If Content is the Bank, Links is its Currency

There are two types of links on your site. Internal and external. Both are very important on how they are structured and what they tell Google. The rub is that internal links are easy to manipulate and generate, but are finite, while external links can be endless, but are much harder to gain. Hence their importance.


External links gives your site Authority and pass link juice. The more page authority the linking site has, the more authority it passes. The fewer the links on that page, more of the link juice is passed per link.

Anchor text or link text is the clickable text that takes you to another page, such as HotvsNot has the anchor text of HotvsNot and links to the Hot vs. Not website. This anchor text could as easily be Web Directory or SEO Friendly Web Directory. As you see, the anchor text can be very descriptive to what you would expect to find on the linked page. Google agrees, and uses this anchor text in the same manor. Normally links outside your control get poor anchor text like website, read more, view page, or the domain’s URL, with the URL option being the only one that comes close to relaying what they site is about, *if* the URL has keywords in it that describe the content.

TIP: when creating a TLD (top level domain), try to get one or two keywords in that domain name without making it too long or having more than two hyphens.Good example would be www.Mikes-Furniture-California.com where you would get two good keywords, Furniture and California.

What you do want to do when link building, is try and get as many quality links with different anchor texts that you can control. What you do not want to do is use the same anchor text over and over. With the example above you would use Mike’s Furniture, Mike’s Furniture California, California Furniture, Furniture in California, and so on. Do some link research and pick 5-7 that would work well and use those.

Links on your page are also very important. linking with the anchor text of Home does nothing for describing the page, nor does contact us, or about us. In place of the Home, I would use an image to represent the home and use that image’s alt attribute to describe the page. Mike’s logo would link to the home page with the alt text of Mike’s Furniture in San Diego California.

TIP: The image alt (alternate) tag is the text that is shown for an image if the image does not load, we’ve all seen this. This is used by screen readers for the visually impaired, so it is important to use. Alt attributes are also considered anchor text by search engines. Don’t stuff the alt with keywords, and always use it to describe the image while creatively using your keywords.

Instead of contact us and about us, why not Contact Mike’s Furniture and about Mike’s Furniture which gets the furniture keyword used again. When linking internally from within the page copy, you can either use click here, or view our adult bedroom furniture collection. The second option being much more descriptive.

Get some of your more important links within your page copy as that has more value than menus.

The first link to a page is the only one that counts for Google. You can link 10 times to /adult-furniture.html, but only the first link will be used by Google.


TIP: the way to work around the one link limit is to use the link anchor method which has two variables.

1) <a href="http://www.mikes-furniture-california.com/Paula-Deen-Furniture.php#paula-furniture">Paula Deen Furniture Line</a>

2) <a name="paula-furniture">Furniture from Paula Deen</a>

It is the #link-name that is picked up later by the name=””

The hyperlink carries a link name that is then referenced on the linked page. You can essentially have each header of a page using the name reference. This method has been used since the beginning of the web to land people directly to content on a page, such as FAQs. Just don’t overuse this as each page should only try to rank for one keyword phrase.

Always use short descriptive anchor text to represent the page that link is going to. Using keywords in your domain name help when other sites link to yours. Don’t use the same anchor text to build 1,000 inbound links, but mix it up.

Lastly, I want to add the importance to obtaining internal or deep links. Having 10,000 links to www.Mikes-Furniture-California.com is good, but you also want to build links to www.Mikes-Furniture-California.com/adult-bedroom.html and www.Mikes-Furniture-California.com/leather-sofas.html so that you build up those pages outside of what the your home page will do.

This does two things.
1) flows link juice directly into an internal page and
2) allows for page targeted anchor text. You might have Leather Sofas and Adult Bedrooms linking from some blogs to those internal pages.

Next time we will talk about keywords on your site, and how to find and use the best ones.