A link is a way to navigate from one webpage to another. The way you structure your internal links can have a huge effect on your SEO. A lot is said in the SEO world about the value of links, and a lot of people assume that it’s outside links SEO experts are always talking about. Not so. Internal links can be just as valuable to your search engine optimisation campaign, and better still, you’re the one who has control of them. An ‘internal link’; is a link within the same Web site. An ‘external link’ takes you to a Web page on a web site to a Web page on another website. The term ‘backlink’ is used when another website links to yours.

Internal Linking

With all the talk out there about linking, one might be under the impression that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links certainly play an important role (as will be discussed in part eight of this series) these are certainly not the only important links.

When you’re about to launch into your link work why not stop and consider the ones that are easiest to attain and maximize first. That would be, the ones right there on your own site and those which you have total and complete control of. Properly used internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal.

The internal linking structure can:

  1. Insure that your website gets properly spidered and that all pages are found by the search engines
  2. Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
  3. Increase the PageRank of an internal page

Here is how the internal linking structure can affect these areas and how to maximize the effectiveness of the internal linking on your own website.

Footers Links

Footers are the often overused and abused area of websites. While they are useful for getting spiders through your site and the other points noted above, they should not be used as spam tools. Footers are longer than the content areas of pages from websites linking to every single page in their site from them. Not only does this look bad but it reduces that value of each individual link (which then become 1 out of 200 links rather than 1 out of 10 or 20).

Keeping links in your footers and margins up-to-date is a part of site maintenance and most businesses do this regularly. It is the area of new content in which some businesses slip up. Keeping your cross-site SEO structure maintained can be difficult, and is one of the many reasons to retain your SEO consultant beyond the initial optimisation of your site.

Keep your footers clean, use the anchor text well, and link to the key internal pages of your website and you will have a well optimized footer. You will also want to include in your footer a link to a sitemap. On this sitemap, link to every page in your site. Here is where you can simply insure that every page gets found. Well worded anchor text is a good rule on your sitemap as well. You may also want to consider a limited description of the page on your sitemap. This will give you added verbiage to solidify the relevancy of the sitemap page to the page you are linking to.

You know how when you break a toe, the doctor will often “buddy tape” the broken toe to its neighbor to provide support as it heals? Well, You can buddy tape your pages by letting four or five of your highest ranking pages concentrate their link-mojo to your newest page, the one that may be slightly wobbly and needs to build up its strength. This is a good idea whenever you launch a new page.

Sometimes you need to do some housecleaning as well. Getting rid of off-topic pages and doing a 301 redirect to another page (or your home page) that’s been indexed. Some people will buy a new domain name made up mostly of your keywords, then redirect your old site to the new one. This is a little controversial, and can be painful in the short term, because it will take a few weeks for your rankings to get back up to where they were. However, the rankings should come back stronger in the long run, assuming you’ve done your due diligence with optimizing.

If you take care of these on-page optimization techniques, then think how powerful your off-page optimization will be!