Internal Link Strategy

To fully understand Internal Linking Strategy, we must first understand the concept of Link Weight. Often website owners have no control over search engine rankings. The fact is that you can put the words ‘search engine optimization’ in your page titles, in your H1 tags, in your ALT text and a hundred times in a text of the page and it will still not get you into the top ten for that search term.

This is because some search engines lay more emphasis on how other pages view your pages, rather than what your page says about itself. When most people think about links, they refer to links from other sites. However, if you visit most ‘optimized’ sites, you will see little or no evidence of an internal link strategy. Hence, the primary step is to analyze the pages, the keywords each page is targeting, the conversion rates for each keyword/page, and the competition for those keywords.

First of all, most pages of a site should link out to related pages in order to prove that they provide related resources for their targeted keywords. Secondly, it means that all pages your website links to, are involved in give-and-take linking with your website.

We, at The Online Inc., do not waste any link weight on pages. The method we prefer is to get each and every page indexed with as few internal links as possible. Once the pages are indexed, we check the ranking of each page. This gives an idea of how much link weight will is required to achieve top ranking for each page. The next step is to carefully spread out the link weight to those pages that require it most. At the same time we conserve excess link weight on the pages from which it can easily be distributed.

To get a high ranking on search engines your site have good PR and theme related back links.

Most people seldom catch on to the importance of link weight channeling. Many continue to use side NAV menus populated with links to all of their pages. This type of navigation is growing in popularity, but it is seriously flawed. It indiscriminately spreads link weight throughout the site’s pages. We, at The Online Inc., conserve your link weight, and distribute it only to those pages that require it, as they require it.

Some people feel that search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search place varying, yet high degrees of importance on internal site links. It is reasonable for search engines to credit internal posts and articles, since links to internal pages are a strong indicator of valuable and important website content. Thus, they help boost the website's rankings. Both the linked page and the overall website gain by this.

Remember the more descriptive phrases you use, the more valuable and forceful they are in search engine results. Don’t use words like ‘follow this’ or ‘move here’. They just don’t work.

One thing website makers can find really easy to forget is the correct way to write our anchor text. At The Online Inc., we focus on writing descriptive anchor text to guide the search engines to what you require. It is another bullet we use in your marketing barrel that helps give you that extra edge. This is the significance of internal linking. You have great input and control over where it goes and what is said. The more you do it, the better it will be for your website ratings.