Saturday, November 1, 2008

Five internal linking tips that will improve your search engine rankings

Most search engine spiders do not type into your search boxes and they do not use pull down menus. The following tips will help you to make sure that search engine spiders will index your web pages correctly:

1. Use simple text links to link to your web pages

Most search engines cannot index fancy Flash or JavaScript menus. Some even have difficulty with image links. If possible, use simple text links to link to your web pages. You can make text links prettier by styling them with CSS.

2. Your most important pages should not be more than one click away from the index page

Web pages that can be accessed with a few clicks from your home page are considered more important than web pages that are buried deep inside your website. It's easier to get high rankings for these easy to access pages.

3. Use descriptive link texts

The text that you use to link to your web pages helps search engines to better understand your content. If you sell shoes on your website, do not use links such as but descriptive link texts such as business shoes

That makes it easier for search engines to put the page into a context and it will be more likely that the page gets high rankings for the keyword "business shoes".

4. Create a sitemap

A sitemap is a simple web page that contains link to all important pages of your website. You could add a link to your sitemap in the footer of every web page. By doing this, search engines can find all important pages with two clicks.

5. Check the validity of your HTML code

Errors in the HTML code of your web pages can prevent search engines from indexing your web pages correctly. For example, an HTML error might indicate the end of a web page before the actual content begins. That would mean that search engines would skip the content and any links of that page. You can access the official W3C HTML validator in the Tools menu in IBP.

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