SEO and Internal Links
You often hear about internal links on SEO websites, mainly that they are crucial for increasing your page rank. However, many website owners don’t really understand what we actually mean by the term. Here is a short guide to internal links that hopefully will be of help to beginners and advanced programmers alike.
Increasing your search ranking with internal links video
What Kind of Internal Links Are Best?
Of course I have internal links, thinks the SEO newcomer. I have a sidebar full of them, in fact. Unfortunately, while internal links in your sidebar are essential to good website organization, they are not sufficient in themselves when it comes to search engine optimization. The most effective internal links are those placed within your actual page content. Google gives different ‘weights’ to different links, and internally placed ones seem to have the most impact.
Don’t believe me? Search for a common term and look at the first few pages that come up. These all will have internal links within their text—all of them. Managing internal links effectively is absolutely essential to getting a more favorable page rank.
Organize with ‘Hub’ Pages
So what are you going to link to? First and most important, you should have several ‘hub’ pages on your website—landing pages for the most commonly searched for tags, terms and subjects on your site. These should be highly targeted and informational, with links to related content deeper in your website. In many cases, these hub pages will function as a targeted landing page for people searching for specific terms, allowing those who stumble upon you to find the information that they need in a fast and efficient manner. However, they will also function as a landing page for those all-important links within your own website. In addition to supplying a logical place for visitors to find specific information, these hub pages will make your site feel more intuitively organized to both people and search engine crawlers while helping you to plan natural-feeling internal links.
Automate the Process if Possible
We know that it can be a royal pain to comb through every post or article looking for text that can be linked to internal pages. Luckily, there are several programs that do most of the heavy lifting for you. We highly recommend that you download a plugin such as kb linker or crosslinker. These both offer script that will automatically link certain phrases to certain pages within your site. They take a lot of the footwork (or in this case, handwork) out of crosslinking and ensure that your website has a feeling of continuity.
Go Beyond Informational
Many money-earning websites serve as either information or sales pages. However, few people link to this type of data—after all, they can supply their own text easily. If you are looking for external links to your internal pages, try to develop and offer a widget, plugin, or other piece of proprietary code that links directly to your internal pages. In other words, give people a tool that functions secondarily as a good reason to provide you with those all-important links to internal pages.
One reason external links to internal pages are so good for your page rank is that they look and feel natural to search engines. Think about it: search engines prefer informative websites. If you have an informative website, will most of the links be going to the homepage, or to pages within the site offering the actual information? By adding hub pages as well as incentives for people to link to you, you are creating a more natural feel that can boost your website to the first few pages of search engine results while also pleasing readers.
Identify and Use Hot Topics
You do not want for your internal links to be spread out evenly over your website or even among your website hub pages. This does not feel natural or normal to search engines or readers. One way of determining where you should focus your internal links is by looking at what web pages are getting the most external links. Use your webmaster tools to identify your top ten most linked to pages. These should get most your internal links as well.
Once you know what these hot topics are, make sure they in turn link to other areas of your website from anchor text in the body of your page. This will drive some of that traffic deeper into your website and give your more bang for your buck. However, be careful with interlinking between these hub pages; there is such thing as ‘too much’.
Constantly Develop New Hub Pages
You may go into this process and immediately realize that you don’t have enough content or enough hub pages. This is a common problem, but it is easily resolved. Create a few pages with timely and interesting content, then drive traffic to them from social media, message boards, and other free resources. Once you have gotten your fair share of organic traffic, add those internal links and move on to the next set of new information. This program will help you turn a popular website into a money maker and boost your page rank immensely.
There is no magic formula when it comes to internal links, so we can’t give you, for example, an optimal ratio of external to internal links or a number of hub pages to develop. These things will vary according to the unique website you have designed. All we can say is this: internal links are one of the most effective SEO tools, and you cannot neglect them without your website suffering. If you follow these simple instructions, you will likely find that your page ranking and your website traffic take a very exciting and lucrative turn. If you think that you have tried all of the tricks and still find that your page rank just isn’t what it should be, consult an SEO expert to see how you can get maximum mileage out of your website.
