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March 22, 2006

Internal Linking of an SEO Consultant

There's a thread over at the WebMasterWorld supporters forum about creative ways to point keyword-rich internal links to your homepage.

As you may have noticed, most people link to their homepage from within their site using the word "home." Makes sense from a usability standpoint, since that's generally what people expect to see. However, it could be kind of waste from a strictly SEO standpoint, if you feel that keyword-rich internal links play a role in ranking pages.

I'm split. I haven't seen them make a big difference, but I tend not to go too nuts on the on-page stuff. You can make yourself crazy carefully inserting keywords into your internal links, filenames, alt tags, etc..., and not see anywhere near the payoff you'd get from a single decent link.

But if you get the chance to test something like this, might as well. For the longest time the main heading of this site was "Bobnar Blog," and it linked each page back to the homepage. I decided that having a separate domain name (esoos.com), title (seo consultant esoos bobnar), and main heading (bobnar blog) for this site was kind of lazy and dumb (and confusing for anyone who might be trying to figure out what text to use to link to me), so I changed the heading to match the title about a week ago.

Of course, that means all the internal links pointing to my homepage now use the anchor text [seo consultant esoos bobnar]. Didn't really think of it as an optimization thing at the time ( I was just tired of calling this site Bobnar Blog), but we'll see what effect it has. I'm around #15 for [seo consultant] in Google last I checked, and I haven't been crawled in about a week, due to my real job putting a crimp in my blogging time.

So I guess once this site gets crawled again (probably shortly after I post this), we'll see if it gets bumped up a notch or two, or nothing, or gets sandboxed. It'd be a shame to lose my number one ranking for turd length, but I suppose that's the sacrifices we make for science.

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