Inbound, Outbound, and Cross Links

The links on your site constitute a very important part of how Google and other search engines will examine, analyze, and rank your pages. Links can be categorized into inbound links, outbound links, and cross links:

• Inbound links point to a page on your web site from an external site somewhere else on the Web

• Outbound links point from a page on your site to an external site somewhere else on the Web

• Cross links point between the pages on your site

Broken Links

Broken links are links that do not work, either because they have been miscoded or because the pages they point to don't exist (perhaps it has been moved).

It's quite important to a search engine that none of the links on your site are broken. It shouldn't be that big a problem to go through your site and check to make sure each link works manually. Doing this will also give you a chance to review your site systematically, and understand the navigation flow from the viewpoint of a bot.

Even though you've checked your links manually, you should also use an automated link-checking tool. Quite a few are available. A good choice is the simple (and free) link checker provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at http://validator.w3.org/checklink. All you need to do is enter the domain you want checked and watch the results as the links in your site are crawled.

Inbound Links

You want as many inbound links as possible, provided these links are not from link farms or link exchanges. With this caveat about inbound linking from "naughty neighborhoods" understood, you cannot have too many inbound links. The more popular (and the higher the ranking) of the sites providing the inbound links to your site, the better.

Inbound links are considered a shorthand way of determining the value of your web site, because other sites have decided your site has content worth linking to. An inbound link from a site that is itself highly valued is worth more than an inbound link from a low-value site, for obvious reasons.

Outbound Links

The "everything in moderation" slogan is really apt when it comes to outbound links. You could also say that the "outbound link giveth and the outbound link taketh." Here's why: you want some respectable outbound links to establish the credibility of your site and pages, and to provide a useful service for visitors. After all, part of the point of the Web is that it is a mechanism for linking information, and it is truly useless to pretend that all good information is on your site. So on-topic outbound links are themselves valuable content.

However, every time your site provides an outbound link, there is a probability that visitors to your site will use it to surf off your site. As a matter of statistics, this probability diminishes the popularity of your site, and Google will subtract points from your ranking if you have too many outbound links. In particular, pages that are essentially lists of outbound links are severely penalized.

If you follow the word-per-page guideline I make in "Words and Keyword Density"a little less than 250 words per pageyou'll get best results if you try to provide at least two or three outbound links on every page and no more than ten or fifteen per page

Cross Links

Cross linkslinks within your siteare important to visitors as a way to find useful, related content. For example, if you have a page explaining the concept of class inheritance in an object-oriented programming language, a cross link to an explanation of the related concept of the class interface might help some visitors. From a navigability viewpoint, the idea is that is should be easy to move through all information that is topically related.

From an SEO perspective, your site should provide as many cross links as possible (without stretching the relevance of the links to the breaking point). There's no downside to providing reasonable cross links, and several reasons for providing them. For example, effective cross-linking keeps visitors on your site longer (as opposed to heading off-site because they can't find what they need on your site).

One reason for cross linking is that ideally you want to have dispersal through your site. You may have established metrics in which one page that gets 100,000 visitors is doing well. In this case, 100 pages that each get 10,000 visitors should be considered a really great success story. The aim of effective cross-linking is to disperse traffic throughout the pages of relevant content on your site.

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Words and Keyword Density

By now, you probably understand that the most important thing you can do on the SEO front involves the words on your pages.

There are three issues you need to consider when placing keywords on a page:

• How many words should be on a page?

• Which words belong on what page?

• Where should these be placed on the page?

Page Size

Ideally, pages should be between 100 and 250 words. Shorter than 100 words, and Google and other search engines will tend to discount the page as a lightweight. In addition, you want to include as many keywords as you can without throwing the content off-kilter. With less than 100 words, any significant inclusion of keywords is going to look like keyword stuffingand get "points" taken off your pages.

Pages that are longer than 250 words are not terrible, but do tend to diminish trafficboth actual, and measured as a per page statistic. From the viewpoint of advertising, lengthy pages waste content; 250 words is about as many as will fit on a single monitor screen, so your visitors will have to scroll down to finish reading the rest of the page if you publish longer pages. You might as well provide navigation to additional pages for the content beyond the 250 wordsand gain the benefit of having extra pages to host advertising.

