We’re talking about internal linking within a website here-we’ve already discussed getting backlinks consisting of specific keywords from external websites which in turn raise your rankings within the search engine results and is essentially SEO. You can get backlinks from your own website which pass considerable amounts of power-considering you have total control over your own website if we can govern the links we get then we should really be focusing on that just as much as any off-page efforts.

Checking how many backlinks you have to your site can be done in many ways-a particular easy way of doing so (SEO’s fav method) would be the Yahoo linkdomain: command-it is used from yahoo home page like so;

linkdomain:www.example.com

This shows a rough estimate of how many links you have pointing at your domain-it even lists links from your own site. With respect to internal linking, what should be done is anchor text links throughout the body of web pages linking through to relevant internal pages in the site.

Internal Link focusing

One can place a lot of weight on particular pages within a website in order to raise the profile of this page from within the site and in the eyes of the search engines.

Usually the most powerful page in a website is the home page or root of the domain-this happens because it’s the first page the search engine visits on crawl and most internal links always link back to the home page-in terms of link juice, most of it gets pointed towards the home page.

We can direct attention or link juice towards inner pages of a website-a good inner page would be a top level category page or contact/conversion page within the site. Try relevant anchor text links within related body content pointed at specific pages. After a while you should notice if done correctly that you may find your site listed twice in the search engine results pages.

If you perform a search for your inner page keyword you’ll get your inner page listed first within the search engine results pages and then indented result as your home page-this is when you know the internal linking to this page is good for a particular keyword.

Checking internal linking with Google Webmaster Tools

A nice way to have a gander at your internal links would be from within Google webmaster tools, if you have access to it and have verified your site, go in and take a look at : Your site on the web : Internal Links

This gives you a table of your inner pages with internal links pointed at them-you can decide for yourself depending on the type of your site how well it’s being done. A good indication would be picking the most important pages in your site should have the most internal links and more irrelevant pages towards the bottom of the list.

Picking this up…

There are more important factors which go very well with internal linking which we will discuss at a later date-this is called deep site external links-when this marrys up with internal linking structure, the site becomes very powerful.

This question has been asked a few times but when it comes down to proving the case-it gets a little tricky, as there are so many other factors which come into play when assessing such a small factor involving on-page SEO.

The method

The true test to see which worked better as a ranking factor would be to;

1. Create two domains both with the same name hyphened with a number to differentiate the two. E.g. willow-34.co.uk and willow-36.co.uk (with the same domain age)
2. Host both domains on separate class C ip addresses, preferably with the same hosting company on similar spec servers.
3. Add content with identical keyword desities, identical title tags etc.
4. Optimise the same niche keyword one site using “strong tags” and one using “emphasis tags”.
5. No inbound linking (backlinks) as this could sway ranking factors for either site differently.
6. Submit both sites in webmaster tools, verify, add sitemaps etc.
7. For faster indexing send both sites a backlink from the same site (you have control over) with anchor text of each domain name.

Observe the Google index closely, see which site outranks the other over a 3-6 month period.

The Conclusion

Although this is a small factor to be messing around with, it’s a factor none-the-less and further testing can be done to refine our SEO practices, there are many arguments that say one is better than the other and vice-versa. But how do we know it was a fair test-the above method is the closest you can get, not perfect but close enough to draw an accurate conclusion.

Any ranking factor we have influence over should be exploited for the gain on the whole.

JND to conduct the “True & Fair em vs. strong Test”

That’s right, we are going to carry out this test under the rules as explained above, we’re not using the domains listed or there could be some foul play-we’ll let you know the results in about 3 months from now which should be end of July 2010. So watch this space sports fans.

Apple goes up against search market giants Google in a bid for market share of what is said to be an estimated £2.2 bn market value.

Apple have announced that thier new Ad platform is to be named the ‘iAd’ which will deliver advertising space with impeccable accuracy in conjunction with thier touch marketed products such as the newly unveiled iPad, and existing products iPhone and iPod Touch. It is roumored that the distribution network for these ads will be placed on the shoulders of Apples mobile devices.

Ad placement

The ad placement will be done through advertising spots available through the availablilty of apps sold on Apple’s App Store.

Because the App Store is fullly aware of what apps users are running, behaviours and the App itself, the new iAds platform can guarantee the impeccable specific user group targeting due to relevant data already in possesion of Apple.

Today we’re talking about backlinks and how they can be categorised. First things first, we need to define a backlink and what one is exactly.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is effectively a link back to your own website from another. So if you go to example1.com and somewhere on a webpage inside that site is a link to example2.com we can say that example2.com has one backlink from example1.com. It’s as simple as that.

Baclinks come in various different forms, as the internet as we know it now has evolved and it has done so through the entity known as hyperlinks. A hyperlink is a way of navigating through web pages and websites on the internet.

Backlinks and SEO

Now we’re relating hyperlinks to backlinks and how it all fits into SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Backlinks are regarded as one of the most important aspects when it comes to SEO in respect to ranking in the search engines well for specific key terms. Backlinks are built for a website during an off-page optimisation project which is in turn part of the wider SEO campaign which incorporates many sub projects.

Backlink classification list

So we have now ascertained that backlinks are essential to the off-page optimisation and is part of a link-building project-now we are to discuss the type of backlinks which exist. Here they are in a list;

1. InLink – Single text link from one website of authority and related industry theme, contained with content.
2. Article Link – Contextual link within article body from Article site related to referring website, contained in article text.
3. Blog Link – Textual link written into the blog body, blog post would be related to your website.
4. Footer/Sidebar Link – Single text link from one website of authority, contained inside website footer or sidebar column.
5. Site Wide Link – Multiple text links placed either in footer or sidebar of website-ALL pages within the site contain a link back to your site.
6. Directory Links/Submissions – Text Link from within a web directory, usually found under your websites category.
7. Press Release/Publications – Text Link placed inside body of text, recent news about your website/business.
8. Forum Links – Text Link placed within forum posting/user signature about your website/product, related industry forums provide better results.
9. Blog Comment – The name of the comment of any blog post becomes the textual link back to your website.

This classifies the ‘backlink’ any backlink you have will fall into one of these categories, each category has associative power to promote your site in the search engines for specific key terms. The classifications have been listed in power order (most effective to least effective).

Do-follow and No-follow

For any backlink to pass weight or ranking persuasion (commonly know in the SEO industry as ‘link juice’) the backlink has to be ‘followed’. This means that when a search engine crawls the backlink it follows it back to your site and you get crawled and indexed.

If for any reason a backlink is no-follow (has the attatched tag ‘rel=nofollow’, entire page containing link nofollowed by robots.txt directive or page contains meta info robots=”nofollow”) the backlink will not be followed by the search engine crawler and your site doesn’t end up getting the full benefit of the backlink.

More to follow…

We will discuss each type of backlink in more detail in Part 2 of our Backlink classification post, we hope that this information was useful to you and would be thrilled if you are anticipating Part 2