DAY 16: Internal Links Structure

“Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.”

- Thomas J. Watson -

More link juice and more pages viewed!

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 our 21 Days 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.

Links for Navigation and Crawling Purpose

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

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 page 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 juice 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 juice and more pages viewed.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.