Choosing Keywords

Beyond the mechanics of crafting sites and pages that are search engine friendly lies another issue: what search queries does your site answer? You need to understand this to find the keywords to emphasize in your site constructiona very important part of search engine optimization.

There's no magic bullet for coming up with the right keywords to place in a page. A good starting place is the "elevator pitch" story, and related keywords, that you'll need to develop as part of an SEO campaign.

It's likely that you'll want to vary keywords used in a page depending on the page content, rather than trying to stuff a one-size-fits-all approach across all the pages on your site.

If the answer is X, for example, what is the question? This is the right way to consider keyword choice. X is your web site or web page. What did someone type into Google to get there?

As you come up with keywords and phrases, try them out. Search Google based on the keywords and phrases. Ask yourself if the results returned by Google are where you would like to see your site. If not, tweak, modify, wait for Google to re-index your site (this won't take too long once you've been initially indexed), and try your search again.

Ultimately, the best way to measure success is relative. It's easy to see how changes impact your search result ranking: just keep searching (as often as once a day) for a standard set of half a dozen keywords or phrases that you've decided to target. If you are moving up in the search rankings, then you are doing the right thing. If you ranking doesn't improve, then reverse the changes. If you get search results to where you want them (usually within the top thirty or even top ten results returned), then start optimizing for additional keywords.

You should also realize that the success that is possible for a given keyword search depends upon the keyword. It's highly unlikely that you will be able to position a site into the top ten results for, say, "Google" or "Microsoft"but trivial to get to the top for keywords phrases with no results (such as "nigritude ultramarine" or "loquine glupe" two phrases that became the fodder for SEO contests).

The trade-off here is that it is a great deal harder to do well with keywords that are valuableso you need to find a sweet spot: keywords where you stand a chance, but that also will drive significant site-related traffic.

Keyword Placement

The text on your web page should include the most important keywords you have developed in as unforced a way as possible. Try to string keywords together to make coherent sentences.

Not all text on a page is equal in importance. First of all, order does count: keywords higher up in a given page get more recognition from search engines than the same keywords further down a page.

Roughly speaking, besides the body of the page itself and in meta information, you should try to place your keywords in the following elementspresented roughly in order of descending importance:

• Title: putting relevant keywords in the HTML title tag for your page is probably the most important single thing you can do in terms of SEO

• Headers: keyword placement within HTML header styles, particularly headers towards the top of a page, is extremely important

• Links: use your keywords as much as possible in the text that is enclosed by ... hyperlink tags on your site in outbound and cross bound link. Ask webmasters who provide inbound linking to your site to use your keywords whenever possible

• Images: include your keywords in the alt attribute of your HTML image tags

• Text in bold: if there is any reasonable excuse for doing so, include your keywords within HTML bold ... tags

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Site and Page Design

Keyword density means the ratio of keywords that you are trying to target for SEO purposes to the other text on your pages. Getting keyword density rightenough so that your SEO goals are achieved, not so much that the search engines are "offended"is a key goal of core SEO practice. Search engines do look for keywords, but they take away points for excessive and inappropriate keyword "stuffing."

Even from the point of view of your site visitors, you want a nice density of keywords in your pagesbut you don't want so many keywords that the content of your pages is diminished from the viewpoint of visitors.

Site Design Principles

Here are some design and information architecture guidelines you should apply to your site to optimize it for search engines:

Use text wherever possible

For most sites, the fancy graphics do not matter. If you are looking for search engine placement, it is the words that count. Always use text instead of or in addition to images to display important names, content, and links.

Navigability

Pages within your site should be structured with a clear hierarchy. Several alternative site navigation mechanisms should be supplied, including at least one that is text-only. The major parts of your site should be easy to access using a site map. If your site map has more than about 100 links, you should divide the site map into separate pages.

Provide static text links

Every page in your site should be accessible using a static text link.

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