Internal linking within a website is a very important part of SEO and is an often-overlooked aspect of maintaining a website. With internal links the webmaster has complete control over them so it’s well worth putting in some time to get these right. Here are some tips to make more of your internal linking strategies.
Link from your stronger pages
There are bound to be one or more pages within your website that does particularly well, either in terms of PR or positions within the search engines.
You can give strength to your weaker pages by linking to them from your strong pages, building the overall strength of your website.
Link within your content
Add links within the text of your pages. It’s worth going through the content of each page and working out which phrases could be linked to another page.
You will have to make sure relevant phrases are selected and the pages they link to are within context and is a good idea to ensure that the anchor text of the hyperlink match those that you want the page to rank for and that they appear on the destination page, making the whole strategy much more effective.
Link from your footer
Now this approach is not only helps with your ranking strategy but also with usability, as it incorporates almost a mini site map on each of your pages.
You can link to some of your primary pages within your footer and can incorporate some longer keyword phrases. Again, the links will need to be contextual and link to a relevant page.
Links from newsletter and blogs
Having articles present in newsletters or blogs are other sources of internal links. If they are hosted on a separate domain these could be beneficial to your SEO and prove additional value. Even if they are hosted on your own domain they can be of value by contributing to your internal linking strategy.
Again, use relevant and contextual anchor text within the link back to the main website to help direct traffic to the most important parts of your website and build the link profile for your main interior pages.
Build a good site map
Another effective SEO technique that also helps with overall usability, building a good site map entails creating a page purely to include links to all of your pages in a user friendly and simple way.
Your site map should contain text links and not images and should include relevant anchor text that depicts what the user should find on each page as well as reflects the keyphrases each page is optimised for. For example you could not only include product names within the anchor text but also popular keywords for that page.
Do you have any other internal linking strategies that you’ve found to be useful? Please share below.
