Everyone who has studied a little bit of search engine optimization (SEO) knows that linking is one of the key factors to a successful campaign. Many people overlook one of the easiest and most influential types of links they can get, “internal links.” As those who have tried to get good, relevant external links know, it’s not always easy. With internal links, you have complete control over where your links are, what type of links they are and what your anchor text says. Although the benefits of internal links and external links differ, they are both vital to a successful search engine optimization campaign. As simple as it sounds, it is one of the most commonly overlooked steps in most campaigns.
Internal linking can help the most by:
- Aiding the search engine spiders in locating all of your pages which results in more of your pages being indexed in the major search engines.
- Inserting more of your keywords on each page, making your page more relevant and building keyword density.
- Helps boost the Google PageRank of your internal pages when linked to from your main page.
Here are some tips and more information about all these areas and how you can maximize your website to take advantage of internal linking.
Getting Your Pages in the Index
The concept of search engine indexes is simple: you want as many or all of your web pages to be represented in all the major search engines. The more pages you have in search engine indexes, the more likely your site will come up for search queries. If you are participating in an SEO campaign, you have researched keywords and have targeted these keywords. One of the great things about getting your pages in the index is that you will start to show up for all kinds of queries that you hadn’t even targeted.
Internal linking can help get more of your web pages indexed because you are providing links to each of your pages on every page. Imagine you are shopping on a website; you click a link to a product from the first page. You are done looking at this product but there are no links back to the main page or other categories or items. Where do you go? The search engine spiders have the same problem. If you provide links to all your other pages, your visitors and search engine spiders will always have more pages to look at and index.
One of the most important parts of internal linking is to make sure that you have text links somewhere on your pages. Many websites use trendy flash and script code for their navigation. These websites look great but they are not always search engine friendly. Search engine spiders can’t see the code in flash and other script code and therefore are not able to follow the links within them. If you use flash or another script code for your navigation, you must ensure that you have text links to your important pages somewhere else on your web page. In a lot of cases, people will put their text link navigation towards the bottom of the page. If you can avoid flash for navigation, that is your best bet. But if you can’t switch, make sure you provide text links also. Search engine spiders can follow image links but they don’t carry as much value as text. If you do use image links, make sure you use ALT tags that appropriately describe the image. This will help the value of your image links.
Keyword Relevancy and Density
The idea of using keywords is pretty basic; you want your keywords to show up on your pages. Even more important than just showing up on your page, you want your keywords to be used in the anchor text of your links. If you have a website page that is about MP3 Players, typically you’d want the anchor text of the links on your other pages to say MP3 Players. It is far more beneficial to use keyword text than the words “click here” or “homepage.” Additionally, some search engines still look at the keyword density of your pages. Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to other text. If you want to show up for MP3 Players, you should have the appropriate keyword density. Be careful though, overstuffing keywords and having a high keyword density ratio can hurt you more than help you.
Using keywords for your anchor text in inline text links is always a very good idea. It may be obvious to use keywords in your navigation links but linking to internal web sites in your page copy may help you even more. If your web site is set up to sell MP3 players, you obviously are going to have the words “MP3 Player” in your page copy somewhere. Instead of just letting this text go without links, use this text to link to your page about MP3 player information or MP3 player product pages.
Boost Your Internal Pages PageRank
Your internal pages’ PageRank can be affected by the PageRank of your homepage. Typically, your homepage carries the highest PageRank of any of your pages. The best way to let your homepage influence the PageRank of your internal sites is to make sure you have internal links from your homepage to only your most important internal pages. You may think that it’s a good idea to list all of your internal pages on your homepage so that your homepages PageRank is distributed to all your pages but this will actually be more detrimental to your internal pages PageRank. If you distribute your homepages PageRank among 100 links, less of the PageRank is trickled down to your other pages, resulting in a lower PageRank. Only put links to your most important and relevant sites on your homepage and boost their PageRank.
Most Important Tips to Implement Internal Linking
- Use text links for your navigation menus on the left hand side of your homepage. If you put your text link navigation on the left hand side, it will be one of the first thing crawled by the search engine spiders.
- Use keywords in your internal linking. Don’t go overboard and cram keywords in there but keep it looking natural and informative.
- Use the footer for navigation text links. The footer is a common place to put your navigation text links. You can also list other pages like your sitemap which will help you in getting more of your web pages indexed.
- Use inline text links. There are many reasons to include inline text links. Many people believe that the search engines place extra value on these types of links and view them as more important since they are in your page copy and not part of your navigation.
Improving your internal linking is a major step in your search engine optimization campaign but as you will see, it is a very important one and one of the few steps in a campaign that you have total control of. If you effectively use internal linking (and don’t abuse it or spam) then you will see more of your pages being indexed and potentially a higher ranking in the search engines.
No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
