Links are an important part of how today’s web works. SEO companies spend a lot of time strategising how to achieve links for their clients, and site owners spend a lot of time plotting how to get others to link to them. Internal links get a quick look-in during the initial search engine optimisation of a site, but once the navigation is set, the issue is put aside.

The management of internal links can’t just stop once the SEO strategy is in place. The introduction of fresh content to a site is a prime opportunity to further support your SEO.

When preparing your content for publication on your site, scan for keywords and other possible anchors. A good SEO technique with internal, in-text links is to anchor a link to a keyword that matches the page it links to. For example, say a news feature had been written for a computer technology company’s home page, detailing a new software product that had been developed. The SEO within the piece itself would support the home page, featuring the major keywords for the company. The piece could also be used to link to the products page, to the development/research page or possibly to the ‘about us’ page. These links within the text could be keywords from those pages, so in other words keywords targeted specifically for computer technology research and development. This would further support the relevance of these pages, while at the same time providing a clear indicator to the user what page they would be going to when they click on the link.

Content-based links can also be used to link through to previous content. It’s easy to forget that your site’s content is an asset in itself. It supports the rest of the site, certainly, but your users should be approaching your well-written content for information and advice. If you’ve included content on a similar topic previously, links within fresh content can help users find it. For example, with the news article example above, there would be an opportunity to link to any content on the development of the product, reviews of similar products, and so on.

If you’re posting fresh content through a blog, remember to recognise others in your links. The blogging community is a world that works on cooperation. Many businesses make the mistake when they first start out of accepting others linking to them, without considering what they should do in return. Although the agreement of ‘I link to you, you link to me’ isn’t written in stone, it’s considered polite to read the blogs of others who have left comments on yours, and link through to interesting posts. It can also be helpful to your site’s users to link to

Once you have determined your where your links will go and what they will be, and have implemented them within the new content, it’s important to check the links. Broken links are not good for SEO, and new links are worth checking.

The choice of links within new content should fit with your overall SEO plan. It can help to consult your SEO consultant if you are uncertain where new content fits in. If you need help with fresh content, talk to us at SEO Consult.

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