0 Linking within Sentences

Linking within Sentences

This is search engine optimization tip number eighteen in our continuing series of tips from search engine optimization company Vizion Interactive. All of our search engine optimization tips meant to be very specific, they should not take a lot of time to fix or review (to check to see if you are following the search engine optimization best practices), and will be rather “short and sweet” and directly to the point.Not following along with our Search Engine Optimization Tips? Our last search engine optimization, search engine optimization tip 17, was about links and your reputation and finding additional links to your site by searching at your favorite search engine for your name or your company name. The SEO tip before that was about creating a breadcrumb trail on your site. To find the previous search engine optimization tips, take a look at one of my previous SEO tips; you should find some links there. All of these “search engine optimization tips” are things I look at when analyzing a site or optimizing it for the search engines. Keep in mind, though, that this is only the beginning. There are a lot more search engine optimization tips coming in the future. In fact, to keep up with these SEO tips you might want to subscribe to our SEO RSS Feed.

For search engine optimization tip number eighteen, let’s talk about how you should link. Or, better, yet, where on your web page you should put your links. We all know that on your web page you will have several outgoing links. (In fact, it’s better to have more incoming links than outgoing links on a web page, but let’s save that for another SEO tip for now.) Those outgoing links can be outgoing to another web site or outgoing to your own internal web page (another page on your site).

If you want links to “count more” in a search engine’s eyes, then you need to make sure that those links appear within the middle of a sentence somewhere, not buried at the bottom of a web page or even on a sidebar somewhere. Although someone may be reading something on your web page and it might make more sense to add a link at the end of your web page (after someone has read it), most likely you’re going to get better search engine optimization results if you put your links within the context of a sentence or paragraph.

Let’s look at an example of the search engine optimization benefits of inserting links within the context of a web page. Wikipedia first comes to mind. More specifically, let’s look at the Wikipedia web page for search engine optimization.

As you read through Wikipedia, you will notice that internal links are sprinkled throughout each Wikipedia entry. You’ll see on the example below that internal links are in the middle of a sentence: they’re not somewhere else on the web page. This is one reason why Wikipedia seems to rank so well for so many phrases (besides the fact that so many other web sites link to them). For example, they link the word ‘web site’ to their web page about web sites.

Search engines are looking to evolve, and they’re always looking for things that are not as easy to “manipulate”. Giving more weight to links that are within the middle of a sentence make sense. So, take a look around your web site and see if you have content on your site where you can link internally to other web pages (within the middle of a sentence). Add some internal links to your content and you soon be seeing the search engine optimization benefits.