Internal Linking – How important?
We’re talking about internal linking within a website here-we’ve already discussed getting backlinks consisting of specific keywords from external websites which in turn raise your rankings within the search engine results and is essentially SEO. You can get backlinks from your own website which pass considerable amounts of power-considering you have total control over your own website if we can govern the links we get then we should really be focusing on that just as much as any off-page efforts.
Checking how many backlinks you have to your site can be done in many ways-a particular easy way of doing so (SEO’s fav method) would be the Yahoo linkdomain: command-it is used from yahoo home page like so;
linkdomain:www.example.com
This shows a rough estimate of how many links you have pointing at your domain-it even lists links from your own site. With respect to internal linking, what should be done is anchor text links throughout the body of web pages linking through to relevant internal pages in the site.
Internal Link focusing
One can place a lot of weight on particular pages within a website in order to raise the profile of this page from within the site and in the eyes of the search engines.
Usually the most powerful page in a website is the home page or root of the domain-this happens because it’s the first page the search engine visits on crawl and most internal links always link back to the home page-in terms of link juice, most of it gets pointed towards the home page.
We can direct attention or link juice towards inner pages of a website-a good inner page would be a top level category page or contact/conversion page within the site. Try relevant anchor text links within related body content pointed at specific pages. After a while you should notice if done correctly that you may find your site listed twice in the search engine results pages.
If you perform a search for your inner page keyword you’ll get your inner page listed first within the search engine results pages and then indented result as your home page-this is when you know the internal linking to this page is good for a particular keyword.
Checking internal linking with Google Webmaster Tools
A nice way to have a gander at your internal links would be from within Google webmaster tools, if you have access to it and have verified your site, go in and take a look at : Your site on the web : Internal Links
This gives you a table of your inner pages with internal links pointed at them-you can decide for yourself depending on the type of your site how well it’s being done. A good indication would be picking the most important pages in your site should have the most internal links and more irrelevant pages towards the bottom of the list.
Picking this up…
There are more important factors which go very well with internal linking which we will discuss at a later date-this is called deep site external links-when this marrys up with internal linking structure, the site becomes very powerful.