Internal Linking

In order for your website to rank well, your internal linking structure is vital to your success. I covered some of the theory for this in the Page Structure guide on Day 3, which said how you should map out the physical linking structure, but in this guide I will explain more about the importance of interlinking your pages, while using your targeted keyword in your anchor text. Not only will this help your search engine rankings, but it will also help visitors of your website navigate your site, which will in turn result in a happier visitor and hopefully more sales for your website.

As a search engine optimizer you should exploit everything possible opportunity to get a better ranking in the search engines. Your first task is to make sure your own website is optimized to it¡¯s full potential. You should know by now the importance of anchor text for backlinks to your website, well, the same applies for the internal links on your website.

When you create a link to another page on your website you should always use your target keyword or phrase as the anchor text. The site you are linking to should then be fully optimized for the same keyword/phrase to maximize your SEO efforts.

If your navigation system uses images then you¡¯re instantly throwing away huge potential to get your website¡¯s ranking as high as possible since you can¡¯t specify anchor text if you¡¯re using an image. Anchor text counts for so much in modern-day SEO, so if you don¡¯t use text links to interlink your web pages then you¡¯re instantly losing the potential to have potentially hundreds or thousands of link pointing to your web page with your targeted keyword/phrase.

Before going down the images route, you should explore using CSS. CSS is extremely powerful and you can actually make a normal text link look like an image.

I¡¯ve seen many websites move up hundreds of places in the search engines, simply by optimizing their website¡¯s internal linking.