R.O.I. MEDIA

We all know that links are extremely important when it comes to SEO and to get your site ranking for all those top industry keywords. We are so obsessed with acquiring those inbound links every month that many of us forget that the links you create internally between the pages of your site are also an extremely important element in Onsite SEO.

Internal linking is right up there as one of the most important Onsite SEO elements in my book. It’s amazing what a good internal linking structure can do for your website and individual page rankings. So let’s first have a look at why internal linking is so important.

Internal Linking serves multiple purposes:

1. To increase Page Rank of internal or ‘deep’ pages.
2. To build relevancy of a page to a keyword or key phrase.
3. To ensure that your site in its entirety is spidered, even those pages that are not referenced in your main navigation.

Increasing Page Rank of Internal Pages

Google allocates a value to every page of your site. For this they use Page Rank. Many refer to Page Rank as the “juice” allocated to each page and the website as a whole. Your homepage is seen as the most important page of your site and therefore the Homepage will always have the highest Page Rank value.  This Page Rank is then distributed between the lower pages of your site as illustrated in the image below:

The links that point from your home page to internal pages are usually found in the Main navigation of the site. This allows your Homepage Page Rank to flow naturally to the internal pages that are being linked to. The ‘juice’ gets distributed evenly across the pages that are being linked to.

Building Relevancy of a Page to a Keyword

The first and most important step of any successful SEO campaign is without a doubt Keyword Research.
You have to have a very clear objective of which pages you want to rank for and for which keywords or phrases. When creating your internal linking structure you cannot just link to pages using any random text you feel like. You need to use the targeted keyword of the page you are linking to in your anchor text.

Links act like votes for the pages that they link to. So, if you link to a page using “click here” enough times, that page will start to rank for the keyword “click here” in the Search Engines. Go ahead and do a search for the poor guy who ranks NO 1 for “Click Here”!

Ensuring your whole site gets spidered and indexed

Making sure your website and all its pages are spidered by the search engines is in all probability the easiest thing you can do to increase your rankings. You see, the more pages of your site are indexed in the Search Engines the more content you have to offer the user. The more content you have on your site, the more keywords you will inevitably have in this content. And the more keywords you have the better the chances of ranking for those keywords.

So why would Search Engines not be able to spider all your pages without internal linking? Pages can be hidden from search engine spiders when linking is done in a way that the spider cannot read to follow those links. This would happen if your site uses a script-based navigation system for example. Also, image-based navigation may be crawlable or spiderable by search engines, but the search engines can’t see images and therefore can’t assign any relevancy from the image to the page that is being linked to.

Well that’s all I have for now. I hope you got all of that, but if you didn’t, don’t despair! Just give ROI Media a call and we’ll sort you out.