Using Internal Links
One linking strategy that’s often overlooked is internal linking. Internal links are those that lead people from one page to another within your web site. This is different from the navigational structure. Internal links are more natural links that occur in the text on your web pages.
Without a good internal linking strategy, you run the risk of not having your site properly spidered. It’s not enough simply to have a navigational structure or a site map (though site maps help considerably). You should also have links that lead from one element (like a blog post) to other important elements (like an archived article or news clipping on your site), so site visitors find that moving through the information they’re examining on your site is a natural process that takes place without too much difficulty or thought.
The most effective methods of internal linking are text links, links within the footers of your pages, and inline text links. Text links are those with which you can use anchor tags and keywords. These links most often appear in the text of a page, though they can also appear in other places within your page, so long as the text links are relevant to the content of the page.
Internal linking is a practice that most companies use to help ease the navigational structure of their sites, and also to create links based on important or keyword text. Plan to use internal linking on your site, but don’t allow it to have so much power over your SEO strategy that you don’t include other elements of SEO.
PohEe | March 29th, 2008 at 5:04 am #
If you are using wordpress, then you are ease from this problem.
WP is very good in internal linking.
kashif | March 29th, 2008 at 8:14 am #
Nice Tips . Never shed light on this and thought it was not much of an issue but every little bit helps
. Internal links will also provide additional links for your site so there are more advantages than disadvantages with internal linking .
Chris | March 29th, 2008 at 9:46 am #
This was one case where I found using Live Writer to post extremely helpful. You can insert a hyperlink and chose for it to be a previous post. I have five blogs, so I can insert a link from the blog I’m working on or any of my others.
Al Haneson | March 30th, 2008 at 10:46 pm #
I always use several internal links, but never knew they helped with spidering the site. I just used them as a way to keep readers on my site longer.
I guess I was a genius and didn’t even know it!
Brad Hart | April 5th, 2008 at 4:40 pm #
I do my internal linking in several ways that all have benefits and drawbacks. First I use wordpress with a variety of cool plugins.
I use twitter tools to post a twit every time I make a blog post on nay of my three blogs. On one of my three blogs I have twitter post a daily list of all my twits. Unfortunately this gets posted as a twitted and included the next day.
On all of my blogs I use the Auto Social plugin which posts each of my posts with their appropriate tags to Del.icio.us. One of my three blogs uses the del.icio.us jason script to post keep a running tab of anything I tag as blogging. It should be no surprise I use this one on the blog about blogging. One another of my blogs I have Del.icio.us post the daily tags I make there As with any autopost I have to go in and put in all the important tagging, category and SEO and meta information in manually but it really connects not only my blog with itself, but all my blogs with each other.
I also use The Simple Tags plugin for automatic wordpress for internal linking to related posts. Which is excessive in new blogs, but as you grow in the number of posts it really provides not only as a way readers can access more content but it makes things easier on spiders.
These things don’t negate the need for good inline links between posts, but they really do help to provide links that most of us are just too lazy to do.
John | April 11th, 2008 at 2:58 pm #
Internal Links are one of the most importent aspect of SEO. Sites should have a good navigational structure that includes a sitemap and links within actual content.