Links are important for a web site and serve multiple functions. Three primary functions of links are:
- To permit
the user to navigate through the site interactively.
- To help
the search engine in ranking your site on a results page.
- To help the search engine in spider your site and index the rest of it.
These goals
can often come in conflict with each other. The way you implement your
links can help you control both your positioning in the search engine
results, spidering, and user navigation, permitting you to have the best
of these worlds.
Type of Links
One way to classify links is by the direction and context of the link:
- Incoming
Links - Links from other sites to your site.
- Internal
Links - Links between pages of your site.
- Outgoing Links - Links from your site to another site.
In terms of helping the ranking of your site with all other factors the same, the incoming links help the most. Internal links would be next on the list, and outgoing links help the least and could hurt your ranking. Incoming links can be of two types. The ones that help the most are the one-way links to your site from quality sites on your topic. The other incoming link types are the reciprocal links that you build by swapping links with quality sites on your topic. Outgoing links can actually hurt you if they go into bad sites (see Links that Don't Work). They can help, however, if they add value to your site from their destination page content.
This means these links to your site are very important and developing these should be a high priority early in your site planning. This also means you need good analysis tools to identify pages on your site getting high hits. Chances are, somebody is linking to them. We provide this free ongoing analysis for all sites we host.
Implementing
a Link
The five basic methods of implementing a link are the text link, image
link, image map, JavaScript link, and a Flash link. JavaScript, Flash,
and image maps links are not search engine friendly and are unlikely to
be spidered by the search engines. In other words, using Flash links means
the search engines can't crawl down through your site, indexing the rest
of the pages of your site. The search engines can follow image links,
but as there is no link text the engines can't assign the image link any
reputation. Text links, in contrast, are simple and very search engine
friendly - the search engines love them.
See Carl's book on Web Site Promotion and Search Engine Positioning for more...
Let us Help You with Your Web Site Design or Analyze Your Current Web Site...
Let
us Help You Get a Great Position in the Search Engines...
Do Your Own Search Engine Positioning and Save!....
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