The internal link structure of a website is a search engine optimization factor that is often overlooked by webmasters. Internal linking structure is commonly known as website navigation and it is an important part of a Search Engine Optimization. Internal linking is a fundamental requirement for your end user and search engine spiders. The internal link structure of a website allows spreading the link power of a website’s home page to the individual pages of website. We often tell our clients that taking care of your internal links is one of the easiest ways to actually gain links and improve on-site SEO.
How to improve the internal link structure of your website
There are several things that you can do to improve the rankings of special pages on your website:
1) Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines.
2) Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page. The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.
3) Use your targeted keywords in the links to these pages. Make sure that you use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted. Show search engines for which keywords your web pages are relevant.
4) Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you’ll get backlinks from these sites.
5) Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn’t be listed in search engines. The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site. If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages.
6) Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. This is very similar to tip 5. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages they can take a close look at the pages for which you want to be ranked.
7) Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages.
By optimizing the structure of how your web pages pass their link power, you can influence how search engines treat the content of your website.
Once you have optimized the link structure of your website, you should try to get more links from other websites.
