How to Create SEO Friendly Links

Linking, next to titles represents the top of the hill when we are talking about what can we do for our website in terms of SEO. The title of a page plays the biggest role in deciding how Google will index that page and how it will rank it. But titles are not enough to get to the first page on Google. What we can do to get to be number one in Google is to pay close attention to how we create links on our website and to our website. Keep in mind that if you’ll have enough external links pointing to one of your webpages then you’ll probably rank well for that page if all the links target related keywords.

Internal links

These links are extremely important because it decides the way Google will index the pages of our website and if certain pages will be indexed or not. That is why you don’t want to have any broken links because a broken link means that a certain page will not be indexed by Google.

You also have to know that keeping a maxim of 3 level links to get to one of your pages is more than enough. If you have pages that you need to click 5 links, for example, to get to them then you need to reconsider this. A good strategy is to make sure that you can reach any web page from your website by clicking maximum 2 links. The way you can do that is by placing a link on the first page of your website to a sitemap.html . The file we call sitemap can be very helpful because this way we can be sure that we’ll have all our web pages indexed by Google.

Another rule is to remember that any page of your website should be accessible from at least one static text link and this problem can also be solved by using a sitemap. Having multiple links on the same page pointing out to the same article on your website will be counted only once by Google. If you want to get more weight for a certain page and place multiple links to that page from the same article you’ll need to use anchors and link to certain paragraphs of that page.

You also have to know that links should be descriptive text and not images in order to count in Google. This means that in order to create a good internal link you’ll need to be careful and link only pages that talk about the same thing – otherwise you won’t be able to use a descriptive keyword in your text link and you’ll lose in the game with Google.

Incoming links

These links are the ones that can get you to be number on in Google no matter what the competition is, if done properly. There a few rules on how to create the perfect incoming link to your website so that link to be counted by Google and these rules are not that easy to follow but not impossible.

Lets say for example that you have a page on your website that we’ll call it Page A and another website wants to link to you from Page B. Here is how the perfect incoming link should look like :

• both titles should target related keywords : this basically means that both pages talk about related things or the same thing
• the text link from Page B should contain keywords related to the content of the page and should be used in content in a natural way : the middle of a sentence for example
• the place on Page A where the link from Page B will land should have proximity words related to the keyword from the text link on Page B

These rules are for the perfect link. You don’t have to be that strict in order to get the incoming link to be counted by Google. The thing you’ll need to watch is to link pages that talk about related things.

Creating good incoming links is not an easy job. You have few options to how you can do it :

• identify website related to your theme and contact them for a link exchange. It’s best to pick websites with PR higher then yours but at the beginning you’ll take what you find
• pay for incoming links
• use forums to create incoming links
• blogs with DoFollow links in comments
• websites that allow you to publish your articles like ezinearticles.com
• register your blog with mybloglog.com and technorati.com

What are your suggestions and tips ?

Of course that these tips and methods are not the only things you should pay attention to in order to have your links to be SEO friendly. That is why I encourage you to comment and share your ideas and thoughts so we can all learn.