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Using Internal Linking To Get Better Search Engine Exposure
By Randy Zlobec (c) 2008

Anyone who runs a website should be aware of a few basic
search engine linking tactics. Used properly you can
interlink your website so that Google, Yahoo and the other
major search engines will rate you higher in both page rank
and search engine results for your keyword/key phrase niche
terms. If you're unaware of what internal linking means,
here's a basic overview.

Internal linking involves the links on your website that
point to other pages on your website. Internal linking is
very important because it allows the search engine spiders,
those automated bots that scour the Internet looking for
information, to find all of the pages on your website. In
comparison, external linking are links that are on your
website which link out to other websites, and there are
specific tactics for those as well. In this article,
however, we're going to cover a few simple tactics and
strategies to get your internal linking up to speed.

When you're developing your website, you will tend to put a
whole lot of pages of similar information tailored to a
specific niche or subject that you want to convey to your
visitors. You probably will have information, news, how-to
articles, tips and sales pages, where informed visitors can
buy your products or services. Your internal linking
structure will not only benefit your visitors, but it will
help you rank better with the search engines as well.

Having a good navigation system makes Google and Yahoo
happy, and in turn, they will reward you because you are
doing things to improve the visitors' website experience.
So, for example, if you have an internal linking structure
that is seamless, intuitive and allows your visitors to
quickly find what they're looking for, search engines will
give you more page rank, index more of your web pages and
return higher search results for user queries.

Why? You have taken the time to help your website visitors
have an excellent customer experience. As a result, your
tactics and strategies should be geared towards giving
arriving visitors not only the information that they seek,
but have it presented in a way that they, and search
engine bots, will love.

So how do you accomplish this? There are a few basic
tactics, you can use that will increase your internal
linking structure right off the bat.

Number 1 - use the rel="nofollow" HTML tag for pages that
you don't want to pass rank to Google. For example, let's
say you had a three-page site. Now, we all know that most
people have more than three pages for an entire website;
however, this will make it easier to follow.

The first page is your home page which gets 100% of the
search engine ranking and love. The second page is an
information or information/sales page, with the third being
a checkout page. If you don't use the nofollow tag on one of
the pages, both pages will be passed half of 50% each for
the link from the home page. So, they'll each get 25% of
the ranking and love passed through from the spiders. The
search engine spiders will naturally give your home page
the best page rank and index it first. Say, you want to
link to the information/sales page and make sure that a lot
of people find it, because the information page is what
will sell your product or service. For ranking and indexing
purposes, you consider the checkout page as useless, so you
don't care if the search engines find it or not. In fact,
you'd prefer it if they didn't index it all. What do you do?

When you link from your home page, you can do one of two
things.

Link to the information page only from the home page. Link
to both pages but use the no follow tag to the checkout
page. In that way, if someone arrives who is already sold
on your product, they can go directly to your checkout page
and buy the product. However, if it is an uninformed
visitor, they can clickthrough to your information/sales
page or they click on the indexed Google or Yahoo link
that's been picked up by the spider

Two things happen with scenario #2. You give the
customer/visitor the option. Because, the search engine is
applying SEO love to one page and not two, the page rank
passed will not be 25% and 25% for each page, but 0% for
the checkout page and 50% for the information page which
needs it. You maintain the search engine indexing and page
rank for those pages that are important.

This is just one thing that needs to be considered when
setting up your website. Professional SEO firms use this
algorithm in order to get specific pages on your website to
rank higher and return results in the search engine results
pages that are much higher than other pages like your
checkout pages which you don't care about.

Number 2 -  Add extra links in your navigation area or
footer area that link to important pages and main sections
on your website. This extremely easy tactic is often
overlooked by many websites, but it does return very good
results for deep linking, and most SEO firms will review
your footer links when they take you on as a candidate in
order to utilize that other form of deep linking.

The reason for this is that so many people forget to do it,
and many Web designers add really cool buttons, images and
all kinds of funky image stuff that do nothing to increase
your page rank or your results in a search engines. You
should remember that search engines can't follow image
links or links created in JavaScript. So, you want to add
simple text links that the robots can follow to index your
website more fully.

These are only two of the tactics that are covered when you
hire a professional, savvy SEO firm to optimize your web
layout and linking structure.
===========================================================
RZ Concepts a search engine marketing company specializing
in website promotion and internet marketing.
http://www.rzconcepts.com
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