Links

When building your website (and you always should be), it’s makeup will include a combination of both internal and external links. Internal links refer to the links that send your traffic to other pages on your site, a proverbial intra-state highway system. External links refer to the links that send your traffic to another website other than your own.

Your Google Analytics account can track and report how your visitors navigate the pages and links within your site, but there isn’t a core feature that tracks traffic when they click away on an external link. However, there is a quick tweak you can do to the way external links are constructed that will tell Google Analytics to track of the number of visitors you are sending away. Read more »

One of the first rules of Search Engine Optimization is to build links on your website in order to get ranked higher by search engines. But to the chagrin of someone’s grandmother, all links are not created equal. Some links are more valuable and popular than others, and certain categories of links can even lower your site’s ranking. Link Value and Popularity is important because it is a decisive factor used by search engines in determining a site’s position in search results. Read more »

How do the search engines know which are the most important pages on your site? Read more »

Every webpage you create is going to have links on it and outbound links benefit the site you are linking to. But what if you delete those old pages? If you delete them you also delete those links that were acting as your website's ambassadors of good. When it comes to your webpages you should always lean toward keeping them and only delete pages after careful consideration of what it might do to your outbound links and your sitemap. This will keep the sites you link to happy and will also keep your navigation from getting broken.

Sometimes when people give you a link to a page they will hyperlink the text "click here". This is not a good SEO practice because the text you anchor your link with needs to have a relevant keyword in it. If you are linking to a page about 'pet grooming' then you need to put that key phrase in the anchor link. This is one of those practices that looks good to search engines and human visitors alike.

In your website you should link all of your important pages to all of your other important pages. This is a pretty straightforward idea but it's not always executed. Inter-linking your important pages is important for visitors so that they will be able to easily navigate the important pages on your website. Inter-linking is also important for the search engines who may enter your site on any given page. If this page links to your other important pages it will be easy for them to follow along, indexing these pages as they go.