Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My site has some 7 main sections with internal pages each (some 8-15 pages each section).
The home site is about a general topic and those 7 main pages are specific, users find often those pages in serps instead home.
So I wonder, what's the best strategy in this case?
Should I feed asking incoming links to home? (home contains links to all that 7 main sections and viceversa)
Or should I split efforts and feed each of those, that contains the keywords users search for?
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:05 pm (utc) on June 25, 2004]
[edit reason] edit for url [/edit]
If you are a contender in your arena and think you’ll always be, or are only engaged in SEO for limited reasons and objectives in the field, I wouldn’t know what to tell you, that’s a frugalism I don’t know. But if you intend to go about getting a lot of incoming links, then you’ll need to branch out at some point and establish a broader stance in the semantic landscape.
If you can put all of your keyterms on your homepage, each appropriately anchor-linked to an internal page of the same name and title, then all you need to do is send links to the home page with those various keyterms and you’re done with it. If not, if you have a lot of competitive keyterms that you cannot list on your homepage, then you need them to exist on subpages, and you can link directly to these pages. Since you could reasonably put 20 internal links on your homepage pointing to deeper pages, and on each of these you could have as many as 100 more internal links, then you could conceivably link in with as many as 2000 different keyterms, but that’s way too high of an average per page. Have an internal site map perhaps with 100 links in it perhaps but the rest should link out at 10 to 16 links per page or so. Still, at a 3rd level, that’s 10,000 or so internal links you can link to using matching anchor text, and that’s a pretty big beast.
While genuinely themed linking campaigns have not been shown to be of any greater benefit up to this point in time insofar as effectiveness of a linking campaign is concerned when compared to linking with off-topic sites, it has been shown that the anchor text you use in your links (and the 1st few words immediately after) is vitally important to how you rank for those terms. However, it seems likely the search engines will continue to dabble in semantic mapping methods, and that keyword topological scoring will play a varying role in the years to come, so for those sites that can support more of a themed format, such may be the way to go.
Some sites do not easily lend themselves to getting links with very similar other sites in the industry. It’s nothing to worry about. Your links are on-topic if they have the appropriate anchor text. By that anchor text’s presence on the other domain’s page, you are lending it some semantic relevance.
The relationships between these different factors will change over time, and with it, rankings. It is important to recognize that these changes are usually brought about by algorithmic updates and updates of database components and values, and not by some man behind a curtain throwing switches and letting mayhem fly. Being aware of some of the mechanics of the algorithms speculated to have been or soon to be implemented will help ward off the witch hunters and black helicopter enthusia when and if you feel you’ve been “penalized”. If you balance your stance, your distribution of power (power=links), you will better withstand algorithmic changes, bear less breaches from competitors, and gain some immunity from real or imagined penalizations.
