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Utility snippets and incidental links

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 27, 2007 in Content Theory, Link Theory

There are three types of internal links we can give ourselves: navigational links, embedded links, and incidental links.

Most people should know the basics for navigational links: use descriptive anchor text relevant to your content; use absolute URLs (especially if you mix HTTP with HTTPS content or use templates for multiple sub-domains); make sure your navigation is both crawlable and indexable.

Embedded links are still gaining acceptance despite the fact they have been used to achieve great success by large ecommerce sites like Amazon, Wal-mart, and Barnes and Noble (to name a few). Your featured products, clearance items, and most popular items content should be dominating the links on the front page of your ecommerce site.

But other sites can benefit from front-page deep links. If your non-profit organization has an event coming up, you need to announce it on the front page of your site — and I mean link to it. If you business has just launched a new initiative, link to the article on your site that explains the initiative.

Even large corporations tend to bury their most important news and information in secondary pages with no mentions on the root URL page. If you have a large content site, you need a well-linked, occasionally or frequently updated Site News section just so that people (and search engines) have some place to go to find out about new content.

Incidental links don’t receive much attention at all. They may be placed in margin navigation that supplements the site-wide navigation, or they may appear in copy that is more focused on some other destinations. Incidental links often point to older articles, contact information, or other supporting information that may not necessarily attract as much traffic as primary content.

Incidental links can help you build up the trust and value in your on-site utility pages. These are not just the “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages. A utility page collates information that is not directly involved in the primary function of your Web site. For example, monthly archive pages on this blog are utility pages. I rarely if ever link to them and most if not all of them are frozen in the permafrost of Google’s Supplemental Index.

You can turn utility pages into channels to help the search engines identify very important content. To do that you have to treat your incidental links as standard copy. That is, just as you have a template that contains your navigation links, you need to create a set of utility snippets that can easily be dropped in to your copy.

These utility snippets provide more information about your site and they can be dynamically generated if you have the resources to create database-drivven pages. But you have to be careful not to let the utility snippets become the main focus of your utility pages. The utility pages still have to be useful for specific if less important functions.

When your utility snippet (call it “tagline” or “footer” text) is longer than the rest of the content on the page, you have a problem. The utility snippet should be brief, concise, and relevant to whatever primary text it accompanies.

If you include articles from specific writers on your site, your utility snippet may be a footer paragraph that links to a profile page for the author, or to a search function that is preconfigured to help people find other articles by that author.

If you have 15 products in a specific category, your utility snippet may be a footer paragraph or a secondary navigation box that describes the category and links to the category home page (maybe even to all 15 items).

Utility content doesn’t necessarily make your site more relevant or link popular for anything, but it does help make your site more crawlable and easier to navigate through. Ona site with 100,000 pages of content, a full-time copywriter probably would not be able to hand-code the utility snippets in less than 6 months.

Utility snippets are always context-sensitive but they should not be intrusive. Web sites that flood page layouts with intrusive advertising usually have little to no utility snippets. Utility snippets do sometimes land in hot zones where advertising can be effective. It is often a good idea to place utility snippets in link hot zones so that your visitors see value in those locations.

Incidental linkage may also appear in navigation. On-site navigation may be context-sensitive, and in some cases incidental links may be useful in the navigation. The context should determine if additional information is required. A common incidental link might be the Terms of Service or the Contact page. The only qualifying factor is that the incidental link appears only where the context demands that type of navigation.

Your targeted keywords won’t be associated with incidental links. It would be unnatural to use keywords in the anchor text for incidental links. If a link can reasonably make use of targeted anchor text, the odds are pretty good that it is not an incidental link.

Think of your Web site template as a tree. Your utility snippets and incidental links are the ornaments you hang on the tree. But rather than being ornamental they really help make your site more useful and crawlable (navigable) by supplementing the normal navigzation with a secondary layer of context-sensitive navigation.

While some people might suggest that context-sensitive navigatioin resembles theming, there are several differences. The chief difference is the lack of targeted keyword expressions. The next most significant difference is that the context is determined by the relationships between pages on your site, not by the keywords for which you optimize.

Formulaic SEO rarely incorporates incidental linkage and utility snippets into its on-page factors. After all, they don’t provide any boost to specific link and copy coding tactics. You don’t get “SEO points” for including incidental links and utility snippets on your pages.

But you may improve your crawling and conversions if you give some thought to the logical, non-keyword specific relationships between functional or administrative pages and product or service pages on your site. By emphasizing those bonds, you make your site stronger and more compelling for both your visitors and the search engines.