Having received a request from regular reader Chad Walls this morning on the subject, I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk a little about internal linking.
Now, in SEO we are always talking about the value of attracting links from external sites. After all, it is through these links that a site gains strength and authority in the search engines’ eyes. However, you shouldn’t overlook the important of your internal structure too.
When a search engine spider lands on your site, it generally only stays for a finite period of time. It doesn’t meander around perusing what you have to offer; it darts from page to page, following the links on each page and collecting information as it goes. To make the most of this, you have to a linking structure that is both logical and thorough.
Each page should be accessible within a couple of clicks. They should be clearly categorised and presented in such a way that visitors and spiders will instantly know the path to take. This is just good site design.
However you can use your internal linking to pass strength around the site too. Generally speaking you will often have most external links pointing to your homepage. This is purely because it is the main focal point for most sites, it is also the most likely landing page. But all that aside, the number of links it has coming in usually makes it extremely strong – often enjoying a higher PR than child pages.
You can help your other pages benefit from this strength by linking to them. This circularity of link strength allows the site to develop authority right throughout. Don’t get carried away though, you don’t want pages swamped with links just to improve rankings a little – not only will that not work, it will confuse the search engine spider and your audience.
In an ideal world – just as with external links – your page links should be in the form of an embedded text link. This means that not only will your visitors know where they’re going, but you can further optimise the keywords and relevance on the recipient page.
For example, if I wanted to point you in the direction of my SEO services page, then I would do so in the form of a text link- just as I did there. It provides a useful link and it has the context of the phrase attached to the link.
In some instances it will be logical to use an image instead. For example, each page might have the company logo in the header somewhere. This is something that most visitors will expect and is good practice. However, that image link isn’t going to do much for your relevance.
So imagine that you have a page with two links to the same page elsewhere on your site. One is an optimised text link, the other is an image. Whilst the difference might only be marginal, it is always best to use a text link purely as it is the most likely to pass relevance.
But your problem remains, so what can you do? You don’t want to have two links to the same page being followed by the spider; not only can that cost time, it can also lose keyword strength. To avoid this, simply apply the nofollow attribute to the image.
This will be entirely invisible to the human visitor and they will still be able to follow the link; however the search engine spiders won’t. This means that as they crawl the site, the spiders will have one clear path to a page and will instantly understand its context due to the keywords used.
If you are struggling to link to each page, ensure that you have a Sitemap embedded in your footer. This will have a rundown of all the pages on a site and provide links to each, allowing human and robot visitors to find their way through. This will also mean that any major page can be accessed through two clicks – obviously large ecommerce sites might not list each product.
If you have a blog, you can use that to further your opportunities for spreading links further. Embed links for optimised phrases to other pages in your site and spread your strength. Just like the human body, a site relies on good circulation. If you have dead ends or are trying to push too many links to one page, then you could suffer as a consequence.
When it comes to internal links, you really need to just be logical. If you’re stuffing in links for fun, you will just confuse your visitors and the search engines. Keep it clean and clear, avoid an overreliance on image links (make sure you use Alt tags if you have to) and try to use embedded text links where possible.
PageRank can be passed from page to page through the linking structure, but you can’t really sculpt it unless you were to nofollow every link other than the one you are really focussing on – not recommended. A site generates an overall strength, to really optimise a single page you need to do some deep linking from external sites. This will build the link profile and provide added authority (as well as new ways for a visitor/search engine spider to find you).
PageRank sculpting has been all but written off by Matt Cutts at Google. It is usually in reference to links exiting your site, rather than internal ones. By all means though, if you are linking to another site that you don’t want to pass strength on to then use a nofollow tag.
Anyway I hope that has answered your question Chad and if you, or any other readers have a question feel free to send it in and I will do my best to answer.
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