Internal Links – Why Are They Important? 5 Tips For Improvement.

How can you improve your internal link structure?

What does the ideal link look like?

How can you improve page rank through links?

I can think of 4 reasons why you should work to improve the internal link structure of your website.

• To make it easy for the search engines to identify the most important pages on your website.
• To build the relevance between your web pages and keyword phrases.
• To maximise the page rank of the more important internal pages containing these keywords.
• To enable visitors to find relevant content using these keyword phrases.

How Your Website Page Rank Is Distributed:

Assume that you have 1,000 external links (or back-links) to your website homepage, then you’ve got a certain amount of power residing on your homepage. The number of links along with the presence of keywords in and around the link will determine the page rank of your home page.

The power of this page rank can be distributed to important internal pages through internal links that are relevant to the content of other important pages.

So for example, if your homepage links out to 100 relevant pages, each of those pages only get around (1/100) of the home page power passed to them.

Maintaining Relevance Between Keywords And Pages

Before you begin with your internal link strategy you must know for what keyword you want to rank a certain page in the search engines. Your main page will always have your main keywords and your internal pages can concentrate on less competitive keywords or long tails.

The key here is a good anchor text … If you want to refer to a page that is about the “Kitchen furniture” and that is the key phrase you want to be found in Google, then use those keywords in the text that lets you link to that page.

Create a table of keyword phrases that you want high scores for in the search engines and try to give the feeder pages good external links.

Here Are The 5 Tips:

1. Start with the Home Page:

Make sure your important pages have links from the homepage and that you optimise the links with your most important keywords.

2. Use Descriptive Anchor Text:

An example of how not to link is by using the words, ..’click here’, or ‘ read more’ or, more information’ …etc – get the idea!

What does the ideal link looks like? Well, if one of my keywords is ‘ kitchen furniture’ then my internal link to a page about Kitchen Furniture, then the link will look like this (in html);

<a title=”Kitchen Furniture at the best prices” href=www.mycompany.com/kitchen-furniture.html>See our Kitchen Furniture latest deals</a>

You can see I have used the keyword in different ways and the search engine is left in no doubt what the link is about.

3. Create New Content Sections

• Use analytic software to identify your most popular pages. Then create a section called “Hot topics” or “Most popular products”, “Top ratings” etc. Then create a new page linking to these from the home page. This will cause a flow of link juice or equity to the new pages.
• Create new pages linked to from the home page to support high value keywords not adequately covered on lower level pages.

4. Create More Internal Cross Reference Links

• If you have a blog add cross reference links to old posts where and when it is relevant.

• If you have a lot of outward links from a page, make sure you add also numerous relevant internal links on that page

5. Do Some Internal Link Housekeeping

• Prevent pages that do not contain important content from getting indexed. For example contact pages, enquiry forms, duplicate content or confidential data. You can use the nofollow HTML attribute, robots.txt and meta robots exclusion tags to achieve this.
• check your server logs for 404 errors. fix any broken links and redirect old linked to pages to their new locations.
• For long pages, display more content on each page rather than using pagination.

You don’t have to do all this work manually, You can use  a software tool to speed up this exercise. This can also help implement your external link building plan.

Get Regular News on Social Media Marketing and SEO Tips  by Email

Get Regular News on Social Media Marketing and  SEO Tips by RSS

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.