Welcome to part five in this search engine
positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of content optimization. In part five we will
cover your website's internal linking structure and the role that it plays in ranking highly, and in ranking for
multiple phrases.
While this aspect is not necessarily the single most important of the ten steps it can be the difference between
first page and second page rankings, and can make all the difference in the world when you are trying to rank your
website for multiple phrases.
Step Five - 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.
Getting Your Website Spidered
Insuring that every page of your website gets found by the search engine spiders is probably the simplest thing you
can do for your rankings. Not only will this increase the number of pages that a search engine credits your site
with, but it also increases the number of phrases that your website has the potential to rank for.
I have seen websites that, once the search engines find all of their pages, find that they are ranking on the first
page and seeing traffic from phrases they never thought to even research or target.
This may not necessarily be the case for you. Hwever,having a larger site with more pages related to your content
will boost the value of your site overall. You are offering this content to your visitors, so why hide it from the
search engines.
Pages can be hidden from search engines if the linking is done in a way that they cannot read. This is the case in
many navigation scripts. If your site uses a script-based navigation system then you will want to consider the
implementation of one of the internal linking structures noted further in the article.
Additionally, although image-based navigation is spiderable, the search engines can't see what an image is and thus,
cannot assign any relevancy from an image to the page it links to other than assigning it a place in your website
hierarchy.
Building The Relevancy Of A Page To A Keyword Phrase
Anyone who wants to get their website into the top positions on the search engines for multiple phrases must start
out with a clearly defined objective, including which pages should rank for which phrases. Generally speaking, it
will be your homepage that you will use to target your most competitive phrase and move on to targeting less
competitive phrases on your internal pages.
To help build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase you will want to use the keyword phrase in the anchor
text of the links to that page. Let's assume that you have a website hosting company. Rather than linking to your
homepage with the anchor text "home" link to it with the text "web hosting main". This will attach the words "web"
and "hosting" and "main" to your homepage. You can obviously leave the word "main" out, however, in many cases it
does work for the visitor (you know, those people you're actually building the site for).
This doesn't stop at the homepage. If you are linking to internal pages either through your navigation, footers,
or inline text links - try to use the phrases that you would want to target on those pages as the linking text. For
example, if that hosting company offered and wanted to target "dedicated hosting", rather than leaving the link at
solely the beautiful graphic in the middle of the homepage they would want to include a text link with the anchor
text "dedicated hosting" and link to this internal page. This will tie the keywords "dedicated hosting" to the page.
In a field as competitive as hosting this alone won't launch the site to the top ten. It will, however, give it a
boost and in SEO, especially for competitive phrases, every advantage you can give your site counts.
Increasing The PageRank Of Internal Pages
While we will be discussing PageRank (a Google-based term) here the same rules generally apply for the other engines.
The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage, the higher the value (or PageRank) the page is assigned.
Basically, if I have a page linked to from my homepage, it will be given more weight that a page that is four or
five levels deep in my site.
This does not mean that you should link to all of your pages from your homepage. Not only does this diffuse the
weight of each individual link, but it will look incredibly unattractive if your site is significantly large.
Figure out what your main phrases are and which pages will be used to rank for them and be sure to include text
links to these internal pages on your homepage. It's important to pick solid pages to target keyword phrases on
because you don't want human visitors going to your "terms and conditions" page before they've even seen the
products.
If that hosting company noted above has a PageRank 6 homepage, the pages linked from its homepage will generally
be a PageRank 5 (sometimes 4, sometimes 6 depending on the weight of the 6 for the homepage). Regardless, it will
be significantly higher than if that page was linked to from a PageRank 3 internal page.
How To Improve Your Internal Linking Structure
There are many methods you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The three main ones are:
1. Text link navigation
2. Footers
3. Inline text links
Text Link Navigation
Most websites include some form of navigation on the left hand side. This makes it one of the first things read by
a search engine spider (read
Table Structures For Top Search Engine Positioning by Mary Davies for methods on getting your content read before
your left hand navigation). If it is one of the first things the search engine spiders sees when it goes through
your site it will have a strong weight added to it so it must be optimized with care.
If you are using text link navigation be sure to include the targeted keywords in the links. Thankfully this cannot
be taken as meaning "cram your keywords into each and every link" because this is your navigation and that would
look ridiculous. I've seen sites that try to get the main phrase in virtually every link. Not only does this look
horrible, but it may get your site penalized for spam (especially if the links are one after another).
You don't have to get your keywords in every link but, if workable, every second or third link works well. Also
consider what you are targeting on internal pages. If your homepage target is "web hosting" and you've linked to
your homepage in the navigation with "web hosting main" which is followed by your contact page so you've used
"contact us", it would be a good idea to use the anchor text "dedicated hosting" for the third link. It reinforces
the "hosting" relevancy and also attaches relevancy to the dedicated hosting page of the site to the phrase
"dedicated hosting" in the anchor text.
Footers
Footers are often the 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. I've seen in my travels, footers that
are longer than the webpage content areas. Not only does this look bad, but it reduces the value of each individual
link (which then become 1 out of 200 links rather than 1 out of 10 or 20).
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 ensure 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.
Internal Text Links
Internal text links are links placed within the content of your work. They were covered in last week's article on
content optimization,
which gives me a great opportunity to use one as an example.
While debatable, inline text links do appear to be given extra weight since their very nature implies that the
link is entirely relevant to the content of the site.
You can read more on this in last week's article.
Final Notes
As noted above, simply changing your internal navigation will not launch your site to the top of the rankings. It
is important, however, to use each and every advantage available to create a solid top ten ranking for your site
that will hold it's position.
Improving your internal navigation will get your pages doing better, will help get your entire site spidered, will
help increase the value of internal pages and will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.
Even if that's all it does, isn't it worth taking the time to do it right?
About The Author
Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. He has
been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to
answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major
search engines.
