People often ask me how they can channel the incoming page rank (PR) received from quality ‘back links’ to maximize its effect on their most important keywords, and this tutorial will address exactly that, using examples and a page rank calculator.
Here’s the situation: Pages such as "contact us" and "privacy statement" are both necessary and integral parts of your design and must be displayed for the user’s benefit. There also may be many other minor pages on your website and you might want them all to be indexed, however you want to be able to concentrate your PR on only those pages that need it in order to compete for your major keywords.
The optimal solution is to have all of your pages indexed while at the same time identifying your optimized pages. Once you have separated these two types of pages (those that need the PR and those that just need to be indexed), then you can use the following method to reduce PR to the "can’t sell anything pages" and channel PR to the optimized pages.
Step One
Start by making a list of your keywords and the pages which were specifically optimized for each. For ease of explanation, we will use 1,2,3,4, and 5 as the keywords. Each link to the optimized page must contain the targeted keyword within the anchor to maximize the effect.
You may also want use the "title" attribute within the link as many SEO’s believe that it carries added keyword weight to the destination page.
Here is a sample html link: <a href="1.html" title="1">1</a>
Here is a sample JavaScript link: <a HREF="javascript:nofollow(1.html)">1</a>
A link with just the keyword in the anchor is usually not user friendly for example "1" is the link above and if I have optimized my index page for "1" most people looking for the familiar "home" button would become frustrated with my unclear navigation.
To counteract this I either use the standby "home" with the keyword, in this case your anchor could be "1 Home" or "Home 1" or I have a "home" button – but write the link in JavaScript and then provide a keyword-loaded HTML link in an inconspicuous place that the spider will still find.
As long as the keyword is somehow used in the link, then you are good to go.
Next, make a complete list of all of your internal pages and create identical HTML and JavaScript counterpart versions of each link. You will now have an ‘SE friendly’ HTML version, along with an unreadable JavaScript version.
It is imperative that the JavaScript and HTML links look identical, so that they can be easily interchanged without the presentation having to be altered.
This process could take you quite a while, but the results will be well worth it. In the conclusion of this article we’ll look at how changes made to your links can influence your page’s PR Cheers! Morgan Carey AKA "SEO Guy"
- Visit www.seocentral.com -
Search engine optimization for those who strive for excellence!
Editor’s Note: Optimizing Web pages and their interconnectivity for improved PR is one of the best methods of increasing the amount of free, high-quality traffic you receive from Google, and while the process can be confusing and time consuming, It can also be done for free; making it an excellent discipline to master. Stay tuned! ~ Stephen
