What is Cross Linking and Avoid Common Mistake

What does Cross Linking mean?

Cross Linking is the art of creating links within a website. In a very traditional layout you might have a home page and then to other pages (page A and page B). The home page would contain links to both.

Cross Linking would then be where you create links from, for example:

• Page A to Page B
• Page B to Page A
• Page A to the home page
• Page B to the home page

Note you should only create such links if they are relevant and useful as to do so for the sake of it can lead to penalties from search engines because they think you are scamming.

So in an ideal situation you might want to achieve the following for maximum effect, where page A is about "Keyword X":

• On the home page the link to Page A should contain the text "Keyword X".
• on Page B there is a paragraph about Keyword X with a link to Page A that contains the text "Keyword X"
• Page A has the URL keywordx.html
• Page A is optimised for "Keyword X"

This is a good set of indicators to search engines that Page A is indeed about "Keyword X" and might be worth ranking in the search results when a person searches "Keyword X".

Note the use of the words "might be worth ranking". There are many other factors the search engines take into account.

Common Mistakes

One of the most common errors people make is to use the words "click here" in the link. For example: "To find out more about Keyword X click here".

"Click Here" does not really mean anything to the search engines and doesn't indicate what the destination page is about so instead use phrases like: "Find out more about Keyword X".