Improve your SEO by Organizing your external links

This is the 3rd post in the series of showing you How I increased my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month. Before you begin reading those, I strongly recommend you check out the past two posts in the series on Guide to refine the Semantic Web Markups and Most Effective SEO move you can make.

Ok lets get this thing rolling. Now If you haven’t noticed after seeing the past two posts in the series, the key point that I am stressing is organizing your content. By doing that you are making the job easier for search engines. That is why they will love you even more and give you the right spot in your Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs). In this post we will be discussing on how organizing your links can improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

How to Organize External Links?

You can organize your links by using relation tags. How do your links relate to you? For instance, you might be linking out to your friends in your blog roll. Your own company, Your own social media profiles, Just websites that you like. But how does Search Engines know how these external links relate to you. Well that is why rel= tags are used with links.

Most of you are familiar with rel=”nofollow”. I know some people who no follow every external link in fear of google. But that is not the way to go. You don’t need to be afraid. You need to work with them. For those of you who don’t know the definition, it means the bot should not follow this link at all. That way you get to keep your link juice and strength to your page. Theoretically you should rank higher in PR, but that is not always the case. So what should you use?

Well, I kind of made up my own categories, and I suggest you to make your own. With each rel tag, you need to have your own category associated with it. So it will be like rel=”category”.

People are afraid to put their own social media profiles without a nofollow attribute. When you do that, you are not giving your profiles the juice. I think instead of nofollow what you should do is attach a ‘me’ tag. For example my youtube profile:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/mbalkhi" rel="me">Youtube</a>

Rel=me is a well known tag around, but you can be creative and make your own categories. For example, I got accepted in 9rules. Which is an award basically because not every site that applies get in. Anyways a required term of inclusion was that you would put 9rules logo on your site with a link back.

<a href="http://www.9rules.com" rel="award">9rules</a>

Above is how my link tag looks. Obviously instead of the name I put the image, but you get the point right. There are other known tags that wordpress advocates if you ever used blogroll you should see a tab that says link relationships.

You can use all those tags shown in the picture above such as friend, sibling, spouse, child, kin, etc. Check out the XFN Guide if you want to know more popular ones.

Now I am not saying don’t use no follow. I do link to people who I don’t like linking to just to make a reference therefore I just add a no follow to their link. But if I want to give credit to someone, I don’t no follow them. If I like someone’s site, and I mention it in my posts I don’t no follow it. So if you get the point what I am saying.

Advantages of Rel tags

In my opinion, your sites look more organized. Advantages of rel=”nofollow” are well known. It keeps your link juice and page strength to yourself etc etc. But advantages of the other rel tags are relatively not known. All I am going to say is that I think this possibly played a role in my search engine traffic, but no guarantee. I know that search engines look at popular rel= tags such as nofollow and me. But I don’t know about others.

Note: I did not read any book/ebook that suggest using creative relation tag helps your ranking. No book/ebook says that you cannot use them either. This is just my sole opinion or you can say an educated inference that I am making. Things that I am trying out and liking it.