How To Use Internal Link Building
Many people know about how getting links to your website from other websites gives you a boost in terms of SEO (search engine optimization). But did you realize that you can actually get similar results with internal link building? The way that your blog or website is set up can have a significant impact on your search engine rankings, especially if you have a site with many different pages. There is a right and wrong way to go about internal linking.
The image of a chain is a great pictorial reference to the interent or world wide web and your web pages. It’s the links that are on websites and webpages that tie the internet pages together. If you don’t use links correctly, you will not be recognized for the content on your website. It would be as if there were an individual chain link sitting alongside a completed chain. The individual link would have absolutely no purpose.
External and Internal Links are a concept that will be totally foreign to the newbie marketer and website builder. However, as in all things….keep at it, read some resources and do some research and soon you’ll began to understand the importance of external and internal links. This article mainly speaks of internet links and is an easy place to began to learn about linking!
Keep in mind that there are three factors of internal linking that you need to address: site navigation, in-context linking and anchor text.
Site navigation is how your visitor will move through your site. This is the first step in getting your internal link building set up correctly. Basically, you will want to be linking to your best pages from the navigation menu. It doesn’t matter if those pages are main categories or just regular pages. In most cases, you’ll have two navigation menus. One will be for the whole site and the one purpose of this is to show your visitors the main sections of your website. The other navigation menu will be for informational pages such as those that have your contact information, a description of your site, etc.
One thing to keep in mind is the proper use of keywords when contimplating an internal linking strategy. Using long tail keywords with low traffic almost guarantees traffic to your desired pages. Finding these keywords is a little tricky but you can find them using one of 2 keyword tools:
I use both these tools and it’s amazing to see what happens when you spend 10 minutes looking for some keywords to use in a daily blog post. It can happen immediately or sometimes 6 months down the road, but suddenly you’ll find a significant increase of traffic to those pages and keywords!
In-context linking is just what the name says. Links that are within the context of your website or blog’s text and not in a list or navigation bar. Search engines prefer in-context links to link lists so it’s important to make sure that your related posts or web pages are linked to each other through your in-context links. How often you do this depends on how expansive your site is. If you have a relatively small blog or website, you don’t want to be using a lot of inter-linking. Choose the most important keywo
rd phrases and link them to your most important pages. If you do have a larger site, feel free to use this method a little more liberally. Interlinking on a large site has a much greater effect than it does on smaller sites.
Anchor text is also very important for search engine optimization. Many people make the mistake of turning “useless” words into links. For example, you can include the phrase “Click here” and link it to the page you want your readers to be taken to. Or you can use the phrase “Get marketing help here” and link just the words “marketing help” to the page. Marketing help is a much stronger anchor text word to use. Not many people are searching for the term “click here” on the internet. You need to tell the search engines what words are relevant.
If you can keep these three internal link building elements in mind, you can either get started on the right foot with a new blog or website or you can re-structure what you already have online fairly quickly and easily.
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Tagged with: Anchor Text • external link buiding • internal link building • link building • search engine optimization • SEO
Filed under: link building
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I am planning to start a website on environmental conservation, one that I hope will make a real difference in getting people to live wiser. I have not named it yet but have began learning so much in preparation for implementation. My question deals with linking—the how-to part…the actual things one does to make linking happen…the code, the actual written part.
I find that many sources of information on linking (both internal and external) are great to tell why they are important and other higher understandings. I have learned some valuable things by reading and plan to take the advice provided.
But my issue is more fundamental. What is it that I am to write in order to get linking to be functional–to actually work. Where do I write it? What are the steps and process(es) needed to accomplish it? Are there easy to understand directions on how-to with examples. How can I learn this most basic information that “teachers” are forgetting to make sure we know how to do?
To use a simple metaphor: what good is it to know how beneficial it is to tie our shoes if the ones learning don’t actually learn how to tie the laces? Back to linking, there doesn’t seem to be many sources like what I need. Any suggestions?
Thanks for your comment John
Your question seems to be very fundamental….something on the order of “how do I form a link” and that answer is very simple. A “link” is simply a hyperlink.
The quality and importance of your site is determined by search engines like Google by the number of links or hyperlinks pointing back to your site. It’s really a simple system.
So if I have a blog environmental conservation and I write a comment or post and then put a link pointing to your site….you in essence have one vote from me.
You want to have as many votes or links as possible. You can get the links by creating the best blog about environmental conservation and letting people find your blog and hopefully commenting and putting a link to your site on theirs….often in reality a very slow process.
So..what can one do to get links.
There are many ideas in my posts, the hyperlinks in my posts point you to resources that will help your develop links back to your site.
If you don’t know what a link is, you really need to spend some time learning some basic html coding. The anchor text is one of the most important parts of a link and should be based on keywords that you want your webpages to rank for ….a simple hyperlink looks like
<a href="http://www.desktop-wealth.com/blog/category/link-building/" rel="nofollow">learn linking</a>If you are new to all this then the easiest ways to get links out on the internet is by writing articles and submitting articles to article directories. At the end of the article directory, you are allowed to add a resource box. In the resource box you’ll want to add a few sentences encouraging your reader to go to a specific webpage….this is where you would put your link.
You can do things like social bookmarking.
You can write quest posts for other blogs.
Do anything that will get your content across the web and always put a link back to your site.
You can also buy link packages that will get 100’s to 1000’s of backlinks to your site. These aren’t the best and usually don’t last a long time but can be a good way to start.
You can manually email other sites similar to yours and ask for link exchanges.
These are all very basic ideas and concepts in SEO and you can find more information on that in my blog or across the net.
Read my blog post at Link Building Basics make sure you click on the links and check out the available resources.
Let me know if you have other questions.