keyword placement, link management is almost as much of an art form as it is a strategy.
Linking schemes
Linking schemes are nothing more
than the structure of how your Web site is linked to other sites, how other
sites are linked to you, and where internal links lead. Good Web design principles
include all three types of linking schemes, and all are important to search
engines because what a search crawler is looking for is site usability first —
how easy it is for visitors to go from one place to the next on your Web site —
and then site relevancy, or how appropriate your site is to the topic for which
a site visitor is searching. Crawlers literally follow all the links on a Web
page to make sure that what’s connected together makes sense and is useful in
the context of where the links appear both in text and in navigational menus.
When
you’re creating your linking schemes, remember that the ultimate goal is to
make your site as usable and as valuable as possible to your site visitors.
Assume that your visitors have landed on your page because it contains
information for which they’re searching; the idea here is to make your site as
valuable to those visitors as possible by providing your visitors with the info
they’re looking for and then some. (It’s the and then some that keeps them coming back for
more.)
Creating value for your user encompasses one concept —
provide the user the information he seeks. It’s that simple. That doesn’t mean
that you need to have every detail or product related to a specific topic on
your site. But if you don’t have it and you don’t plan to put it there, at
least be prepared to point visitors to another site that does have the
information or products sought.
All of that is accomplished through linking. You’re either
linking to another page on your site where the information being sought is
available or you’re linking to another site entirely. In return, you should
also have other sites linking to your own, for the same reasons. (I have some
tips on how to get other sites to link back to you later in the chapter.)
Internal linking
Internal linking is the
process by which the pages on your site are actually linked together. The type
of links isn’t nearly as important as the way in which the pages are linked,
but even the structure can have some benefits. For example, text links — called
hotlinks — can be more valuable than graphic links because they allow you to use your
keywords within the link. But it’s also important to have a consistent
navigational structure — the links that
usually grace the side or top of a page that lead to
different sections of your Web site. Both hotlinks and navigational links can
be used in your internal linking process.
Using keywords in your navigational structure gives you
freebie opportunities to use them — the keywords within links don’t count
toward the keyword density of a page because the percentage of times a keyword
is used is based solely on the content on the page. This means you can use your
keywords more often. But using hotlinks does count toward keyword density, so
be careful about how you place those links.
It’s also important that no matter how your links are
formatted, you always need to leave an escape hatch — every page on the site
has to have a clearly defined navigation area with easily recognizable links
that make it a snap to return to whatever page the visitor wants. Users who
click from one page to another in your Web site may not appreciate having to
click the Back button to get them back to the page they were previously on.
Even more importantly, if there’s no way for users to go back from whence they
came, they’ll leave. Typical surfer behavior when they can’t escape a page is
to close the window or browser that’s pointing to the site on which you have
them trapped. They may also just type a new address in the browser bar and
navigate away from your page that way.
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