What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and how to do it part 2

Part 1 looked into the explanations and advice of using keywords in your website as well as dos and don'ts.

For all of you lacking in the technical jargon department, internal links are links within your website that would navigate your user to another page or point in your website. Internal links fall into the "usability" category of Google's 200 (circa) point criteria when ranking your site.

Why internal links

When Google and other search engines "crawl" your site (this is basically when they go through your site logging any changes from the indexed page), one thing they look for is the "ease of use" when navigating through your website. Internal links allow users to seamless flow through your website without having to depend on the top navigation bar. When writing content, one should think about how that content may tie in with other pages. For example, website owners tend to describe their business on the home page, now if you were a double glazing company, i guarantee that in your description you would explain the different products you offer such as double glazed windows and double glazed doors. To help optimize the text, it is best practice to link the words "double glazed windows" and "double glazed doors" with the relevant pages on your site. This shows Google and other search engines that if someone was reading that and thought "i would like to learn more about your double glazed windows" then the user can simply click on the word and be taken to the appropriate page. This is something simple that people fail to action.

So what is "deep linking", this term is used when describing a websites link type. Its when a link navigates to the appropriate website but not the homepage. In our case the tips mentioned above will help with deep linking which again falls into Google's "usability" category. Deep linking can be achieved in several ways:

• Having links (or anchored text) within your articles/descriptions which navigate to the appropriate pages within your site other than the homepage.
• One of the most effective ways to deep link is to have whats known as a "site wide footer", this essentially is a type of keyword driven sitemap shown at the bottom of every page (be careful when using a site wide footer, your site should not have too many pages to make the footer to cramped or have to little pages to make the footer look silly!.
• And lastly one of the most common ways is to include a tag cloud, a tag cloud comprises of random keywords which link to approriate pages/articles within your site, the words in the tag cloud ashould be of various colours and size to show the importance or popularity of that type of content. e.g. a double glazing company's tag cloud should show the most important or popular word as being "double glazed windows" rather than "roofing".

Part 3 will dwell into the realm of outbound and inbound links.