If you are doing on site SEO, you've no doubt hit the basics already. And we've written about them before. This includes things like meta tags, title tags, H1's, keyword density and alt tags. There are tons of sites that talk about the SEO benefits of these types of adjustments to your site. We've run many experiments, and there is no doubt that changing these things on your website will help your SEO.
As you also know if you follow us is that we believe you can only go so far with SEO on your website. At some point, and hopefully sooner than later, you will need to turn to off site tactics. The reality of SEO today is that it is competitive. And you will need to do the link building process if you expect SEO to work.
But today's little SEO tip is for advanced on site optimization. Specifically, we've come by some advice related to using no-follow links on your site. We are all certainly familiar with the use of no-follow rel tags for links to other sites that you don't want to pass any SEO juice to. For those who don't know, Google and Yahoo invented the no-follow tag and actively asks people to use it any time when they are not ready to vouch for another site that is being linked to. It is a signal to the search engines that the site at the other end of the link is not completely trusted or known.
We all know that, so what's the SEO tip? Well, we've recently found some SEO folks talking about using no-follow tags in some of their on-site links. Specifically, the theory goes that you can actually control how you pass SEO power between pages on your own site. Each link between pages on your site actually has a weight, just like a link to another url. Therefore, you should block links that are not helping your overall SEO. For example, a link to a "contact us" page doesn't need to rank. So put a no-follow tag on it. Alternatively, a link to a sub-page that is keyword rich and about a service that is related to a target keyword phrase should be ranked. So make links to that page with follow.
Taking this theory further, these SEO folks believe that the anchor text you use for your own site should be as carefully dispensed as anchor text from in-bound links. For example, most of the links on your website that point to the home page probably use the anchor text of "Home". But that page is probably not about houses. Therefore, you should no-follow these links and include as many other links pointing the home page that have more descriptive anchor text.
Again, this is theoretical to us at this point as we've just learned it. But we are going to run some experiments on a few of our sites and report out on the SEO outcomes. But as I've tuned into this on site SEO approach, I have seen many high-ranking sites with no follow applied to on-site links. This tells me there might be something to it.