Link Structure

How you construct your linking patterns has a lot to do with the success of your site.

Internal links are how you keep visitors on your site, clicking through to more pages and getting more information. You want them to convert to customers. Your pages should be as focused on sales as you can without losing the edge of being informative.

You will want to keep your home page strong, so keep obtaining inbound links to as many internal pages as possible to avoid weakening your home page. Link down through your pages sensibly, to add link juice where needed and to make your site easy to navigate.

Link your home page to a few key pages, gather inbound links to those same pages, then spread the love down from there. Your home page should contain (among other things) several boxes with links to various portions of your site, but these should be limited to five or ten at the most.

There is no need for links to specific product pagesfrom your home page. Once we get the internal pages, we can start working on these types of links. So, the home page links to interior pages, which link to the following:contact information, FAQ, the home page, and any related pages within your website, product pages should link to  ‘Add to Cart’.  and ‘checkout. – other pages should still include a link to checkout as the person may surf before checking out.

Deal with enormously long pages by breaking them up or adding a ‘back to top’ link. This can cut down on customer impatience if they have scrolled way down a long page and want to get back to the top fast.

As you add pages to your website, it will be fairly obvious where the internal links to each page will need to come from. Always keep in mind that visitors who come to your site want to be able to find what they want quickly and easily, so multiple landing pages are nice.

Try to link like things together across your product categories to encourage more browsing and increase sales. You can even have certain items marked as qualifying for a discount, or free shipping when purchased with another qualifying item (make sure you only specify products with a high profit margin for this type of promotion!). Don’t forget the possibility of an up-sell!

A strong internal linking structure only costs you time, and the ROI is worth it. If you have advertising on your site as well, then the longer you keep consumers clicking and bouncing around the more likely they are to click on an ad…and then you make a commission; same if you run an affiliate website.

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