The importance of Internal Linking for SEO
Every SEO knows the importance of links. Links are the ‘currancy’ of the web. External links are great to get your site found, spidered and indexed by the Search Engines, but can be difficult to obtain, manage and control. So, your site should have two types of links, some pointing to it ie external and some pointing to other pages on your site ie internal links. The best thing about internal links is that you have control over them, you get to decide the anchor text, you get to decide the placement of them and you get to decide how many you’re going to have on a page, or pointing to a page.
Internal links don’t cost anything. They can be targeted, from within relevant text, to relevant pages, making them stronger and more valid. You can increase the PageRank of a page with internal links. You homepage usually has the highest PageRank of your site, so create an internal link from your homepage to the page that you want to pass the PageRank on to (ie a page where you’re optimising a competitive keyword that doesn’t fit on the homepage). Use descriptive anchor text. Use the keywords that the linked-to page is about, this will help the search engines and your users to know what the link goes to. You can use this technique to help your internal pages attain higher rankings
You should have several different types of internal links on your site.
- Navigation Links – Always ensure that if you use JavaScript or image based navigation that you provide a html version as well to help the search engines spider your site effectively.
- Footer Navigation – this is different to the main navigation, and should always be written in a list format. Use your most competitive keywords as the anchor text.
- Inline Text Links – These are some of the most important links on the page. Why? Because you can surround them with relevant text to increase their ‘worth’ to the search engines. You can also use them to direct users around your site, and hopefully eventually towards a conversion.
- Sitemap links – by providing a sitemap you are giving the search engines a valuable list or ‘contents page’ of all the page’s within your website. This is useful for both the search engines and your visitors, especially if you have a large site with a lot of pages to visit.
You should use internal linking as part of your SEO campaign. You may well find that by creating a few targeted inline text links that your site starts to climb the listings. Obviously this isn’t the only SEO technique that will make a difference to your campaign, but when integrated with well written copy, good site architecture, and of course a great external linking strategy, you will find your listings are higher, your pages stronger and your visitor numbers increase.
