Internal linking is very important in SEO. One of the first things you can do is change the link to your front page. Most people put “Home”. You should change that to your keywords like widgets or my service or whatever term you are trying to get on your front page. You could even have a different keyword per page. Another mistake is people put the link to their home page as /index.html. Don’t do this your going to be telling search engines you have 2 front pages. They will see www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html as 2 pages and they will see them as duplicates. You will not be passing any of your internal link value to the home page. I try to use absolute URL’s. (i.e. http://www.domain.com/page.html) If someone hijacks your site they can only hijack one page this way. Every so often to hack comes out where somebody can hijack your site. It does not happen often but why risk it. Another thing I try to tell people is don’t put a link to your home page on your home page. You are just wasting space.
Next you want to have all your pages pointing to other pages on your site. If you have a small site with 10 pages or less you can just have each page point to each page. If you have more you will need to pick a number of links you want on each page. Then you will need to make sure that each page has that many internal links plus the link from the front page or directory page. So if your number is 6 then each page should have at least 7 internal links. Be sure that the links to each page have the right anchor text for that page.
This will give you the power of keyword rich anchor text to help boost each pages rank. It will also make sure that when you do rank for something you will get a second indented result in the SERPS because you have that keyword on at least 2 pages. It is good to organize the links into groups so that you also get more keyword density on the page that has the links.
I have recently spoken to a few webmasters that say no. I saw one website that was 1.5 MB in size with 66 objects. That is a bit out of the norm. Most often you will see sites that are around 200k which best case will load in 45 seconds. This does not mean they don’t see anything for 45 seconds. Often your text will come up but not your pictures or flash. If you just really need to have a big web page make sure you have useful information in text that comes up quickly. If you design a web page you want people to see the whole thing. If your sites takes 20-60 seconds to load they are not going to wait to see the whole thing. They may just give up and hit the back button and try the next site on the search engine they used. In another article I posted a link to a CNN story that showed 76% of rural users have dial up and 61% of urban/suburban users have dial up. This is a huge group of people to eliminate.
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I am writing this article to be a guide on the proper way to set up the front page of a website. There are two things to consider when creating a front page: getting visitors to your site and getting them to do something on your site. One of the biggest mistakes that most web designers and company owners make is that they think a website is similar to other media like TV, magazine, and radio. Most people are on the web to find information quickly. They are moving from site to site and spend very little time deciding if your site is worth using. I have some rules about what to do with your front page. Some are general website rules and some are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rules.
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php using html extension
I know a lot of my readers may already know this but I get asked this question about how to run php with an html extension enough that I thought I would get it down in print so I can just send people to it.
I often get the question “How do I use php without changing my url’s?” or “How do I just make one header and footer file to include in each page so I only have to change them once when a change is needed?”. Read more…
I have spoken about Impersonating Googlebot user agent using Firefox in the past and people have asked me how to do this using Firefox so I thought I would give a little tutorial on how to see what googlebot sees. I will start off with why somebody might want to impersonate Googlebot and the pros and cons of impersonating it. Read more…
