If you own a website, or are in the business of optimizing websites, you’re obviously reading plenty on what do to optimize the site for search engines by focusing on one-way links, keyword rich content, taking care of your meta tags, description tags, and so on. But there’s one area not to forget–your internal link structure.
Optimization is all about seeking an advantage, executing at the tactical level to satisfy all of the SEO strategy requirements that will improve your search engine rankings (although, truth be told, most people likely only have google come to mind). Part of that advantage is internal links–or links within your website that point to other pages within your same website. Besides having keyword links pointing to your site without you pointing back, internal links create the structure on your website that search engines follow like breadcrumbs in a forest.
What should you do from an Internal Links perspective?
1.Have text links to all important pages in the navigation and footer
Search engines like google work like a train–they need a track to follow, and text links that point from one page to another within yoursite provide that track. Fancy images can’t be read by google or other search engines, at least not as well as they can read text links (I know, you’re thinking, “I just read google can read Flash”, etc., but it’s not that simple yet.) Make sure you have text links pointing to every page you want to optimize.
2.Use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag
Google and other search engines use algorithms to measure the importance of the various pages on your website. Part of those algorithms is that your internal pages may not rank the same, which makes sense based on a number of factors. One of those factors is the worth or value the page has based on its having a link from the Homepage, which will probably be a high ranking (if not the highest ranking) page on the site. If your pages are all relatively equal in terms of optimization factors, but you don’t want them to be, use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag to ‘push’ all of the importance from one
page away from itself and to other pages.
3.Be descriptive and alternate keywords in your quest
The goal is to get the search engines to rank your pages highly on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Make sure you use anchor text that uses the same keywords on all of the different text links on all of the various pages where you have links pointing back to a particular page. If your anchor text is ’search engine optimization,’ for example, make sure to vary the words. So, for instance, you may have anchor text that becomes: “great search engine optimization,” or “search engine tactics,” etc., so you’re getting ranked for different terms that refer to the same or similar subjects.
4.Links within the content on the page
This is probably the simplest seo tactic for internal link building. Blogs software such as the software that level2wo’s blog (this blog) use allow for quick and easy internal link building, which is great for people who don’t know how to write code and think HTML is some foreign language that only geeks speak. Basically, if you’re writing content for your website, and you’re including keywords for which you want to rank, turn those keywords into text links pointing to other pages rich in content on your site. It’s that simple.
5.There’s no place like Home
If you’re a Wizard of Oz fan, I hope I just got a smile out of you. In SEO, your homepage is very important, as it is for your users. But text links that point back to your homepage, while they should be easily found, should not necessarily say ‘Home,’ unless that’s the word you’re trying to rank for on search engines. Be creative–but be user friendly, when creating that obvious link back to your homepage.
You’ll notice that every single link in this article points back to another page within the Level2wo blog, with the exception of the anchor text link pointing to Wikipedia’s definition. I did that on purpose here, obviously, to show how I built the internal links on my page–which you’re reading. So, hopefully, I’ve shown you as well as told you (which is also one of the main rules of fiction writing, in case you’re a fiction writer, as I am, and can’t help point such things out!