Linking to internal pages

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

It was suggested in another thread that one should get some link partners to link to internal pages rather than just the index page.

About what ratio of internal to index page links do you think is appropriate?

I have been focusing on 6 key phrases in my anchor text and they are really the only ones that I am particularly interested in anyway. But, does anyone think that I should use some less relevant key phrases which are more specific to the internal page that I am working on? Or would it be OK to use the generic 6 that I have been using?

[kensmith]

With getting links to internal pages you will not only have one spot in the SERP's, but you will get 2. So for example my if my terms I am #1 and 2 or sometime it's #1 and then #12 (or 5...). This will give you more exposure than just having one page rank for all of your terms.

Some terms are easier to just create a new page for and get a few links to it. If you truely can think of only 6 terms that your site needs to target then maybe you don't need to worry about it anyways. Think I target about 50 terms at least so it makes a lot of sense for me.

Now from G's point of view. When you link to a valuable resource are most of these links to the HP or an internal page? I have found that at least 60% of the time that I link to a site it is to the internal pages, not the HP.

If you have pages that have information that is usefull then the links should go to them at least some of the time to look natural IMO. I would say 50+% of my links go to internal pages.

[ResaleBroker]

Ted, your backlink's "anchor text" should be relevant to the page it is linking to, internal or otherwise.

[webmaster]

I'm with Ken,
Come up with great copy other than the homepage for each of your main kw's (An article on Breckenridge homes and why buying and selling through you is a benefit for instance) then get links with "breckenridge homes" to that internal page which you will call breckenridge-homes.html or whatever extension you use.

Make the focus more on converting the visitor, not ranking in the SE - chances are you already will get the second ranking because of your strength in the first - of course you will use your title element and an H tag or 2 with in your article sprinkled with your kw but no need to write

"our kw is the best kw of all the kw's - search for your kw which is our kw"

Because that is just annoying lol

[MattL]

Definitely be careful with "less relevant" keywords, particularly in bold or heading tags. Google is very smart, very literate, if such a thing can be applied to a spider. I've definitely noticed a handful of recommendations fed to me by others can "sway" G to certain pages:

• BOLD and ITALIC text matters. Especially BOLD links leading to your relevant content.
• Bad words can dilute your content. Google knows noun/verb structures and can smell fishy writing.
• Multi-level headings (H1, H2, H3) matter a lot. Like BOLD, it hints to what is most relevant on the page.
• The top 350 words matter most. Period.
• ALT attributes for linked images are (I believe) just as significant as H1.

For all of their talk of PageRank and site-to-site voting, I think Google has a much better text analysis engine than anyone lets on. It's definitely better than Yahoo! or MSN, which can both be easily tricked by stuffed pages.

As Ken said, content matters most. With the exception of allinurl-type matches, Google will go deep for maximum relevance before it goes to the home page.

-Matt

[Don Willoughby]

Relevance is the key. If you are receiving a link from a real estate properties page you are better to have it link to the page on your site having real estate properties as a keyword.

[frobn]

Definitely be careful with "less relevant" keywords, particularly in bold or heading tags. Google is very smart, very literate, if such a thing can be applied to a spider. I've definitely noticed a handful of recommendations fed to me by others can "sway" G to certain pages:

• BOLD and ITALIC text matters. Especially BOLD links leading to your relevant content.
• Bad words can dilute your content. Google knows noun/verb structures and can smell fishy writing.
• Multi-level headings (H1, H2, H3) matter a lot. Like BOLD, it hints to what is most relevant on the page.
• The top 350 words matter most. Period.
• ALT attributes for linked images are (I believe) just as significant as H1.

For all of their talk of PageRank and site-to-site voting, I think Google has a much better text analysis engine than anyone lets on. It's definitely better than Yahoo! or MSN, which can both be easily tricked by stuffed pages.

As Ken said, content matters most. With the exception of allinurl-type matches, Google will go deep for maximum relevance before it goes to the home page.

-Matt

That's odd. I have found Google the worst of the bunch when it comes to good site architecture. MSN to me seems the best. I have looked at the source on100s of top ranking pages looking for things like key words in heading tags and my impression is that Google disregards them. Google also appears to give the least relevant results for real estate sites, I think that they over emphasize the city and under emphasize the real estate terms.

These are only impressions, but it would be interesting if someone were able to do a vali analysis.

[MattL]

In my experience, MSN is a no-contest-cakewalk to Top 10 positioning. It was the first SE in which we placed Top 10, and now (with no further specific targeting) we're virtually all of the first 30 URLs in many "<location> <keywords>" searches. And I'm talking 20-30 suburb names.

Google is most certainly content-sensitive, particularly to the formatting (as I noted above). It took some time to get from 20-30 to Top 10, and the change can solely be attributed to formatting.

Although many others have noted it, I too found Google outsmarting any sort of keyword stuffing... which, according to others, is based on sentence structure intelligence (which, of course, makes perfect sense).

I'm sorry it's not what you've seen... perhaps there are specific pages you'd like to point out?

-Matt

[frobn]

What I am look at is the site hierarchy and architecture, title, meta description, h1, h2, h3, tags, html to content ratio and how they interplay. Look at the top sites for key west real estate. None of them have very good design architecture or even h1 tags. I have done this with a several different locations, from what I gather from my observations is google does not give the best results. Analyzing a site for natural language shouldn't be difficult. I remember an old DOS program that simulated an psychiatric interview, a lot of people thought it was better than a real psychologist or psychiatrist.

[ResaleBroker]

The top 350 words matter most. Period.

The top 350 "words" or the top 350 "characters"?