The Importance of Strong Internal Links for Your SEO
October 21st, 2009 by Nick
A lot of time is spent on building external links. External links are promoted as a great help to SEO, which they are, but it’s important not to overlook the links you have best access to. These are the links within your own site.
Internal linking is an important part of SEO which can often be overlooked. This is a shame, as it’s far easier to solidify your internal links than it is to nurture links from external sites. A site with the right internal structure can score a higher ranking than a badly structured site with external links. Also, internal links are guaranteed to come from the page with the most authority on your business – your own.
Your internal links can help make sure that all of your pages are seen by search engine spiders, build on the keyword density within the site, increase the PageRank of your internal pages and ultimately increase your site’s overall ranking.
It’s even better if your site has been online for some time. A lot of companies approach SEO well into their online campaign. In a lot of respects, this makes for a frustrating time, particularly as a lot of companies seek to optimise their sites as part of their active marketing campaign. SEO results take time to kick in, and there’s nothing more frustrating than waiting for results while your business is counting down the hours. The one area that established sites have the edge when it comes to SEO is that they have a history in the search engine, and this is great for link juice once internal links are fully optimised.
Tweaking your internal linking structure can be a very easy process. Sometimes it’s a simple case of inserting keywords into your links, making it easier for search engines to find the right content within your site. Sometimes a little restructuring is in order, which is a more difficult task.
When looking at the internal link structure of your site, you should think about supporting the search engine optimisation tactics you have in place in your content. This might sound obvious, but quite a few companies spend a lot of time carefully distributing keywords throughout their content, only to name their video files in numerical code that will mean nothing to a search engine. Your search engine optimisation should cover code in your pages, content, anchors for links and naming conventions for any folders and file names. Talking to our experts at SEO Consult can be a great help with defining the tags that are best for your internal structure.
A good internal link structure is important not only to boost your ranking, but to ensure that all of your pages get the attention they deserve. It’s not much use having a 35-page site if only five of those pages are spidered by the search engines. Shoring up your internal links means that you are using the assets already available to you, providing SEO value for relatively little effort.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS feed.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.
[...] Nick from seoconsult writes: Internal linking is an important part of SEO which can often be overlooked. This is a shame, as it’s far easier to [...]
It appears from the early caffeine results that internal linking is going to carry rather more weight than it does right now. encouragement there then to build more pages!
BB
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.