When it comes to SEO, we’re often focused completely on the practice of building our catalog of external links for our clients’ websites. But just as important is the practice of building your repertoire of internal links. If you consider any link as a recommendation of your site in the same way you consider external links recommendations to Google that, “Hey, this site has good content,” then why wouldn’t you recommend your own content and web pages to Google? This is why Internal Linking is such an important tool of SEO specialists, especially if you have a well-ranked high authority site already. You can use your well-trafficked and highly ranked pages to direct spiders and users to more content such as a limited-time campaign “recommended” by the high authority page. Likewise, internal linking provides important navigational features to your site that help users orient themselves and find what they want on your site without having to use search boxes or find orphan pages.
In the year 2013, these are mistakes nobody should be making, but there are also some important things you can do that your competitors might not be that can help you get an edge on the competition.
1. Link to Your Most Profitable/Converting Pages
It goes without saying that at the end of the day companies hire SEO specialists and Internet marketers to help them make money. So, as someone in one of those positions, you want to drive users to the most profitable and highest converting pages on a client’s site. Therefore, the more inbound links to that page, the more you’ll show up in the search engines and (hopefully) get more traffic. Of course, don’t just post href HTML codes everywhere, but don’t neglect the fact that many very profitable businesses put “most popular items” or “recently searched” in their top navigation. You already know these are highly converting pages, so why wouldn’t you try and increase exposure of these pages?
2. Link to Relevant, Related Pages
Nobody wants to have excessive links on a web page. It looks messy, cluttered and overly aggressive on behalf of the business. That being said, most web sites actually underutilize internal links rather than abuse them. If you’ve ever been a regular browser of Wikipedia, you’ll know that providing links to related, relevant and quality content can drive traffic to other pages you wouldn’t have originally considered. That’s why in your SEO strategy you should be utilizing SEO to link to related content on a regular basis. For example, if your client’s site runs a blog and the client has a web page or another blog on a related or relevant subject, you might want to consider linking to these pages. Say your site had a page on landscaping, and you wrote a blog about landscaping. This would be a great time to internally link to that central web page or an earlier blog about a similar landscaping service. Though it may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many webmasters, content developers and SEO specialists neglect to do this. Google also gives a boost to pages linked with relevant anchor text to the page’s content–which as you’ve just seen is something you can easily do.
3. Provide Breadcrumb Navigation
I can’t think of a web browser that doesn’t have a back button, but that doesn’t mean you should let your users rely on it. Breadcrumb navigation (i.e. linking back to a more broad page from one with a narrower scope or focus) is often forsaken in favor of users’ browser back buttons. Nevertheless, breadcrumbs are a great way of ensuring your pages aren’t dead-ends, enhancing the navigational experience for users as well as sneaking in a couple extra internal links. Retail outlets and e-commerce sites such as Wal-Mart and Amazon are common users of this strategy for their sites, and clearly they’re doing pretty well in the search engine rankings. Why shouldn’t you? As an added plus, it again also allows you to easily and thoughtlessly add relevance to web pages with anchor text that is almost undeniably related to the web page in question.
Our guest blogger is Ricardo Casas is the CEO and founder of Fahrenheit Marketing LLC, an Austin, Texas based internet marketing company. With over a decade of experience in the field, Ricardo has seen the field change dramatically and knows how to adapt quickly to the pressures of the rapidly changing world of SEO.