One of the major elements of SEO that’s often undervalued is internal linking. When done right, internal linking not only encourages visitors to stay longer on your website, but more importantly, it can improve your search engine rankings.
So, content is key. Link within your content!
When websites link to other sites on the internet, search engines like Google and Yahoo pass value for the terms/ phrases used in the link “anchor text”. Anchor text is the highlighted text when your mouse hovers over a link. Often when people think about linking strategies, they focus on improving and increasing their number of inbound links and they pay special attention to what the anchor text communicates.
But this isn’t the only type of linking strategy you should count on. Rather, contextual *internal* links can also be effective in helping to improve a site’s ranking for certain keywords and phrases.
So, let’s say you’re writing a new blog post.
You’ve just written a ton of fantastic, original, newsworthy content. Now, re-read it. The text is filled with opportunities to potentially pass ‘link-love’ to other pages of your website or other friend sites. Now, you can start adding in those links to help your viewers find what their looking for, but also score some points with the search engines.
Why inbound links helps keep the peeps on your site!
When done right, contextual internal links improve usability. By adding links to the content of your site that are relevant for the user, it provides another path to their goal. Multiple paths are great for site navigation since usability studies have shown users are more likely to click on a link in the text of a page instead of those on a navigation bar. (Duh, it feels more natural!)
How do you do it?
To start improving your link strategy, simply go to each page of your website (yep, page by page!) and add anchor text and useful link text.
- Using Keywords in Natural Text to Create Anchor Text
The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information regarding the content of the page you’re linking to.Here’s an example ‘made up’ paragraph:
Getting online marketing exposure is far from easy. You have to stay on top of the latest online marketing trends like Google 411, advertising on facebook and buying domains for their type-in traffic. But, even that’s not enough, you have to have good old fashioned, user-friendly content.
Still need an example?
- Tamara can be found on Twitter here.
- Get periodic online marketing updates on Twitter with Tamara Brooks, our head online marketing wizard.
- Even Out the Link Strength
It’s true. Internal links don’t carry as much prestige with Google as links from other sites, but they still count!So, you’ll find it’s common for certain pages of a website to receive more inbound links than other pages of the same site. And, therefore those pages tend to have a better page rank when compared to other pages of the same site. Use Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, or your analytics program to find which pages have the most link love and which ones have the least.
You can then give a little more emphasis to the weaker pages by pointing internal links from the stronger pages to the weak ones (just from a few that have strong linkage, not every page).
- Navigation Text
No image links, no javascript links, no image map links. Only keyword focused, embedded text links to menu items. Use CSS, graphic background images and text links using keywords. It’s not that hard to do. - Outwards bound links!
There’s a possibility that even outbound links matter to SEO (There is much controversy surrounding this) - Breadcrumb Links (category – subcategory)
These provide a text based representation of a website’s structure (often a vertical hierarchy of a site) and where you’re located within in that structure. - Subject & Topic Group Links
Similar to the way news blogs have a ‘related stories’ link, you should have related posts or pages. Don’t fall into the ‘most popular links’ syndrome. People are looking for relevant content to their search query. - Sitemap Links
It’s accepted and necessary from both a usability standpoint and relevance.
October 17 Media provides SEO copywriting services, website optimization analyisis, blog writing and link strategy development. Don’t know where to start or know someone who can use our online marketing expertise? Give our online marketing department a holler. (LINK)
Tags: internal linking, linking strategy, SEO
