Tips on internal linking strategy

by Graham Charlton 19 June 2008 13:14 2 comments Print

Internal linking is an important and often overlooked element of SEO and, unlike external links, the site owner has complete control over this, so it's crucial to make the most of it.

Scott Allen of Search Engine Guide has written a useful article on internal linking strategies. Here are a couple of his tips, alongside some from our SEO Best Practice Guide...

Link within your content

Scott advises webmasters to go through their site's content and work out where it would make sense to link to other pages which you want to rank better.

Make sure that the anchor text matches the keywords and phrases that you want the pages to rank well for. Scott also advises that these target keywords should appear on the destination page, as this will make the linking more effective.

Link from stronger pages

Some webpages may be more popular in the search rankings and receive more links than the rest of your website. You can strengthen these weaker pages by including some contextual links to them from the stronger pages.

Some additional tips from E-consultancy's SEO Guide...

Links from footers

This approach can also help with usability, as it is effectively a mini site map on every page. It also allows you to include some lengthy to be included.

For example, E-consultancy ranks well in Google for keyphrases such as 'web project management' and 'online surveys & research', both of which are included in the footer.

Sitemaps

Spending time on an effective sitemap is not only effective for SEO, but also has usability benefits.

Always have a sitemap with text links, not images.
Make sure your anchor text reflects user behaviour and keyphrase analysis, so include not just product names, but also the most popular keywords for that page.

Links from e-newsletters and blogs

Articles in newsletters and blogs are another source of internal links and, as they are often hosted on separate or sub-domains, they may provide additional value.

Include relevant anchor text in the links back to the main site, not just the title of the article.

Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.

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Reader comments (2)

mephedrone
1:19PM on 1st March 2010

nice tips
Santosh Bhandarkar
4:38AM on 3rd March 2010

If you are using Wordpress for your blogs, you can use a cool plug-in called "Seo Smart Links". It does all the work for you once you decide on the keywords and the respective target pages.