Learn how to maximize the SEO impact of your links.
As you may already know, links are extremely important for helping your site reach and remain in the top search results for your keywords. Both internal links (from page to page within your own site) and backlinks (from other sites to your site) are important for showing Google, Bing, and other search engines that your site contains valuable content.
The only problem is, it’s easy to use links incorrectly, in ways that do nothing for your SEO or even hinder your efforts at dominating your keyword category.
These 6 tips for building and maintaining link equity (valuable links) will help.
- Share the backlinks. Do you have one blog post or web page that has gotten tons of backlinks? Take advantage of this popular page’s link equity by linking it to other pages on your site. These other pages will then get a boost from the link equity generated by that popular page.
- Flatten your site. The way your pages are linked to one another in your site architecture affects search results. Do not bury your popular pages or important keyword pages way down in the fourth or fifth level of the site. Instead, flatten your site by reducing the number of levels (number of pages that must be clicked through to reach a given page). You want to have your most important pages linked from the home page, so that search engine webcrawlers will find and index them.
- Use Nofollow links. If you need to link away from your site, use a nofollow tag in the HTML code. This tells search engines not to follow the link so that they will not transfer any of your page’s link equity to the destination page.
- Use Noindex pages. There are some pages that must be on your site, but are never going to rank. The “contact us” page is a perfect example. By using a noindex code in your HTML, you can prevent search engines from indexing these pages so you do not waste any link equity on them.
- Delete old pages that don’t rank. If you have old posts or pages on your website that are more than two years old, are seldom visited, and do not have backlinks, you may want to consider deleting them or making them noindex pages so they don’t steal link equity from more successful pages.
- Use keyword anchor text. It’s always smart SEO practice to use the keyword for the destination page as the link text on the page that is pointing to it.
Need Help?
Evaluating your link equity and restructuring your site to maximize it can be a detailed and time-consuming process. Fortunately, Webstract Marketing is here to provide expert assistance with this and other aspects of your SEO and digital marketing efforts. Contact us at 855-201-5800 to learn more.