In this article, we'll take a basic walkthrough of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization techniques. Internal Linking
Anyone who has explored the world of Search Engine Optimization surely understands the importance of external links to your website, but often many website owners overlook the importance that the search engines who rank your pages place on internal links. In order to pass along your Page Rank to low ranked pages, you should link to your lower ranked pages from your high PR pages.
For example, let's say you have a simple 3 page website. Your home page, Page A, has a Google Page Rank of 6. Page B has a PR4, and page C, which is a PR0, is optimized for a keyword that you want to rank. In order to help Page C rank, be sure to link with your targeted keyword from Page A and Page B. By utilizing this simple technique, you will help Page C by passing along A and B's ranking power, making Page C more likely to rank.
Utilize the Google Toolbar to check the Page Rank strength of your various web pages, and use keywords to link from your strong PR pages to those that need a boost.
Your internal linking data tells the search engines which pages are the most important. Use internal linking data and targeted keywords to inform the search engines of your pages' importance.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the words you use in your links. Always go for keyword-rich text versus generic text in your links.
For example. You want to create a link form your Christian Bale website homepage to your Terminator 4 page. You could do this one of 2 ways:
">a href="christianbaleexample.com/terminator4"<Click here>/a< for pics, info, and a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of Terminator: Salvation."
Yuck! Are you trying to rank high in the search engines when someone searches for the term "click here?" Let's hope not! After all, when was the last time you went on Yahoo and typed in the phrase "click here" in the search box?
Here's a more effective way to go about it:
"I've compiled quite an extensive Christian Bale collection, including pics, info, and a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of >a href="christianbaleexample.com/terminator4"<Terminator: Salvation>/a<."
Aaahhhh. Much better. It's a whole lot more likely that someone will google "Terminator: Salvation" than "click here."
Also, take notice of how the text was written in a very natural form in the good and bad examples.. Too much SEO will alarm a search engine bot and possibly put you under the critical eye of a human quality rater (yes, major search engines do employ humans to work alongside their bots).
Alt tags for image links
Avoid image links as much as possible, deferring instead to anchor text links to boost PR. When image link must be used, be sure to include your targeted keywords in the image ALT tags to serve as your anchor text.
For example:
img src="yourimage.jpg" alt="your keyword here"
Stuffing the ALT tag with keywords simply does not work, so DO NOT do it. Such practices could flag you for human review and may even result in being banned from the index. Instead, just use a targeted keyword or phrase in your image ALT tag.
Broken Links
Let's face it, broken links just make your site look bad. Visitors to your site will become frustrated, lose trust, and leave your site. Not only do broken links create a bad experience for your visitors, but search engine spiders and bots cannot continue to crawl and index your site past broken links.
You can utilize tools such as Dreamweaver or the free Xenu Link Sleuth program to check your links.
URL Problems
When optimizing your page for search engines, you want to show consistency in your link profile to make it less confusing for the search engines. So when you link to your homepage, use yoursite.com instead of yoursite.com/index.html.
When you do link to your pages, make sure that all links lead to either www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com. Although both of these addresses go to the same page, they are generally considered to be two different websites. Although google now considers the two to be the same site, it is better to be safe than sorry. Not all search engines operate on the same parameters as google.
User friendly navigation
While navigation does help to guide your visitors to appropriate pages, do not rely exclusively on navigation. Be sure to build paths to the pages you want your visitors to see using keyword-rich anchor text links within content. Your visitors are more likely to follow your links from content than they are to spend the time and effort searching through navigation.
Linking out
Beyond building backlinks, you really don't have much control over who links to you, but you are in full control of who you link out to. If you link to low quality spam sites, you can expect to see a negative impact on your search rankings, especially if these are reciprocal links. Don't get your site classified as part of a spam network. Instead, link out to quality, relevant websites, informing the search engines that your site is a quality resource on the web.
Using "No Follow" to Enhance your Page Rank
Many links on your page have no ranking value, such as pages covering TOS (Terms of Service), contact information, privacy policies, about us, etc. Still, visitors to your site expect to see these pages, so they should be there.
As you link internally from Page A to Page B, C, D and F, link power from page A is distributed equally between B, C, D and F. If, for example, page F is a TOS page with no ranking potential, you can apply a "nofollow" attribute to the link from page A to page F. This blocks search engines from passing link juice to page F and as a result, more link power is now distributed between pages B, C and D.
To apply the "nofollow" attribute, simply add rel="nofollow" before href . Example:
rel="nofollow" href="yoursite.com/tos.html"
Site maps
A site map is a page that has links to all of the other pages of your website. The idea of a site map is to give a quick route for search engines to find all of your internal pages and to help users get quickly to the content they want.
Make your site map very simple and easy to use. Avoid graphics and stick to linking to your pages. Keep it simple for search engines to read, and easy for your users to navigate.
You can also utilize an XML sitemap, which is exclusively for search engines. Google has a free XML site map generator in Google's Webmaster Central.
This intel first appeared on: http://stybero.com/seo-search-engine-optimization.shtml
