The Link You Control
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009A lot of people trying to optimize their website for search engines often focus on researching and obtaining good back links on other websites, but what they don’t realize is they have the most relevant authority site sitting right in front of them – their own pages. How could anything be more on-topic than the pages you have complete control over? It’s icing on the cake if the pages are aged and already have page rank.
Major search engines, most notably Google, give a lot of importance to internal link power. By carefully designing the structure of your site, and with the help of internal links, you have an opportunity within the framework of your site to "cast votes" for pages within your own site. You are able to, in essence, tell the search engines which of your pages are important and which are most important. You are also giving search engines an idea as to what the pages are about by using descriptive link text. Use of contextual links not only guides visitors to other pages within your site, increasing usability which search engines love, but simultaneously passing page rank and flow as well.














