8 simple steps to guide search engines to the most important pages of your website
How can you get search engines to display the most important pages of your website?
Depending on your navigational link structure some pages can get higher rankings than others. Here are eight things that you can do to guide search engines to the most important pages of your website:
1. Make the web pages easy to find
Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important is that web page.
2. Link Internally
The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link internally. Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page.
3. Use the right keywords in your anchor text
If you want to see a certain page of your website on Google’s first result page for the keyword “green thingie” then the links that go from other pages of your website to that page should contain the keyword “green thingie”.
This does not guarantee that the linked web page will be listed for that keyword but it increases the relevancy of the page for the keyword phrase “green thingie”.
4. Use absolute links
Do not link to green-thingie.htm but to www.yoursite.com/green-thingie.htm. If your site gets scraped you’ll get backlinks from these sites.
5. Use the nofollow attribute
Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably don’t need to be listed in search engines.
6. Remove unnecessary links
The fewer links you have on a page, the more important a single link to another page on your site is seen as. Remove unnecessary links from your web pages.
7. Use robots.txt
Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages the other pages of your website will get more attention.
8. Recover lost pages
Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages on your site. You might want to use a link checker to check your links.
There you have it. 8 simple steps to to guide search engines to the most important pages of your website. Optimizing your own internal links will help to improve the position of your web pages in search engines.
