Post date: August 26, 2010 by Mike Campbell
There are lots of do’s and don’ts when you try to create search engine friendly website pages. In our tutorials section we talk about the importance of code to text ratio, keyword density, link building and fresh content. But what are the rules when it comes to the amount of links within your page content? And what about the links in the menu and footer sections?
When deciding how your page is structured it should be on your mind that there are not too many internal or external links. The amount of outgoing links per page should be considered in the same sense as your link building efforts. You want as many coming in as there are going out, and because you can’t realistically link build for every page on your site, you should be more frugal with the hyperlinks within the text and footer.
The menu [when first designed] is created with code to text ratio in mind, meaning it should be as compact and SEO friendly as possible. A big consideration is your existing PageRank- many optimisation blogs and articles will dictate you can have more links the stronger the page is. Also, having a smaller menu structure (less links) gives the opportunity to have more in text links to other parts of your site. This is an important part of SEO, and Google et al see in-text linking as a more positive effort for search engine optimisation.
A footer section can have more internal links and even links to third party websites (and other sites you own and want to promote). Again this should be done sparingly; it all adds to your page size and reduces the link popularity of a page unless the links are all reciprocated.
Are there an exact number of hyperlinks to aim for? No not really, just don’t go overboard on external links, and make sure you have a structure to how many you use and where they go. If you try to have 20 internal links per 1 PageRank that’s a good starting point. Never more than 100 even with a PageRank of 4/5 is something we stick to.
Remember, if you run an e-commerce website then your menu could already have 50-60 links, so the sidebar and footer sections should be relatively free of links when the site is first launched. With time and website strength you can add more.
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Last modified: September 27, 2011
