It is the old story, “How do I get more traffic to my site?“ If you run a blog, that is good. It seems like you have one foot already in the door towards getting your articles indexed and having them displayed on the Google Search Engine Results page (GSERP). Blogs, such as Wordpress, seem to be natural Google Bot magnets. This articles teaches you how to control your links and why it is important for improved SEO.

On my site I write a lot about successful blogging and different ways to better optimize your blog site. In this article you will learn about controlling your links. Controlling the pages you link to on your site is important because the Google Bot will investigate where all your links go to, and then where all the links on those pages go to, and so forth. The Google Bot is dedicated to investigating deep links and keeps a tally on which pages have content that is acceptable for the Google Index and which pages do not. If you are participating in link exchanges or blogroll exchanges, that is great! Participating in these exchanges will help increase your backlinks. However, if you carelessly participate in these exchanges and don’t invest time into investigating the links on the page you linked to, then you it could potentially cause your site some harm.

Another aspect to look at when controlling your links is clearing a path or painting a navigational picture specific for directing the Google Bot. If you control your links you can actual point the Google Bot in the directions you want it to go. Your home page is ultimately the most important page on your site. If you have ten most recent articles displayed on your home page and 250 other external links, when the Google Bot visits your site, it will be hit/miss whether the Google Bot indexes your articles. “It is important to have your home page indexed, but what is more important is having your individual pages indexed as well”. If the Google Bot can’t reach your important article pages because it was too busy attempting to index 250 other links, then you lose!

Your home page needs to be organized, clean, and Micro-managed. If you don’t manage and have a conscious knowledge of your links on your homepage, then inadvertently you make it difficult for you to be a successful blogger because you put a huge damper on how accurately your important articles get indexed.

Basically, what I am saying is don’t have a million external links on your home page, and don’t have a million internal links on your home page either! The total amount of links on your home page *should not exceed 100 URLS. If you have a blogroll with 50 sites, you might want to consider creating a page called “blogroll” or “links page” and putting the links there. Doing that reduces your home pages links from 50 down to 1. It is no big deal for people to click into a secondary page to view links.

As as added bonus, when you consolidate your links into secondary pages, you also help increase the PageRank of these pages. If you increase your PageRank on secondary pages that link back to your home page, then you will really start to see your home page increase in PageRank.