Always Link To Your Home Page
The first rule of SEO is that all webpages within your website must link to your home page. While automatically provided for in most WordPress themes, in other types of websites this fundamental requirement is often overlooked.
The starting point of good internal link structure is having all of your webpages link to your home page. And, further, that your home page should always be defined the same way. Including, for example, index.html in the URL of your home page should always be considered a bad SEO practice. Your home page should either be using domain.com or domain.com/ as the proper format for your home page url. Defining your home page sometimes as domain.com/ and at other times as domain.com/index.html is just asking for trouble. This is always a bad SEO practice which will only divide your internal pagerank between two different urls.
Remember that not all hyperlinks are equal. If you want your links to be followed in the search engines, than using plain text hyperlinks is the preferred practice. Graphic links are not followed, unless they contain alternate text. Only text is indexed by search engines that are indexing the Web. So, remember that only the ALT=Text (alternate text) image tag is what Google uses to tie graphic hyperlinked images to text. Always avoid embedding hyperlinks within javascript as most search engines don’t parse it.
The traditional anchor text used for all home pages is either home or home page. On occasion, you will see some websites using other text, such as Wikipedia’s Main Page. While this anchor text is user friendly, it is hardly good SEO. Ideally the anchor text for you home page should include important keywords or a recognizable acronym, if not the entire name of your website. Here shorter catchy site names have a clear SEO advantage over sites with longer names.
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June 15, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Hi, Thanks for the info, Do you think using a permanent redirect to a subdomain of your site as the sites home page would be bad in terms of SEO?
For instance when i-CONICA.net is accessed it is redirected to downloads.i-CONICA.net, you think that is important?
Thanks.
June 15, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Google does not like redirects. They are considered almost as bad as a broken link. Google especially does not like redirects used to create a domain name which in your case is setup to look like a subdomain. Historically, many people consider that type of redirection both sneaky and to be a form of spam. Thus, at some level, Google is discriminating against your use of redirection.
Your robots.txt file for i-conica.net is completely invalid. You should check all your robots.txt files with a robots.txt file checker for validity.
June 18, 2008 at 8:05 am
Wow Thanks for the advice. Really appreciated. I’ll move the contents of the default subdomain to the root domain over the next weeks. I’ll have to leave redirects back to the new destination to stop 404s from currently cached pages though. Thanks again!