Two of the most important subjects in the area of optimization are content and linking.


Linking strategies and structure are a part of both on-site optimization and off-site optimization.


Your on-site or internal linking structure has to do with the clarity and ease of your site’s navigation as well as the selection of other web site’s to which your site links. Off-site linking deals with all the ways in which you can get other sites to link to yours.


When you are designing and adding to your site make very sure your visitors can find their way around. They should be able to find any page of your site within a couple of clicks from any other page. For larger sites make sure to include a site map. This is a listing of every page on a web site written in plain English. With a link on every page to this site map your visitors will never get lost navigating your site.


When selecting other sites to link to from yours make sure these sites are relevant to yours and that they are not ‘bad neighborhoods’ or ‘low trust’ sites. A page on your site with too many links to affiliate sites or too many links on one page could be viewed negatively by the search engines such as Google and may also confuse the viewer.


Links pointing to your site should come from relevant sites. If your site were all about different types of dance wear a link coming from a real estate site would be unlikely to bring any qualified traffic to your site. At the same time the search engine spiders would be inclined to view this as an attempt at spamming and would ignore the link or worse put your site in a position to be barred from the index.


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