SEO Recap – Internal Link Structure

Aside from the initial importance of getting indexed in search engines (as the first step towards good search engine ranking), you have other SEO concerns to consider. It is not enough to get just your home page indexed. You need to get all the internal pages indexed as well, and one of the main factors that ensures all the internal pages are crawled by search engine bots is good internal linking.

Many web masters focus narrow-mindedly on getting one-way links to their website but they pay very little attention to good internal linking. In many cases, some of the most important information about your products or services will be found in the respective inner pages and not on the homepage. You could significantly increase your conversion rates by getting the right inner pages listed in search!

Since it this is an area of SEO where you can be totally in control, you can definitely commit to a well linked website. (If you are too busy to work through the ramifications of how you structure your link architecture, you can hire a professional SEO services firm to help out.)

If you make use of the correct anchor text in your website’s content to link to the other pages in deeper levels, the keyword relevancy of your inner pages will improve a great deal. It will also help a smooth flow of PageRank to the inner pages – but note that you don’t want to thin it out too much.

Pay attention to your internal links!

If you use relevant keyword anchor text to link the inner pages of your website, the number of keywords for which your website gets listed improves a great deal. You can also boost the strength of your main keywords by increasing the number of internal links for that keyword from various pages of your website. This requires prior planning and good SEO content writing skills.

Your website visitors will find it easier to reach the important pages of your website by clicking on the anchor text. Not having to hunt for the navigation bar links can enhance your visitor’s online experience. In addition, if you happen to use image oriented navigation bars,  the search engines will be blocked from reading the keywords. Using good internal linking structure through anchor text will make up for what you miss out on these types of  navigation bars.

Always take a balanced approach when using internal anchor text linking. Don’t be tempted to place too many anchor text links on each page. If you have a large website, this could eventually result in every second word turning into a hyper link and becoming a source of irritation to users – and you want to keep your website as user friendly as possible. Your prime concerns should be enhancing user experience without compromising on search engine requirements for bot-friendly architecture.

Since internal linking is so important (and unlike the reciprocal links or one-way links, doesn’t require waiting for your website to be launched), why not incorporate this form day one? Then once your site is up and running, you can concentrate on increasing your back links.