How Important Is Internal Linking For SEO?

A lot of people get stuck when it comes to SEO for their website or blog.
One point in fact is neglected most of the time… internal linking architecture.

A question I came across recently is “How Will Internal Linking Affect My Rankings?”

Let’s look at a few things…

Sausage Links

Mmm, that looks pretty good.
But not quite what I had in mind.
Let’s Try again…

Golf Links

I love this game, but that’s still not right…

Internal Linking for SEO

Ah ha! There we go.

So what was the point of all that you may be asking.
I simply wanted to illustrate how something as trivial as the word “links” could be interpreted and how that plays into our discussion of SEO and proper site architecture, and more importantly the use of anchor text and internal linking to properly identify what your content is really about.

There are several onpage factors that Google in particular takes into consideration when they index your page.

• Title
• Description
• H1 tag
• Internal anchor text
• Page url
• Site architecture
• Inbound links

These are just a few of the big things the search engines look at.
As it applies to the question “How Should I Structure My Links?” Google in fact places some of the heaviest weight on your own site architecture and your internal linking.

Remember those pictures and all the ways a link could be interpreted? It’s the same with your content. And the best practice is to spell it out as clearly as possible what your content is about for the search engines.

Who knows your content better than you? That is the presumed question from Google in this case, therefore the way you link your own pages onsite tells Google a lot about your site and its content and how to rank and index it.

Carefully placed anchor text from one page to another as well as your sites navigation are big factors that you directly control, and the element of SEO that most people get wrong. I have seen changes in this area alone dramatically change a sites index position in the SERPs as well as it’s PageRank, if you’re tracking it.

Don’t get caught up in keyword density and all that, its pointless unless you have thousands of pages of content and extremely poor rankings for those pages. The average site with average amounts of content usually does poorly because of internal issues and onpage structure and site architecture that were done incorrectly.

Let me caveat by saying this however, DO NOT spam your own content. I use an hourglass model. Mention your keyword prominently at the top of page and trickle it with less frequency through the body and then pick up the pace towards the end of the page, having your keyword for that page as close to the last word on the page as possible. The key is to make it all “read organically.” If you blatantly “place” keywords in your pages Google will quickly identify the pattern. Patterns = Premeditated, Premeditated = Something’s fishy and you may be trying to game the system, which = potential penalty.

The basis of onpage linking is pretty simple…
You have a page that talks about blue widgets and in the text of that page you talk about red widgets as an option to blue widgets. In the sentence that mentions red widgets, you link that text to your red widget page. That’s a the watered down version.

What I recommend is the free SEO video course from the guys over at StomperNet and pay attention to the module called “Referential Integrity.” Leslie Rohde is the instructor and really hits a home run with his explanation of how this all works. You can get the course here for FREE: The 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes

Feel free to email me for more help: richard {at} bravo media dot com.

Cheers!
~RB

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PS:
There’s a cool little conversation on this topic over at BetterNetworker.com
Check it: Internal Linking for SEO