Help Your Customers Find You in Cyberspace

8. Re-work Internal Links

In all likelihood, your visitors shop differently during the holidays than they do at other times of the year (e.g., they buy different kinds of products, have a higher average order value). If so, it makes sense to reorganize your internal linking structure so those categories and products that are more popular during the holidays get a larger share of PageRank score than other, less popular ones.

For example, if your site sells chocolates but all your chocolates are two clicks away from the home-page, change it so they’re available just one click away from the homepage. And if there’s a particular type of chocolates that’s a top seller, consider making that particular product available with just one click. However, Google advises in its Webmaster Guidelines that you keep the number of links on your homepage to fewer than 100.

Don’t replace your existing navigation structure and category hierarchy; add additional links to provide shortcuts that pass PageRank to popular holiday sellers. Many sites do this through a site map page or links in the footer, but these approaches are less than ideal. The site map already is piled high with links, and each link will get only a small share of PageRank passed to it. Footer links are discounted and will probably not be worth as much as links placed higher in the page.

Anchor text (the underlined words in a link) play a critical role in search engine optimization. The search engines take those underlined words and associate them with the page to which you’re linking.

For instance, a text link that says “chocolate” is a good start. One that says “chocolate gifts” is better, because you improve your chances of visibility for chocolate gift-related searches, yet haven’t hampered your ability to get good rankings for chocolate-related searches.