Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website - Step 5: Internal Linking
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.
Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid
search engine positioning campaign.
The Ten Steps
We Will Go Through Are:
- Keyword Selection
- Content Creation
- Site Structure
- Optimization
- Internal Linking
- Human
Testing
- Submissions
- Link Building
-
Monitoring
- The Extras
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:
- Insure that your
website gets properly spidered and that all pages are found by
the search engines
- Build the relevancy of a page to a
keyword phrase
- 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
however 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, image-based
navigation is spiderable however 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 if desirable 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 however it'll 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 you
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 as 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 that 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:
- Text link navigation
- Footers
- 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 you homepage target is "web
hosting" and you've linked to you 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 the often
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 content areas of pages
from websites linking to every single page in their site from
them. Not only does this look bad but it reduces that 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 insure 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
as 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 however it's
important to use each and every advantage available to create a
solid top ten ranking for your site that will hold it's
position.
They will get your pages doing better, they
will help get your entire site spidered, they will help increase
the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of
internal pages to specific keyword phrases.
Even if
that's all they do, aren't they worth taking the time to do
right?
Next Week
Next week in
part six of our "Ten Steps To an Optimized Website"
series we will be covering the importance of human testing.
Having a well-ranked website will mean nothing if people can't
find their way through it or if it is visually unappealing.
