What's the Right Way to Link To Pages On My Site?

The answer to this question might surprise you! First off, innuendo and rumor aside, Google and other search engines do not care about how your links are coded. I have read on some SEO sites that people suggest that Google "spiders" your site faster if you have absolute or even fully-qualified URLs, but as far as I can ascertain, that's just not true.

So this facet of the question boils down to what's the easiest for you to maintain on your site? A link that allows you to move all the pages around as you might need to reorganize things, or a link that forces you to always live with a specific domain name and directory name? My druthers is unquestionably to use relative links as much as possible, and to always use absolute (though not fully-qualified) links on 404 error pages and other content that kind of floats around on your site.

The only area where full, absolute URLs are a necessity are weblog entries, because your Weblog entries should be generating an RSS feed (learn more about RSS feeds at this RSS info page) which is then read by subscribers in their own applications, so relative links almost always fail. This means that it's a bit more tricky to add links to, say, this entry since this Web site -- free web money -- is built around the Movable Type weblog content management system, but the trade-off of having clickable links in the RSS feed makes it worthwhile.

Let's get back to the main question, then: How should you structure the links between pages on your site?

Well, I used to have links like "home" and similar, but upon reflection realized that they were empty links because the words that are used to link to a site are important and "home" is almost as bad as "welcome" in terms of being completely useless. Instead, all of your interpage links should, as much as possible, reinforce the key words and key phrases that you want to have identify your site (also see Understanding Keyword Density for more about keywords). Instead of a link like:

<a href="index.html">home</a>

<a href="index.html'>free web money</a>

<a href="affiliate-secrets.html">free web money</a>

Whether you want to think about filenames or not, it's certainly useful to think about the words that you use to establish the links between your pages. A few minor changes can have a significant impact on your findability and isn't that worth the effort, after all?