| Chapter
1- Section 11
As you’ll
discover in Chapter 6, each Web page can “vote” for
other pages. When you link to another Web page, Google considers
this a recommendation of that page. If you have ten links leading
from your page to ten other pages, your vote is divided by ten with
each page getting one tenth of a vote. So the more links you have
leading out from your page, the less rank boosting power each link
has.
For some
corporate sites where appearance is high on the priority list, you
could use your text menu technique like this:
Learn
more about our key products:
Digital
cameras | Digital Video Cameras | Digital Accessories
You can
even lighten the font color just to tone down its intrusive look.
You can also ensure that there is a graphic animation higher up
in the page, to draw attention away from the links.
There’s
lots of ways to control the visitor’s attention so just use
a little creative imagination and you’ll find a way to make
it happen.
Each link
from one page to another is counted only once. So if you have five
links leading from your home page to another page on the site, the
five links are only considered as one “vote” for the
page being linked to. Using multiple worded hyperlinks is still
useful however, because the search engine does record each one.
The biggest
problem presented by linking to unimportant or non-optimized pages
is that you’re wasting PageRank power. By linking
to a search engine irrelevant page, you have less linking power
to distribute to the other pages. You should try to limit the amount
of links leading from your home page. Links should only go to those
critical pages which you need to have rank well, and those pages
which can deliver link reputation back to the home page.
So navigation
schemes are now very influential in search engine optimization.
As you’ll learn in chapter 6, linking votes are a kind of
currency that is distributed within your site. For your single Web
page to rank highly, it will have to have hyperlinks leading to
it. The entire site’s documents must coordinate or cooperate
to achieve good rankings.
In short,
the voting power or PageRank
contained within your site must be channeled and focused properly.
If not, you likely won’t rank highly for competitive keyword
phrases. Competitive keyword phrases very often tell you where the
attention and money is on the Internet. If that search term represents
good buyers or influential readers, it will be hotly contested for,
which means you’ll have to apply good optimization techniques
to be in the top ten sites listed in the results page. Few people
look beyond the first page of results and most don’t even
look past the first five. They don’t have the time or inclination
to do so.
In search
engine optimization, technique is everything. Linking techniques
contained within your menus and body copy will take you a long way
to getting your site successfully spidered by search engine robots
and being ranked in the top results.
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