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Optimising Internal Links
By Kerry Plowright
CEO, Australian Windows Publishing Pty Ltd.
Something largely overlooked by many webmasters today is the importance of
optimizing internal links. We always focus on external links, trying to
make sure that they are keyword friendly, but then when we actually go to
create our web sites we use generic internal links.
The text that you use for a link tells the search engine what is behind
that link. So for instance if you use “Home” to link to your index page,
the search engines know whatever is behind that link is home.
Unfortunately “Home” is about as descriptive as a blank page.
Indeed, most sites you visit you will see the standard “Home”, “About”,
“Contact”, etc… In doing this there really is no true definition of what
is behind those pages. Works great for human visitors, and really sucks
for the visiting search engines.
A properly optimized site should be using more descriptive links. For
instance, say you run a site about possums, let’s call it possums.com.
Let’s assume you have five pages: the home page, a page about your site,
an info page on species of possums, a photo gallery of possums, and a
contact page. Instead of using generics such as “Home”, “About”, “Types”,
“Gallery”, and “Contact”; use more descriptive terms, such as: ”Possums.com”,
“Information about Possums.com”, “Species of Possums”, “Photo Gallery of
Possum Pictures”, and “Contact Possums.com”.
By doing this you create much more keyword friendly text. The best bet is
to find the general theme of each page, and do a search for commonly
searched keywords, and try to target the best applicable keyword as the
link to that page. In doing this you will be able to let the search engine
know what the page is about. So then when someone searches for “types of
squirrels” or “squirrel pictures” you are more likely to have better
rankings for those terms because they were targeted with the links.
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 About
the Author: Kerry Plowright founded ezimerchant in 1996 and was
the first to offer an affordable, packaged ecommerce solution to
small and medium business. Since then Kerry has helped thousands of
business make hundreds of millions of dollars on the internet and is
arguably Australia’s leading authority on small business and the
internet. Kerry recently sold the ezimerchant business which is now
the most widely used solution in Australia in addition to being sold
in Japan, the USA and UK. Kerry now offers his expertise to selected
businesses desiring to establish or improve their online presence.
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