How to Link Categorize and Tag Content

In one of their great SEO tutorials, MOZ once described links as the streets that search engines used to crawls the web. Through their algorithmic link analysis, the search bots discover how the site’s pages are related to each other, and to the other sites on the web. It is this site profile that helps a site gain ‘Search Traction’. For content developers, building and minding our site’s link profile is a critical task in building and maintaining search ranking and traffic success.

Make effective use of robots.txt

Search engines don’t want the same content littering their results. It makes no sense for them to present the exact same page multiple times for the same query. Unfortunately most content management systems create multiple URLs for accessing the same content. Categories, tags, and search results all lead to the same content being found through multiple URLs.

You might want to block some of the URLs from being indexed though a robots.txt file, or through the use of the meta robots tag (use noindex, follow so links on the page can still be crawled) or use 301 (permanent) redirection to point the duplicate URLs, to your URL of choice. If you allow search engines to decide which URL to index it may not be the one you prefer. The canonical attribute on link tags is another option to help search engines determine which URL is the one you want indexed

 Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

You also want to make sure that every page on your site has unique content. Many ecommerce sites will have very thin product information. For example one product might come in several different sizes and each size gets its own page. The content on those pages will likely be exactly the same with the exception of the different sizes. Search engines are not likely to rank all of those pages. They’ll choose one.  It would be better to create a single page and allow for a choice of size on that page. If each size must have it’s own page rewrite some of the content to increase the percentage of uniqueness on each.

Make your site easier to navigate

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

When you click on Update Permalinks under the Settings tab in WordPress, it will create or update the Rewrite rules in your .htaccess file. Generally this is sufficient, but there are often htaccess settings that will yield additional site improvements. While this is well beyond the scope of this post if you are interested in learning more, two good site to visit are mod_rewrite, a beginner’s guide (with examples) and URL Rewriting Guide – Apache HTTP Server.

Search Friendly URLs

Which of the following URLs tells you more about the content you’ll find on the page?

• domain.com?id=3648373729&cat=12
• domain.com/sports/baseball/statistics.php

The first tells you absolutely nothing about the page content. The second clearly tells you the content will be a page showing baseball statistics of some kind. That’s much more usable to real people as well as search engines. It helps search engines identify what the page is about, makes use of keywords, and is easier to crawl.

Note: Search engines can crawl dynamic URLs fine. However too many parameters can trip them up, especially when those parameters include session IDs. If you need to include parameters in your URLs try to limit how many. Two or Three are OK,but  a dozen could cause crawling issues.

Notice in the second URL above that keywords have been used in file and folder names. You don’t want to stuff keywords in there, but using them as above reveals a lot of information about your site and reinforces keyword themes. If your statistics page and your teams page and your players page all link back up to the main baseball page it helps reinforce the keyword theme baseball throughout that section. Assuming you also have sections for football and basketball and hockey all linking back up to your main sports page it further helps reinforce the keyword theme sports.

The idea of creating these keyword themes is a concept known as theming or siloing.

Improve the structure of your URLs

Canonical URLs (different than the canonical attribute mentioned above, but the same basic concept) are another example of duplicate content. Canonical URLs are a fancy way of saying multiple URLs can lead to the same page. Your home page might be accessed via:

• domain.com
• www.domain.com
• domain.com/index.html
• www.domain.com/index.html

Those are 4 different pages in the eyes of search engines and again only one will be indexed. Just as important are the links pointing into those pages. Say one site links to domain.com and another links to www.domain.com/index.html. You might think that means your home page has 2 links pointing to it. Nope. From the perspective of a search engine that’s one link pointing to each of two different pages. You’ve effectively cut in half the benefit of those links.

 Linking and Online Promotion

Internal Linking, Anchor Text, Nofollow, and Link Diversity

There are three more ideas we should discuss when talking about the quality of links:

1. The anchor text of the links in question,
2. Links with the nofollow attribute applies, and
3. The diversity of where those links come from.

Anchor Text

Fast review — anchor text is the clickable text that becomes the links. Those words and even the words around the link itself give an indication of what the page is voting for. If the anchor text linking to you says “web design” it will likely help you rank better for the keyphrase “web design” than if the anchor text said “click here.” Keywords in anchor text are a good signal for ranking.

Nofollow

nofollow is essentially a way to link to a web page while at the same time letting search engines know you’re not voting or recommending that page. Links with nofollow applied are not supposed to pass any link juice or link value. They shouldn’t therefore have any benefit in regards to SEO.

Link Diversity

With web pages and websites there is likely a diminishing return concerning links back to your site. Consider two cases.

1. 1,000 links pointing into your site all from a single website
2. 100 links pointing into your site, five each from 20-different sites

The latter is probably going to have a greater impact. In the first case there’s no diversity in the links. In the second case there are more sites “voting” for you. Ideally links into your site or page should come from a variety of sources.

Resource: SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Link Diversity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Quick Summary of Link Building

1. Build trust and authority in your site by acquiring links from general and topical trusted and authority sites.
2. Build trust and authority in a single page on your site by acquiring links from general and topical trusted and authority web pages.
3. Try to get links with variations of your main key-phrase in the anchor text.
4. Seek links from a diverse set of sites and pages.
5. Sometimes it’s simply a numbers game. More links or better more link juice, PR, or whatever you want to call it, is better. Quality though, is usually preferred to quantity.

Internal links (links from one page of your site to another) count as links, but what others say about you means more than what you say about yourself.

External links (links from other domains) are better than internal links, but internal links do count. Make sure to link between pages of your site. Internal links are also one place you can guarantee control over the anchor text of the link.

In general the easier a link is to get the less value it likely has. Even if it does have great value your competition will be able to get that same link as easily as you thereby diluting the effect of the link.