SEO Recap – Internal Linking Tips

Internal Linking Tips

We can’t stress the importance of internal linking structure enough.  With one-way links we can use many different methods to improve our rankings 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.

We’ve gathered together a few excellent tips on how you can improve on your internal links. Normally, all your websites will start out with internal links in the form of a navigation bar. You can enhance 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.

One of the best practices you can follow is to have the navigation bar on the left hand side, so that the search bot will crawl the navigation bar as first thing when they visit your website. Do NOT stuff the navigation bar with the keywords. 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.

Finally, 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!