Importance of Internal Linking
14th September 2009
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Organizing your content in content silos is a powerful SEO technique, and combined with proper internal linking can be all that your site needs to rank for your primary keywords. Links are important both internal and external. Internal links should use keyword-rich anchor text that point to your internal pages within the website. External links are the one-way inbound links from other web properties that point to your webpages. Although, I can’t overemphasize the importance of lots & lots of content, that has hyperlinks embedded within the content that contain the keyword which you want to rank. Keyword-rich content is important. Don’t get hung up on keyword density. Just make sure you use a few primary keywords on the webpage. SEO Copywriting along with internal linking can be the secret sauce that’s needed to boost your position in the Search Engines to a top spot. Now, come the links. The internal links should be directed to a “target URL”. The target url is the webpage you want to appear in the search results. The idea is to increase the internal link percent. In short, the internal link percent is the percentage of pages on the domain that link to the Target URL. Pick the page you want to rank, and start internal linking to that webpage using the chosen keyword. If it makes sense for usability, take advantage of the sidebar and footer for internal linking. Fill your target url with keyword-rich content. It’s okay to link away from your site. Make use of keywords in anchor text, and make sure the outbound links are to “authoritative” sites within your topical neighborhood. Create content silos that are tightly knitted together by keyword-rich internal linking. Ideally, ecommerce sites should use internal linking to knit together pages within a department, category, sub-category, sub-sub category, and product pages. Bottomline, the internal linking affects keyword ranking, and contributes to strong content silos. Combined with a properly structured inbound-link campaign are extremely powerful SEO tactics. Photo credit: bkwdayton Related posts: |
Building textual content is important, but by itself, it’s not going to give you the boost in keyword ranking you desire. 
September 24th, 2009 at
I am also a firm believer in internal linking, I advise all of my clients to also make use of breadcrumbs, which is good for both the search engines and visitors as you always know where you are in a site and can quickly get back to any page that you have previously viewed.
September 29th, 2009 at
hmm.. thanks for such a great article ..
I agree with you, internal links helps a lot on SEO ..
October 8th, 2009 at
Hi Shimon
My site is very new and I’ve just started link building. Thanks for the wonderful post. I will allocate more efforts to internal linking.
Tom Low
October 9th, 2009 at
High quality external links seem to be a bi challenge for some of our clients. This internal link strategy is something more in their control and is totally feasible. Just A question: could the “Target page” be the homepage or is that a no-no?
December 14th, 2009 at
Very good demonstration of the Importance of Linking, I would Like to stress the importance of internal linking, especially to old posts. The bots usually crawl the first 300 (or 100 or all depending what SE) links and therefore internal linking is useful for re crawling older relevant posts that usually get a small boost out of it.
December 16th, 2009 at
This is solid information, although I’m wondering about how much concern should be held for first-link priority in Google, and the limitations that holds for internal linking (especially multiple links to the same pages in both side/top and footer navigation)?