Linking Structure For Website Optimization

A good linking structure can bring a website and its pages to a higher rank as well as performing better in search engine results pages or in other words, a higher position and visibility in SERPs.

Linking can be done either internally or externally in a particular page or site. Internal linking is an internal connection within one website where most of the time, pages are linked from one to another and it is also considered as a voting (PR is passed except for nofollow tagged links). Identically, external linkage is also considered a vote cast but in terms of situation, it's from one website to another, which is also known as outbound links.

Search engines especially Google will look into these links as an important data to rank a site. More natural and high quality links that are pointing to one single page can directly tell the search engine that this page is very valuable. In addtition, more votes from higher rank pages can probably push up the particular page's ranking. But if the page or site that links out is connected to irrelevant contents, spam sites or low quality pages, search engines will not index them well and will give them less weight.

Other than that, there are several other factors that may affect a link's weight which may include the anchor text used, links on images without alt text, number of inbound/outbound links on the page and using the proper URL address. Although, site addresses that comes with or without "www." in front would not make much difference, try to select just one type of format such as "www.domain.com" or "domain.com" and stick to it. Ultimately, building a simple site map is very useful, plus visitors and search engines can find all your content pages more easily.