular) commitment.

During this time I received hundreds of “comments” on … the one default posting that comes along with the install. This is a “WordPress” blog. When you install a WordPress blog you get one posting that is titled “Hello World”, with a very short paragraph saying that you’ve installed the software.

I had comment after comment after comment telling how “wonderful this posting is”, how the person leaving the comment “agrees completely”, they go on and on .. “I learned a lot”, “you are certainly right and I agree with you”, etc., etc., etc.

Well … sheesh … there is no posting there to begin with!!!

So how on earth is any automated script going to help you when that it what you get … really.

You need to do this linking yourself, without automation, and with leaving intelligent and informative responses. Afterall, these comments will be read by a human … not only by the engines. What you really want it to have someone visit your site, as well as get the inbound link from the blog.

Oh … remember … lots of blogs today put “no follow” tags on the comments so you won’t get a blink from every blog out there. Do your due diligent research to find this out.

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