is an ever-changing fight for the highest place. At one time, back in the history, links were non-existent, then start gaining importance and now is like nothing else matters but the quality (juicy) links a site has. So it's crucial that those search links are properly optimized.How you do a SLO (Search Link Optimization)? Let's look how a common internal link looks like (this will link a text from one page to a different page in your site i.e. for navigation purposes) :
a href="your-page.php" title="page title" target="_blank" page name; (I intentionally omitted <, /> because it will be treated as a valid html link and will not display but "page name")
There are two areas to be optimized in this type of link. First is title="page title" -- the page title should contain at least one prominent keyword for that particular page description. As an example, on this site (Apex Pacific) I have available SEO Suite that is an All-in-One Seo Software, so in my case title="seo optimizing software" works great. All three words are key keywords and it might look like I am spamming but that is what the product is.
Second area is page name (that is where you put the page name) and in my case I have SEO Suite v.8 As mentioned in previous posts choosing a page name could make a big difference. Again, the page name has to contain at least one prominent keyword. So, you have at least two "money" keywords in one internal link that will be easily indexed by search engines.
Another type of internal link is the image (picture) links. This link will display the image where you place it on the page and it tells the browser where the image is located on your site. All image links have the alt=" " tag. What you should use for alt tag is the image description that it will be displayed instead of the image in case the image is damaged or missing. So take this alt tag and use it in your advantage by optimizing it the same as a text link as described above.
More about links: be careful about outbound links where you link to. The search engine algorithms are very keen against spamming. You should link to other material or products of similar relevance. Specially pay great attention to other people that are allowed to post on your site (such as comments to your blogs or forums). Many times they take advantage of your ratings and embed a link to their low ranking site in their posting. You should not allow that because that will lower your rank. The way to block that is adding a nofollow tag to that link when you moderate: add rel="nofollow" after title="title" and that will prevent search engines to follow that link thus that site is not getting part of your rank.
To better understand how links and page ranks are tied go to this blog.
