Last week I posted about restructuring your website and the SEO considerations of doing this so I thought I’d follow this up with some information about internal linking on your website.
As Tom mentioned in his post last week reviewing your SEO campaign for 2010 should not be forgotten in the rush to get everything ready for Christmas so reviewing the internal linking structure of your website is a great New Year’s Resolution.
The internal linking structure of your website is important to ensuring that your website ranks well in the search engines as well as making the site easier to navigate for your visitors.
When you use a link to a page within your website from the footer navigation, main navigation or the body text on a page you are providing a message to Google about what your website is about and helping them to find pages on your site. Making each page of your website easy to find for search engines and also for your website visitors is key to ensuring you not only get good rankings but also that your customers are able to find things on your website.
Google uses the anchor text of links to determine what they are going to get when they click on a link so using a keyword as the anchor text of the link will help prove to Google your website is about the products you sell and the keywords you are working with.
So when you review the internal linking of the site make sure that you are not linking to the contact form of your website 3 times on every page of the website as this will tell Google that you consider this page the most important page on the site and not your product pages. The downside of doing this could create a really high ranking for your website for the term “contact” similar to the BBCs top 2 ranking for Privacy Policy.
You also want to ensure that you are not falling into the “click here” trap and using “click here” or “read more” as the anchor text for all or most of the links on your website as this is not informative to Google at all.
Don’t turn your website into a series of links, the internal linking you need to use must look natural to search engines and must not be off putting for customers. So linking to a few pages from each page of text is good, but linking to 340 pages from each area of text won’t do you any favours. Although this sounds like a nasty tight rope to walk, just remember that you are a internet user too and if you feel there are too many links on a page on another website, you have already identified what your own personal threshold for too many links is!
If the navigation of your website is not readable by search engines (as it is images or a flash file) consider a short footer to help the rankings – however you need to make sure this is not too long.
When working with your company blog, create links to relevant pages on your website such as the link to the homepage of the Vertical Leap website I’ve included for the phrase SEO at the top of this post. As your blog (whether it’s a Blogger blog or a WordPress blog) will be pinging Google when you add a new post to the site these internal links can help your content get indexed more frequently.
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