If you own a website, or are in the business of optimizing websites, you’re obviously reading plenty on what do to optimize the site for search engines by focusing on one-way links, keyword rich content, taking care of your meta tags, description tags, and so on. But there’s one area not to forget–your internal link structure. Optimization is all about seeking an advantage, executing at the tactical level to satisfy all of the SEO strategy requirements that will improve your search engine rankings (although, truth be told, most people likely only have google come to mind). Part of that advantage is internal links–or links within your website that point to other pages within your same website. Besides having keyword links pointing to your site without you pointing back, internal links create the structure on your website that search engines follow like breadcrumbs in a forest. What should you do from an Internal Links perspective? 1.Have text links to all important pages in the navigation and footer Search engines like google work like a train–they need a track to follow, and text links that point from one page to another within yoursite provide that track. Fancy images can’t be read by google or other search engines, at least not as well as they can read text links (I know, you’re thinking, “I just read google can read Flashâ€, etc., but it’s not that simple yet.) Make sure you have text links pointing to every page you want to optimize. 2.Use the rel=â€nofollow†HTML tag Google and other search engines use algorithms to measure the importance of the various pages on your website. Part of those algorithms is that your internal pages may not rank the same, which makes sense based on a number of factors. One of those factors is the worth or value the page has based on its having a link from the Homepage, which will probably be a high ranking (if not the highest ranking) page on the site. If your pages are all relatively equal in terms of optimization factors, but you don’t want them to be, use the rel=â€nofollow†HTML tag to ‘push’ all of the importance from one page away from itself and to other pages. 3.Be descriptive and alternate keywords in your quest The goal is to get the search engines to rank your pages highly on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Make sure you use anchor text that uses the same keywords on all of the different text links on all of the various pages where you have links pointing back to a particular page. If your anchor text is ’search engine optimization,’ for example, make sure to vary the words. So, for instance, you may have anchor text that becomes: “great search engine optimization,†or “search engine tactics,†etc., so you’re getting ranked for different terms that refer to the same or similar subjects. 4.Links within the content on the page This is probably the simplest seo tactic for internal link building. Blogs software such as the software that level2wo’s blog (this blog) use allow for quick and easy internal link building, which is great for people who don’t know how to write code and think HTML is some foreign language that only geeks speak. Basically, if you’re writing content for your website, and you’re including keywords for which you want to rank, turn those keywords into text links pointing to other pages rich in content on your site. It’s that simple. 5.There’s no place like Home If you’re a Wizard of Oz fan, I hope I just got a smile out of you. In SEO, your homepage is very important, as it is for your users. But text links that point back to your homepage, while they should be easily found, should not necessarily say ‘Home,’ unless that’s the word you’re trying to rank for on search engines. Be creative–but be user friendly, when creating that obvious link back to your homepage. You’ll notice that every single link in this article points back to another page within the Level2wo blog, with the exception of the anchor text link pointing to Wikipedia’s definition. I did that on purpose here, obviously, to show how I built the internal links on my page–which you’re reading. So, hopefully, I’ve shown you as well as told you (which is also one of the main rules of fiction writing, in case you’re a fiction writer, as I am, and can’t help point such things out! ). Link
Great read. i use internal linking myself. i put links going to other pages of my site using the keywords I am optimizing for.
I have a website with multiple pages but they are all separate. I just tried linking the other ones to my homepage, so hopefully that will give it a little boost.
It's called PR sculpting. The theory is that you are only transferring pagerank within your site to the most important pages, and not pages like contactus and aboutus, etc.
Sorry for this seemingly silly question, but does a blog always have a homepage? Or to rephrase the question: what exactly is the homepage of a blog? I have a wordpress blog that I post articles once or twice a week. Is the latest post of my blog the homepage? Or do I need to create one? Is linking from one post to another post considered internal linking? Thanks so much for an anticipated response.
The blog homepage is the index page of the blog. The location depends on where you have installed the blog.
Disaggre with number 2. Nofollow usually use for not importance pages line "About Us" or "Privacy Policy". Internal linking with "dofollow" is better for Googlebot to deep crawling you webpages.
Deeplinking and interlinking within your site or even between a few sites you own often has more usefulness than you would think. There's no better way I know of to give an instant boost to a new site than 1000 links on the pages of one of my other sites...even though they all come from the same source, if you have enough of them they count for a lot.
The last point is a good one, but hardly few people understand dat clearly... Linking to your homepage from sub-pages is very good, and dat too with proper keywords other than home makes u a world of good! Whenever you put your site title or any keyword related to your site in general within any of your post, hyperlink dat to your homepage!! - Dats the best way to do it!
This is a great tactic for forums & blogs, it can be time consuming, but defintely worth it. We used this recently on one of our forums (20,000 users / 15 moderators) for a week. The Mods were all back linking to internal posts for a week & we skyrocketed the PR. In my new venture, this is one of the key strategies that we are implementing, especially with "no follow" to outside links. Think about SEO as a bottle of mineral water, every external link you make is like piercing the bottle & allowing water (search engine traffic) to flood out, so you have to keep topping up with back links & directory submissions. Make life easy & implement "No follow" attributes as much as possible & internal linking as much as possible, the aim to have Google, Yahoo! etc "residing" within your site. For the OP, I really like the train track analogy.