Links in general can possibly make or break a website, so far I have only covered external backlinks in link building 101 and link building. For this post however I will be covering how to manage links on your site, by properly linking related posts together you will open your site up to your visitors and help them to navigate your site much better and find what they are looking for.
In a previous post I covered canonicalization of your url so I will not be covering it to deeply here, but it’s important to complete this task because search engines assign page rank to your URLs. Keeping this in mind you’ll want to make sure that all this “link juice” goes to the right page of your website, and by directing it to the same URL will make sure that this gets done. Once you decide which URL structure you would like to use it’s important to use it over and over on your site or for that matter wherever you post links back to your website, this will help search engines determine which page of your site gets the juice from those links.
Of course you cannot control how others my setup links back to your website, but don’t worry you can still control where the link juice is going to some extent, when setting up which URL structure you would like to use you should also setup a 301 redirect to your preferred URL as well. By doing this it will funnel all of that goodness to the right place and make sure that you get everything you deserve.
Relative vs. absolute links
With many of the CMSs available today you have the option of inputting the full URL of a page or just the relative URL (if the new page is on your site). While this relative URL choice maybe much easier for you to input and it gets your visitors to the desire web page, this is not an optimal strategy when it comes to SEO. Using the full URL helps to focus the juice directly to that page, this will help contribute to your cause and efforts. An added benefit of using the full URL is also to prevent theft of your cherished site content. Let’s face the facts, not only are there people out there that think they can get great content for $1.70 but others take it a step farther and just go right ahead and copy and paste someone else’s hard earned content, but if you have been using the full URL to link your sites content together chances are the plagiarized site will be linking back to the original source too (your site).
Proper anchor tag usage
When you are referencing a URLs in the href attribute of an anchor tag, it will behoove you to follow this standard URL format to optimize this link for SEO. First when referencing the front page of your site you do not have to include the “index.html” or “default.aspx” using <href=“http://www.example.com/”> will work much better for this.For pages that are not top level of course you will have to include the file name.
To farther help with transferring this juice, you may want to use the title attribute. This will help by letting search engines farther understand the relevance between the two pages. By using the title tag you may also be able to use other keywords that might not make since for the reader.
There are many more tricks you could use to better link pages together but this should provide you with a good start and remember that no page should be an island every page on your site should have at least one link pointing to it.
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