Search Engine Optimisation Training Course

Lesson No.14 - Building Internal Links

by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au

Q. Why should you build internal links?

A. More link power and more pages viewed!

It makes sense, doesn't it?

All too many people fail to leverage on the potential they have on their site alone. Remember that before off-site SEO became popular with Google, SEO was one entirely on-site.

If off-site SEO has become dominant, this doesn’t mean that on-site SEO doesn’t have value anymore! Today I’m going to review with you what you can do with your site links to enhance your on-site SEO.

What is an internal link?
An internal link is a link that point towards another page within your site, in opposition with the external links which points toward an external source.

We’ll talk more about the external links in the last part of this SEO Mastery course. From this point on, when I talk about links, I’m only referring to internal links.

People like to talk about how off-site optimization is important for your search engine rankings, well I’m here to show you that it all starts with doing a good job on-site.

Why should you care about your internal links?
The links inside your site have 3 major purposes:
• Facilitate the navigation for your visitors.
• Facilitate the crawling of the search engine spiders.
• Build custom inbound links to your different pages

Internal Links for Navigation and Crawling Purposes
The main purpose of SEO is to bring targeted visitors to your pages, and retain them on your site for as long as possible. One easy way to do that starts by making navigation on your site simple to understand.

When somebody lands on one of your pages, what are his options from there, where can he go, what can he do? Obviously based on our 3 Tier site structure, the following links are expected based on the Tier your visitor lands on.

Tier 1 – Homepage Internal Links

• Links toward each category of the site.
•Links toward the general information pages (contact us, about, policies, etc…)

Tier 2 – Categories Internal Links

• Link towards the homepage.
• Link towards the content of the current category.
• Possibly links toward the general information pages.

Tier 3 – Content Internal Links

• Link towards the homepage.
• Link towards the main category.
• Links toward similar content.
• Possibly links toward the general information pages

Siloing

http://www.seo2020.com/lsi/silo-structured-website.html

http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/0505/silo.html

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/07/smx-notes-give-it-up.html

http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/volume29/themepartone.html

Poor relevancy and crawling issues arise when a website’s internal linking structure is poorly planned. On average, I see websites everyday with each page that links to 30 other internal pages, all ‘follow’ links. This creates haywire for a search engine crawler and impedes Google’s ability to understand the relevancy of your website.

Internal linking affects the relevancy of the site, the search engine crawling, and ranking–this theory has become accepted, and most good SEO’s know that when a website’s pages link to every other page on the site, without consideration of the nofollow tag, a website will have a harder time ranking in the search engines. Of course with enough powerful links any site can rank, but why not try to create a website that is properly structured so your off page optimization of link-building reaps greater benefits.

Here is the strategy I recommend on internal linking, which is based on the Bruce Clay’s theory of Theming and Charles Heflin’s Theory of Siloing.

1. Homepage should link to the top level category pages & the pages targeting keywords with high search volume.
2. Each page should link to the next page as per the structure of the site.
3. Each page should link back to the category main page.
4. Some pages can link back to the homepage other pages when the keywords are closely related.
5. While linking to any page, we will look for the related keywords as anchors.
6. Use nofollow when required. Create a virtual silo using the nofollow tags.

Let’s take a page out of Charles Heflin’s Book “The Master Plan” where he shows two diagrams of a poorly structured site and a well structured site.

A Correctly Siloed Site Using the Cat Food Example:

By interlacing your content is this manner, you ensure that both the search engine spiders and your visitors will be able to navigate easily and efficiently throughout your site.

Your visitors will be happy and possibly navigate on more pages, and the search engine spiders can crawl your site more easily which in turn enhance your chances to have your pages indexed faster.

Custom Internal Inbound Links
Remember when I told you earlier than off-site optimization started on-site? By now you should also know that building quality inbound links toward your pages is extremely important if you want them to rank well.

One fact that is all too often overlooked is that when we say a page needs a lot of quality inbound links, we don’t necessarily mean that they must come from external sources!

That’s right, a link from one of your pages pointing towards another one of your pages is still counted as an inbound link for that page! Now think about it for a second and imagine the potential at your disposal!

Remember that you have full control over the content of your site, you are free to place the links you want wherever you want, be it inline within your content, or in a sidebar, at the bottom, etc…

In addition, you also have full control over the anchor text of those links!

Let’s review what qualifies a good inbound link:
• From a related content
• From a quality site
• From within the content preferably
• With your keyword as anchor text

I don’t know about you, but that sounds strangely similar with what I would get from one of my related pages of content! One of the easiest way is to add a few links at the bottom of your content page pointing towards different related pages your have on your site, it not only enhance your visitors navigation and site crawling, but gives you the opportunity to build inbound links towards your pages.


Although it is a bit more work, this is also the reason why I don’t use plugin for this. I’m now free to choose exactly which post I want to link to, and more importantly, which anchor text I want to use; and since it’s my posts and my content, I can change or modify those information anytime I wish.
Even better, if you can link from within your content, this will carry even more weight for the search engines.

One of the quickest benefit you can get from doing this is getting your pages in the primary index, since they already receive sufficient inbound link power from your other pages pointing towards them; and that’s only for low or no PR pages.

Now, just imagine that you have a couple of PR2 or PR3 (even better if you got better PR) pages on your site, and that you place inline inbound links toward another of your pages, what do you think would happen?

That’s right, this would count like this page is receiving great quality inbound links from PR2 or PR3 pages, almost instantly!

Exercise
Look at your linking structure on your site; are you following the different recommended navigation links? If not, place them now on your site. Also, make sure that all your links are optimized by using the appropriate keywords as anchor text as you previously defined when you mapped your site structure.

Build internal links between all your related pages to enhance both your visitors and the spiders experience, this will result in more link power and more pages viewed.

1.   Learn How to Sort Out the Competition
2.   Do Your Keyword Research Homework
3.   Refining Your Keywords
4.   Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.   Mapping Your Site Structure
6.   Understanding Links & PageRank
7.   Sculpting Your Site Structure
8.   Cascading Style Sheet Design
9.   Using Wordpress for SEO
10. Setting up Your Analytics
11. Engineering the Title Tag
12. Optimising The Content
13. Optimising The Description Tag
14. Building Internal Links
15. SEO & Images
16. OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17. Link Building 101
18. Beating Your Competition
19. Building External Links
20. Using Structured SEO

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