Search engine optimization is something every webmaster is going to have to master if they want to grow their website with targeted traffic from organic search engine rankings. There are many different ways you can optimize your site to increase web traffic including external link building, article marketing, free products and much more. One part of SEO that often gets overlooked is the process of internal link building. Internal linking is just what it sounds like, you have links from one page in your site linking to another. These types of link building tactics are not as powerful as external linking; however, they do have a place in SEO.
Internal Link Building Within Your Navigation
The main reason webmasters use internal link building is for better navigation. You want customers and potential customers to be able to move around and through your website easily and internal link building is a great way to do that. You can add links to the side bar, within the text and as a footnote, which allows users to naturally flow from one page to the other. Navigation is also important when it comes to ranking well in the search engines.
Search Engine Importance
Internal linking is one way that search engines determine which pages on your site are more important. Links within your site tell the search engine how much importance you place on specific pages. Anytime you have a multiple page website it is a given that not all pages will have the same importance which is why setting up this hierarchy is important.
Opportunity for Internal Linking
Creating a website is generally a complex thing; you work hard to create a site that is entertaining and useful for users. Toward this end, many people will use banners, images and logos to enhance the experience and you can use these for internal link building. You will want to link back to your home page or other important pages through these graphics or text links. It is also a good idea to use keywords in the ALT text of links with any images you use on your site, this does not have a huge impact on your SEO but it does make the user experience better, which is important.
Suggested Articles
Once you get a visitor to your site, it is not a stretch of the imagination that you would want to point them to further appropriate content. Many times web site owners will use this opportunity to link to other sites with relevant content; however, this could be a good opportunity for more internal link building, which will send users deeper into your website.
You can accomplish this by having a suggested articles list on your sidebar, but a better option might be to hyperlink within the content itself. With just a little HTML experience, you can easily insert clickable links within the text that will point to other important pages on your site. This is a clean and professional looking way to achieve internal linking.
Keywords
In conjunction with the internal link building mentioned above you can optimize your efforts by linking through relevant keywords. For example instead of creating a “click here” in text citation, you can use hyperlinking to make a keyword or phrase the link. Let’s say you have a site that promotes vacations in Florida, you could use the keyword Florida, vacations, hotels or restaurants as the anchor text of links that point from a page on your domain to another page on the same domain. This will make navigation smoother for users, tell the search engines which pages you rank as more important and help with keyword optimization. It is a good idea to use common variations of your chosen keywords instead of focusing on just one or two words.
SEO
Search engines use complicated algorithms to rank websites. Keywords and content are very important, as are link building strategies. It is important that you use both external and internal link building in order to push your site higher in the SERPS, (search engine results pages). There is a good deal of emphasis put upon external links, content and keyword optimization however, internal linking kind of gets left on the wayside. Utilize all SEO options when you are building your website and traffic will be your reward.
As a side note you can also sculpt the PageRank of your pages to some degree by implementing rel=nofollow attributes into your link statements. You would do this for links that you deem unimportant for search engines. Some examples of those types of links that you might not want a search engine to pay attention to are your privacy policy page or perhaps your terms of service page.
Building a site and having it recognized by the search engines is the goal of any webmaster. The above tips on internal link building are just a few of the many ways you can optimize your site. Remember, however that you must keep your users ultimately in mind. Search engines will change and tweak the way they rank websites but people will remain the same. Users want to find good information, easily understandable and constructed in a simple to navigate fashion. If your users begin struggling to find what they are, looking for you can rest assured they will quickly move on to a better site. By all means, use internal linking and other valuable SEO tools to improve your site but do so with the end result in mind, a good customer experience.
