Internal Links

As the search engines crawl through your site, they are doing more than just moving from one page to the next. They’re looking for clues that tell them what the pages on your site are about. Links from page to page inside your site, and the text they contain, provide some of these clues. A well-planned internal linking structure might even help focus some link authority to your more important pages. Are optimized internal links the answer to improved search engine ranks? Nope, they’re not. This level of SEO detail is just one of the many little modifications you can make that will add up and make a difference. From our experience, sites that pay attention to their internal linking text are usually a cut above their competitors.

Here are some things to watch out for in assessing your site’s internal links: Use every reasonable opportunity to link. If you want a search-friendly site, the robots need to be able to follow links throughout your site. Does your home page provide links to your landing pages? There may be some obvious opportunities for internal links that you aren’t currently taking advantage of. Scan your page copy for product names, calls to action, or other opportunities to add robot-friendly HTML links within your site’s text. For example, we often see home page text that looks like this:

We’re proud of the great reputation our Popsicle Stands have earned. With JuniorPop Stands, SuperPop Stands, and high altitude stands available, you’ll be blown away. You can find our products in many retail locations, or buy online. But modify this text just a little bit, and look at the improvement:

We’re proud of the great reputation our Popsicle Stands have earned. With JuniorPop Stands, SuperPop Stands, and high altitude stands available, you’ll be blown away. You can find our products in many retail locations, or buy online. Why is this better? Because it provides clear, keyword-rich paths to each of your product pages, your store locator, and your online store, it provides a clue to the search engines that these are important pages on your site, and it’s also much more useful to your site visitors.

Use meaningful text in your links. If you’re serious about your site’s usability and optimization, you should consider rewriting every “click here” on your site to something more meaningful. Imagine the contextual help you give to a search engine robot, and the favor you do for your website visitors, when you change:

SuperPop Stands are famous for their compact yet sturdy construction. Click here to see why they’re so popular.

To:

Why are SuperPop Stands so popular? Because popsicle sellers love their compact yet sturdy construction.

Bloggers, you are guiltiest when it comes to lazy linking. How many times have you written a blog posting that looks like this: “I am the world’s biggest Green Bay Packers fan, as you’ve seen here and here.”

Oh, it’s suave, it’s carefree, it’s ubercool. We get that. And it’s fine by us when you’re linking out to a YouTube video and you don’t care what the search engines think of it. But when you use this linking style for your own internal pages, you’ve wasted an opportunity to give your link a little context, and your site a little optimization boost. And a link is a terrible thing to waste!

Another place we find lazy links in within a site’s global navigation, a.k.a. the main menu. When you link to “Our Products” and “Our Services,” what keywords are you missing out on? What if you linked to “Our Organization Tools” and “Our Time Saving Services” instead? Now, you don’t want to overdo this one the potential is there to make your page look keyword stuffed, and it might impact your site design. Work together with your designers or writers to see if you can come up with navigation text that looks great and includes keywords, too.

Play favorites: Link to landing pages. Maybe your most important landing pages exist alongside thousands of other pages in your site. Robots don’t index every page from every site, so they may simply move on before they find the path to the pages you think are most important. This is a quick fix: Just be sure to add HTML links that place your landing pages no more than two clicks away from the home page.

Outbound Links

In the real world, nobody knows that you wrote in your pet gerbil for president. Online, it’s another story. Outbound links pointing from your site to another website are considered votes, and they’re traceable. Search engines, in particular, are keeping a close eye on outbound links on your site. If they catch you linking to a “bad neighborhood,” your ranks could suffer. Here are some pages that shouldn’t be getting links from your site:

• Link farms pages that obviously buy, sell, or trade links

• Sites engaged in “black hat” SEO

• A large number of sites that have subject matter unrelated to your own

It’s easy to find outbound links on your site just search for linkfromdomain:yourdomain.com on the MSN search engine. Sites you linked to ages ago may have expired or been taken over by domain squatters, making them less-than-desirable outbound links, so make a habit of checking them once every few months, or anytime you see an unexpected drop in rankings.

Internal Link Structure

Want to know how link equity, link juice, page authority, link love, PageRank, or whatever you like to call that precious commodity so important in SEO is distributed through your site? Here’s a visual: Champagne Pyramid. Just as the bubbly stuff flows merrily from glass to glass, your link juice flows through your site, following pathways created by internal links. Inbound links from other sites bring power to your site, and internal links move it around. If your site is like most, the majority of inbound links are pointing to your home page.That means you need to share the wealth using internal links with other pages on your site.There’s no single linking structure that maximizes link power for every site, but here are a few do’s and don’ts that should help:

• DO point your main menu to key landing pages.

• Your site has a finite amount of overall equity. So DON’T link to low-priority pages unnecessarily. This is especially true for sitewide links such as copyright and legal.

• DO consider your site map page a landing page if it’s linked from every page.

• DO amp up your deep-page-to-deep-page internal links. Related content links engage your users and increase the authority of the linked page.

• Subpages that have lots of inbound links carry link power. DO link from them to your toppriority landing pages.

• DON’T let any pages, especially top-priority ones, become “orphaned” (not linked from any page) or deeply buried more than five clicks away from your home page. If you put some thought into your internal linking structure,we’ll raise a glass to your SEO success!