Internal Linking Strategies - Adam Audette

Internal Linking
SMX East 2008
Adam Audette AudetteMedia.com

Text Links are Good
watch those image links
have text link options
image replacement can be an alternative

Contextual Links Rule
images ≠ semantic meaning
images = emotion and context
text = semantic meaning

Anchor Text?
isn’t a golden key
be aware of the context of pages
relevance, credibility, semantic meaning

Anchor Text con’t
influence increases with scale
on large sites anchor text can be strongly influential
relevant surrounding text

Speak to your Users
use anchor text to build in calls to action
‘click here’ still surprisingly actionable!
think about your site’s visitors

Mix It Up!
anchor text should vary
Over-SEO’d sites = the new penalty (newish at least)
keep it natural and balance SEO needs with human needs

Link Consistently
standardize internal links
http://mydomain.com/index.html
http://www.mydomain.com/
http://www.mydomain.com/index.html

Link / Page Relations
link text should match the page it targets
keywords should surround the link and be in link text

Are Your Pages Important?
check internal link counts
pages without many internal links = not important to your users (and spiders)
important pages should be within 2-3 clicks of root

Link Thresholds
general advice is 100-150 links per page max
it’s actually case by case
more links usually = less usability (but not always!)

More on Link Thresholds
typical Amazon.com product page has nearly 250 links
Amazon.com home page has over 200 links

Link Thresholds & Nofollow
the Brands page on Zappos.com has over 1,500 links
removing nofollows on the Brands page helped some brands rank higher

Related Link Structures
use ‘related’ linking to flatten a site
eases crawling
connects many pages together

Tag Pages
have users tag pages or manually build
create tag categories
add RSS feeds

Cool Stuff with Twitter
check out twitter.zappos.com

Thank you! follow me on twitter : http://twitter.com/audette contact me: [email_address] www. audettemedia.com More cool stuff: www.audettemedia.com/internal-linking

Internal Linking Strategies - Adam Audette

by Adam Audette

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