Internal linking techniques
Internal linking is very important in SEO. One of the first things you can do is change the link to your front page. Most people put “Home”. You should change that to your keywords like widgets or my service or whatever term you are trying to get on your front page. You could even have a different keyword per page. Another mistake is people put the link to their home page as /index.html. Don’t do this your going to be telling search engines you have 2 front pages. They will see www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html as 2 pages and they will see them as duplicates. You will not be passing any of your internal link value to the home page. I try to use absolute URL’s. (i.e. http://www.domain.com/page.html) If someone hijacks your site they can only hijack one page this way. Every so often to hack comes out where somebody can hijack your site. It does not happen often but why risk it. Another thing I try to tell people is don’t put a link to your home page on your home page. You are just wasting space.
Next you want to have all your pages pointing to other pages on your site. If you have a small site with 10 pages or less you can just have each page point to each page. If you have more you will need to pick a number of links you want on each page. Then you will need to make sure that each page has that many internal links plus the link from the front page or directory page. So if your number is 6 then each page should have at least 7 internal links. Be sure that the links to each page have the right anchor text for that page.
This will give you the power of keyword rich anchor text to help boost each pages rank. It will also make sure that when you do rank for something you will get a second indented result in the SERPS because you have that keyword on at least 2 pages. It is good to organize the links into groups so that you also get more keyword density on the page that has the links.
Nice article. Keep it up.
Wow… I am going to my site to implement this idea immediately! Thanks! I can’t believe I had never thought of this.
Hi David,
Thanks again for this great article. This article sheds some ligh upon internal linking methods, but I still have some questions unanswered. Can you please shed some more ligh on these areas.
1. Does it help to have all links in sites have the domain name in them or not? Some sites use relative urls instead of the domainname.com/page1.html etc. I’m not sure if this is clear, but I’m not sure if this matters and if so how important is it?
2. Does having links to home.php or the domainname.com and duplicating content, does that really pose a penalty and does it really matter that much?
3. What about redirects in apache permanent that redirect from http://www.domainmame.com to domainname.com and vice versa, are those good ideas to do or not and will this boost page rank and rankings in the search engines?
4. Some people use nofollow tags and you say not to. I’m confused as to what nofollow does to engines and also does it stop pagerank being passed? Some people warned about buying text links that do not pass pagerank. How do you stop pagerank from being passed?
Thanks
Amir
Google can deal with all 3 of those things without giving you a penalty. The problem is that your letting Google made decisions. You never want to let Google guess. As an SEO you want to present everything to Google the way you want it. You want all links to go to only one version of each page. If you have links going to diff url’s of the same content you are not getting the full affect of your links. All links to home page content need to be 301 redirected to the main version that has the most links.