Feb 2, 2012 Posted in Marketing Ideas

SEO Linking Strategy: Internal Linking Strategy for Better Search Rankings

I had two conversations yesterday about site structure and internal links and how they pertain the overal SEO linking strategy. Internal links are the links within your website that link to other pages of your own site. Both conversations made me think that I should write a quick post of the importance of these internal links.

We must remember that Google and the other search engines rank websites based on the words (text) on a page.  They find those pages by sending out robots to crawl the Web and report back what they find.  Those robots (sometimes called spiders) make their way through, around and within the Web by following hyper-links.

This is a critical piece of information to understand because if you put something up on the Web and it has no links to it chances are that Google will never find it.  However, the more links to it the more likely it is that it will be found and the more likely it will be that it will get a better ranking.  This is a major over-simplification but one of the main criteria that Google looks at in ranking a page is the number of links going to it. They basically look at every link as a vote of confidence.

Ok, that said, your SEO linking strategy should definitely take into consideration your own internal linking strategy.  You have total control of the content on your site so you can do things properly.  This is how you do it:

• Use whatever keywords you want your site to rank for as links to your homepage.  For example, my site among other things is about seo services so this link will go to my home page
• Keep all pages or posts within 2 levels of your home page if you want it to rank. The more layers removed from the home page content is the less likely it is to be found and the less important it appears to Google
• Create links to all new content you post to your site as well.  Remember, pages get found through the links pointing to them.

 

This has been a very simple overview of SEO linking strategy as it pertains to internal linking.  Obviously, there is a great deal more to it but as long as you include links to all of your pages and you use the right type of links (use your keywords), you’ll be well ahead of most of your competitors.