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Part 1d - SEO: Optimizing Your Hyperlinks

With your list of key phrases close at hand, it's now time to look at the internal hyperlinks you have throughout your website. By "internal" hyperlinks, I'm referring to the links on your website that lead to other sections of your website — not necessarily your main menu in the context, but rather those plain old text links found within the body content of your web pages. Those will be our focus.

You should integrate your key phrases within text hyperlinks. Text hyperlinks are just what they sound like: hyperlinks contained within text. Search engines like text hyperlinks for several reasons. First of all, these hyperlinks are text as opposed to graphics, which means the search engines can read them.

Second of all, text hyperlinks often lead to other pages of the website, so they help search engines complete their mission of crawling the site.

Thirdly, search engines consider the text found within the hyperlink to be important, since it usually transports the reader to relevant information. In other words, hyperlinks help search engines understand what a website is all about.

So how do you optimize text links for search engines? You put your key phrases in them. For example, let's say you've followed a paragraph of web content with a hyperlink that simply says learn more. Naturally, the link leads to a web page (or a blog post) explaining the paragraph in more detail. Maybe it leads to an article that has just been summarized.

Simply by integrating your key phrase within the hyperlink, you can improve the destination page's search engine visibility for the phrase:

Let's say my "learn more" page is a detailed explanation of custom widgets. So instead of just writing Learn more, I might write Learn more about custom widgets ... or Learn more: custom widgets ... or custom widgets explained. This (along with relevant content, title elements and all the rest) will help educate search engines on the overall theme of my website.

This is also a good practice for website usability reasons. When you make your hyperlink text more descriptive, it helps people understand what's on the other side of that click (and will probably increase their desire to click as a result).

You won't be able to apply this technique to your main navigation menu, nor should you try. Your main menu should be all about usability, presentation, organization, neatness and logic. You don't want a bunch of long hyperlinks in your main menu — it would look cluttered. But within your body content, you can do whatever you want because there aren't any space or placement restrictions ... so hyperlink away!

That takes care of the hyperlinks within your website (from one page of your site to another). Now let's talk about the importance of inbound hyperlinks (from other websites to yours).