Internal links provide the same impact as backlinks in improving your website’s SEO rankings. Although having top quality backlinks ensures that you have steady traffic from other sites, the correct internal link structure will make sure that you direct your users to pages where you want them the most. Keywords on the text link should explain the content inside the link. The most popular page of any website is the home page. That is why the call-for-action content or the most important part of your site is placed on the home page. If you want to promote a page, direct most of your links on that page. Do not spam your website with numerous links to your featured page. Instead, use the “nofollow” attribute in your link tag on unimportant links so that Google will only focus on indexing your featured page. Know the most popular section of your website and use that to draw focus on your other pages.

A site map is a page that presents a directory for all the content of your website. Each item on the site map should link to a page in your site. Site maps can help improve your page ranking by allowing the engine spider to easily crawl your site and do so in an orderly manner. However, hard coded site maps are hard to compile especially if you expect numerous updates daily. There are XML site map generators that will organize your links for you. Once you have your XML file, submit it to Google so that the spider can crawl your website accordingly. Each item on the sitemap is placed relative to other URL’s on your site, allowing the engine spider to crawl your website in a more systematic way.

Dead links are a burden to users, webmasters, and especially search engines. Engine spiders will not waste time going through links only to find a dead end. At the same time, websites with dead links reflect badly on their content, putting an impression that the pages are not updated. Search engines know that readers will not put up with dead links. Thus it is important to keep your pages updated with correct, live links.

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The Alt tag is one attribute often overlooked by many SEO developers. An Alt attribute is used to show text when the primary element cannot be rendered. For example, if the called image is missing, the Alt tag appears in place of the image. Alt tags are also used by audio browsers to describe your website to disabled users particularly the blinds. For this reason, Google and all other major search engines place considerable importance to Alt tags. Alt text indexed by Google contributes greatly to the search engine availability of your website. An Alt tag that perfectly describes your image helps search engines index your images, so that the content ranks well in image search engines. If you have a compelling image with a high ranking keyword in your Alt tag, you can lure a higher search listing. Alt tags are best used for their real purpose which is to help text-only and audio browsers render your page. Alt tags should not be used to stuff keywords. Use the Alt tag carefully.

Once you find the right keywords or “money phrases” you should know where to place them for most the effective impact. Keywords should be placed in title tags, meta description, H1 tags and other heading tags, and in the first paragraph of the content or the first 200 words of the article. Keywords should also appear in the filename with the correct file naming conventions (i.e. dash instead of underscores) and in anchor text that link to internal pages or relevant external sites. There is also a prevailing importance in placing keywords in domain form. MSN places the highest value on keyword domains while Google and Yahoo have varying treatments for them.

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