SEO TIPS – The Difference Between Backlinks and Link Spam

It is impossible to stress the importance of internal linking structure enough.  With one-way links there are many different methods to improve our rankings that we can use, but when it comes to internal linking we often fall short with creative ways to improve our architecture. Most webmasters don’t think about internal linking as much as they think about external links, and there simply aren’t enough good, solid resources online that will teach us how to improve the internal links.

Here are a few excellent tips on how you can improve on your internal links. Under normal circumstances, all of your websites will start out with internal links in the form of a navigation bar. You can improve the effect of the navigation bar on internal linking by using keywords as the linking text in the navigation bar instead of some random text. The navigation bar should also be plain HTML, and should not be image links to the inner pages. Image links are not going to help your rankings at all.

One thing you should be doing is making sure you have the navigation bar on the le

ft hand side, so that the search bot will crawl the navigation bar as first thing when they visit your website. It may not sound like a big deal, but it makes a huge difference. Do NOT stuff the navigation bar with the keywords or it will just be counterproductive. The navigation text link should reflect closely the content of the page it is linking to, for continuity of keyword optimization.

Next you should concentrate for getting internal links in the footer of your website. The function of the footer navigation link is a lot like the regular navigation bar. For our SEO purposes, they can be used as another way of more internal links. For footer links to be effective, you cannot have too many footer links (this will dilute the effectiveness of individual links.) You should make sure that your footer always has a link to your sitemap. The sitemap will of course have links to all the pages of your website arranged in logical order.

The final thing you need to look at is text / content in the web page will let you create contextual internal text links. If you have well thought out content, you can have a number of in-line links, utilizing anchor text for greater visibility and keyword optimization. Making sure your internal linking makes your site user friendly helps just as much as making it SEO friendly! happy optimizing!