WebProNews

Over at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, Maile Ohye is posting linking tips all week. Today’s tips are about linking architecture, or structuring internal links on your site so that they are both user and search engine friendly.

Ohye describes some pretty basic SEO, but reviews and verification from Google is always a good thing. For instance, reminding webmasters that “click here” might be an acceptable call to action for end users, but for search spiders, it means nothing. For search relevancy reasons, the anchor text of the link should indicate where the link leads. This is also helpful for human users because it provides an information scent for them as well.

That advice falls within the overall theme: Making your site easily navigable is extremely important for users and for Google. Ohye suggests role-playing as a way of determining whether your site is easy to get around. Text links make it easier for crawlers, and submitting sitemaps to Google is a good way to help the Googlebot out if using other kinds of links.

How would you know if the Googlebot is indexing your internal links? Though Webmaster Tools you can request verification from the Googlebot of which links it has found. You can verify with through “Pages with internal links” feature.

Once again, Ohye and the google team frown on attempts at “PageRank sculpting,” not that it does a lot of good anyway.