SEO Basics - Part Five - Internal Linking Structure

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Now we’re at part five of the SEO Basics series. Let’s take a look at the internal linking structure used for your website. Not everyone will take the time to utilize a cohesive internal linking structure, but it’s generally worth the time to implement. Consider, also, that your internal linking structure is also an important part of your user’s navigation experience with your website, you have to place things in a way that’s bot usable for humans and spiders.

Internal linking structure is an SEO factor that shouldn’t be ignored

Really, consistency in naming your pages is key to good internal linking structure. If you have a page about “red widgets”, it’s important that your internal pages refer to the page as “red widgets.” If they do, you’ve already won half the battle. Now all it takes is getting external websites to link to your page with the same anchor text, and your life in the SERPs should be improving rapidly. Since you can control internal linking, you might as well do so. There are a million off page factors you can’t control, so don’t neglect the on-page stuff you’re in charge of.

Here are some key points to consider about internal linking structure

1. Internal links are for visitors and not just search engines so be descriptive
2. Consistency in your linking is key. Don’t use different labels on different parts of your website.
3. If a page is extremely important, it’s probably best to link it from all pages of the website
4. Don’t allow any orphan pages to exist.
5. Use a sitemap to make sure “no page gets left behind.”
6. Pages that you deem “unimportant” can be neglected in your site structure. If you don’t want to pass PageRank to a certain page, you can use “nofollow” and “noindex” to effectively remove the page from Google’s PageRank algo.
7. Long tail SEO generally requires good internal linking structure, because many of your pages won’t merit getting any external links.
8. Link to old pages in your archive from fresh pages with descriptive anchor text

Internal linking structure should never be ignored. If you haven’t paid much attention the subject, it would be quite simple for you to go through your main website navigation and make small changes that end up helping you immensely. Take your time and inventory which pages are important to you, and place an emphasis on those. As the incoming links start to rack up, the affect on your internal pages will become relatively obvious.

Continued from SEO Basics - Part Four - On Page Optimization. This is part of the SEO Basics series. Continued in: SEO Basics - Part Six - Incoming Links.

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