SEO: An Overview - Link Optimization and Redundancy

There are several points to consider when optimizing your links; I’m going to focus mainly on optimizing your outbound links. First, you want to limit the number of outbound links that exist on a single page on your site. If you have too many you start looking like a link farm, which Google penalizes; also, too many outbound links on one page can be confusing to your visitors.

When you do link to outbound sites, make sure the links are relevant. For example, if you’re operating an online dating site, why would you link to a site selling ephedra? Putting links on your site that have no relevance to your particular focus can move your site down in the search engine results and, again, confuse your visitors.

On the subject of link exchanges, link farms, and link swapping, you want to avoid them (especially link farms) at all cost. Search engines spot them easily. They can result in your site being completely blacklisted by Google.

I know that selling links is a popular practice, and that many large sites and publicly traded companies do this to make extra money. Here is an example of what I’m talking about:

You should avoid doing this on your site. While links to casinos, games, gift sites, etc. may be lucrative, they will only hurt you in the long run when Google spots all of these links that are unrelated to your content. Your competitors may even report your site for link spamming, which can of course result in your site being completely banned from a particular search engine. This practice also cheapens the reputation of your site with your visitors.

To finish up this topic, I’d like to discuss nofollow links. Using nofollow on outbound links tells Google to ignore the link and not follow it for indexing purposes. If you nofollow most of your external links, your Google PageRank should remain intact. But don’t use nofollow on internal links; you want PageRank to spread properly among your own pages.

One of the ways Google decides whether a web site is relevant to a particular query is by looking at the frequency with which the query’s key words are repeated on that site. This kind of redundancy is also known as keyword density. If you look at just about any page from SEO Chat, you will see the same keywords repeated in many places on that page: the page title, the breadcrumb navigation, an H1 title on the page, the URL itself, and the meta tags. Putting your keywords in these places sends a clear and concise message to the search engine highlighting what a particular page is all about. This in turn should enhance your ranking.

There is a lot more to SEO than I can cover within one half-hour presentation. Many people have spent years studying SEO and make it a full time profession. This is just a general foundation to build upon. I recommend joining an SEO community such as SEO Chat, reading the articles there, and posting question on our forums – it’s free and our members are very knowledgeable and helpful.