Have you ever thought about how search engines see your webpage?

The search engines send out robots or ‘bots’ to examine your pages. These ‘bots’ don’t see an eye-catching, well designed webpage. What they see are HTML tags and text. That’s it! they don’t see the wonderful photo collections, stunning graphics or marvelous layout that took hours of painstaking work.

And most importantly, they cannot follow links based on JavaScript. So, the super-cool JavaScript, drop-down menu you installed last week, will not allow the search engine ‘bots’ to crawl your site and index all your pages.

The correct way to link is really very simple. Always use,

<a href = "http://www.destinationsite.com">destination site</a>

Then the search engines will always be able to follow your links. This applies to internal as well as external links. So, where should you be linking to?

Your task, as a webmaster and SEO optimiser, is to get as many links as you can, pointing to your website, from popular, on-topic authority sites. The sites on the first search page, for popular keywords, often have hundred’s or even thousand’s of incoming links.

It takes time to build that many links. But when you have, it tells google you are an authority because everyone links to you, and you have earned your place on the first page of results.

So, you should be systematically adding links to your site, on every website in your niche, particularly authority sites with a high page rank, because some of that page rank will come your way.

But here’s a trick that many webmasters miss. Assuming you already know the keywords for your website. If not, check my recent post, do you know your keywords. You should use these keywords in the links pointing back to your site. So if your domain name is ‘footloose.eu’, and your keywords are hill walking, walking, Alps, then use these words in your links, not your domain name. For example,

<a href = "http://www.footloose.eu">hill walking</a>

<a href = "http://www.footloose.eu">Alps walking</a>

This tells the search engine "here’s link to a website and it’s about hill walking", or "it’s about Alps walking", and it knows before visiting your website. So, when the ‘bot’ arrives at your site and sees it is indeed about hill walking and Alps walking, it’s opinion of you as an authority is reinforced, giving you higher rankings and a better position in the search results.

Linking is a powerful way to improve your rankings, but there is a lot more advice, tips and techniques you will need to employ, and a terrific source, with an excellent reputation is search engine news.