In today’s post, I’m going to talk about internal link building and how to use it effectively for higher search engine rankings, higher page rank and for better user experience on our websites and blogs. Most of the time when we talk about getting quality links for our website, we always aims at getting links from external websites whether they came from discussion forums, guest posts on blogs, blog commenting, link exchange, directory submission, Ezine publishing etc and also underestimate the power of internal link building. Your scope of doing internal linking keeps on increasing as the number of pages on your website increase as in that case you will have more pages to link to.
We can get top rankings for our website internal pages by creating links within our website and by linking them using proper anchor texts. One of the biggest reasons behind the success of big portals like Wikipedia and Answers.com is their strong internal linking system. Here I’m going to discuss some of internal link building strategies we can implement on our websites and blogs for better search engine rankings and higher page rank from Google:
1. Website Navigation Structure
Website navigation should be created with the focus in mind to highlight your website or blog top pages, posts or categories. And if you find problem in showing all of your website internal pages in the navigation bar, then you can think of creating a main navigation in the header where you just show your website most important product or category pages and show pages like About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Disclaimer etc in your website sidebar or in the footer section. Website navigation is one of the best way to link to your website internal pages with Seo friendly URL’s and Anchor texts which will ultimately help those internal pages higher rankings in search engines and better page rank.
Lots of people love to use flash, image text and buttons in their navigation bar to show their website main pages and categories. But I would suggest avoid using flash, image texts (text written in images) and drop downs in your navigation bar. Search Engines don’t understand text that we wrote within an image or buttons. So avoid these practices when creating navigation menu for your website or blog.
2. Linking within Content
Its true search engines give more preference to links that are within content as compared to links that we get in the website sidebar in the form of blogrolls or Partners, on the resources pages or in the footer section. So contextual linking (links with your content portion) is really beneficial for external websites and for your own website internal pages. But contextual linking is really successful in those websites and blogs with hundreds or thousands of pages being created.
And in case you are running a blog on Blogger or WordPress, there are plugins available that will help you show related posts with your blog posts. But don’t add too many unnecessary links to your website internal pages as that will not be good from user experience. Create links to pages which they looks natural and add more value to your existing content.
3. Proper Anchor Texts
Creating links within your website using any imaginary text will not help you much in search engine rankings. So the best strategy will be using seo driven Anchor texts when adding links on your website or blog. Links like Click here or Read More does not add much value to the page you are linking and also it’s not good for your website readers. Please go through some sample links people generally create within their websites and blogs:
Keep on Reading for information
Internal Link Building Strategies
Among all of three examples, third one is best example of using a proper anchor text to link to your internal pages. And its also creates better user experience on your website as its more informative when compared to first and second link schemes.
4. Follow BreadCrumbs
We generally show BreadCrumbs in our website below navigation menu. A breadcrumb is used to show where we are currently on the website and has hierarchical structure mentioned in links. A good example of website following BreadCrumbs is open directory project Dmoz.org.
And to know more about BreadCrumbs navigation and how to implement them on your website, go through the Wikipedia link shared.
5. Creating Sitemaps
Another thing that can be done for internal link building is creating HTML Sitemap on your website and limits the number of links within your sitemap to 100. And if you must include more than 100 links in your HTML Sitemap, I would suggest crating more than one HTML SiteMap.
6. Footer Links
And in case you missed using some of important pages links in your navigation bar, why don’t add them in your website footer section.
And in the end I hope you understand the magic of internal link building. So implement these techniques on your websites and blogs for getting lots of organic traffic from search engines and for higher page rank to your website internal pages. Have you been using any of the techniques that I shared here on your website or blog, please share in the comment section.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I am just thinking that if we want to get good
search engine ranking, we have to give more
focus on external links only.
thanks for this posting.it is great!
Most of the techniques I used in my blog.But my blog is very new just one month old.So I am trying to make some backlinks.BWN good aricle.
@Lakhyajyoti, 3 months back i started blogging on my site i used most internal linking here and there like a word bollywood i would hyperlink it pointed to my domain most of blog post were imported from other blog , today i have avaerage of 600 unique visitors my content is messed up lol but it still works i have external links only with 1 site and twitter
if you want to do any link exchange feel free to visit my site contact me
Very informative article…………….
but i have one question…………i have many internal links……but i have far more out going links from my blog……….
does it affect my SEO????
pls guys help
I don’t think you will have any problem from Seo prospective if you are linking to quality websites. And if you are doubtful or does not want to give credit to a website, use nofollow against its link.
@baba, it dosent effect your seo, i has lots of like outgoing what this post is actually saying is try building internal links like for example here at this site some word like make money online are hyperlinkee to scopeformoney.com that way the keyword searches it improves ranking
I have understood all your points except one. What is HTML sitemap? Can I use it in blogspot blog?
Hi
I don’t think there is any option in blogger right now to create and upload HTML sitemap in blogger blogs at least
Thanks Zeeshan and admn………..
you mean anchor text is more important, right??
You mentioned in section 2 that there are plugins available to help with the internal linking process. Can you recommend any or point me in the direction of a review I could read please.
I would suggest you searching on Google with the tems like interlinking plugin wordpress or so, you will surely get something of use that you will fix your interlinking problem to some extent. I would suggest you to go for such plugins only when you ahve big websites and in case you have 50-100 page websites, you should manually do interlinking
@admin, Thanks for your reply, I’ll dig around in Google and see what I can find.
Offpage Optimization is optimization done off the Page such as getting relevant links from other sites, link exchange with quality relevant sites, choosing relevant anchor text from the perfect location on the different pages of different sites etc.
heavy internal linking with variations in anchor text from the page text works best indeed. look at wikipedia and copy how they do it.
my theory is wikipedia ranks well because google engineered its algorithm around wikipedia (not the other way around)
very useful article will put it to good use thanks alot.
Wow! This is quality stuff. I am going to learn every single one of it and implement it.
It is indeed important to link to your other blog posts especially if these offer the needed information regarding the subject. But how about if other outside sources can provide the best information about your topic? Should you link out or not?
In my opinion, the whole aim of the game in SEO is to replicate what happens in nature, and it’s not natural to have your website never linking to anything anywhere. This means that, in my view, it is okay to link out to other sites, especially if the content there is rich enough to shed light on the discussion at hand because that is what happens in reality.
The more you provide great content, the easier it is for you to get links naturally from other sites especially if they see your content as a good reference and is worth mentioning in their posts.
Cheers,
Dave