Recently, I was contacted by an ecommerce website that told me they’ve had an SEO Consultant optimize their website, but they still aren’t seeing their site in the Keyword rankings. They want to know “Why?”. “Did the previous SEO Consultant do a good job? Did they do something wrong? Why aren’t we ranking?”.
I did a quick analysis o heir site. The site was certainly “optimized”. In the sense that it is crawlable, and search engine friendly. Additionally, the site had a good amount of unique content on category & product pages. URL structures were clean & appeared static, the website navigation was okay, H1 tags were in place, Title tags were written properly. And, all the other on-page factors looked okay. The site was indexed in all the search engines. So, why isn’t it ranking? Hmm. Perplexing, right?
The answer is contained in an earlier post I wrote on the Importance of Internal Linking.
Using your keywords as textlinks within your website is very important. Choose a specific destination page for the textlink. That’s called your Target URL. And, embedd that textlink within page content. This is one way to strengthen a content silo. So, when Google (or any of the search engines) crawl your site, they understand that’s what this section is about (the textlink).
In short, building content silos, and increasing the internal link percent of target url’s is a powerful seo technique.
In the case above, the SEO Consultant was good at making a site search engine friendly, but just didn’t have the expertise to really provide a boost in the keyword rankings.
Linking is powerful. Both using internal links, and properly structuring an inbound link campaign.
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Good reminder of a basic optimization process that often goes unheeded. My clients don’t think it’s important; after all, there’s the nav bar on the left! However, I show them how it also enhances usability, especially when the nav bar is above the fold, but the reader is looking at content below the fold.
thanks!
Hi Shimon,
Excellent potential client story. Internal linking is indeed an area that sometimes gets forgotten within the entire on site optimization process.
I always advise clients to improve the internal linking structure naturally so it helps improve user experience on the site. For instance if a site has a perfect space for a helpful bottom navigation/footer, this is a good place share deep relevant links to other places on a site. However, if the internal linking is for an ecommerce site, then sub-category linking to a category and featured products within each is always a natural fit.
This is an often overlooked aspect of site optimisation that can be relatively easy to develop, but I agree with the above comments that internal linking also needs to be closely related to site usability. If the number and format of links is too high then it can make the text really hard to read.
I needed to read this. I am glad I found this post. I had forgotten the importance of internal linking. I have a tendency to focus on off-page factors at the expense of on-page factors.
I am going to do a little internal linking now.
Thanks
Good tips.I often link to a related post I have written (inbound link) to get the search engine crawler to index more of my pages, but also to help the reader to get more information and keep them longer on my site.
Hi,I am new learner of the SEO. I got Very nice information from your article.Waiting for next article. What is the best way to learn SEO from start??
We can agree with you.
Without internal linking… SEO is not SEO, the web project is not SEO complete.
As you improve your site external links, you also need to pay attention of the internal links. Many actually forget the importance of this step for their SEO.
SEO is very important today. It triggers the possible start of success of businesses in online world. No matter the business is online or offline, SEO still influence everything.