Website Internal Linking Strategy

By having a good internal linking structure in place you also improve your site usability. You guide your visitors to the pages and posts that will enhance their experience which means, of course, that they are more likely to return.

Website Structure And Navigation

This the first part of your internal linking strategy you need to get right. Use the three-tier pyramid structure: a home page linking to tier 2 keyword-focused topic pages which in turn link to tier 3 keyword-rich content pages.

If you can use the keywords and phrases of the tier pages in your navigation menu, so much the better.

Check Each Of Your Pages For Possible Contextual Links

Which relevant, niche-focused words or phrases appear in other pages of your site? Make these links (anchor text) to those pages. As long as the words/phrases appear somewhere on the target page, you can vary the anchor text. What this strategy does is give the search engines an easy way to determine what your site is all about.

Improving Target Page Ranking

By checking Yahoo Site Explorer, you can find out which of your pages have the strongest inbound links. You can then redirect some of their ‘link juice’ to your weaker pages by creating keyword anchor text which points to them.

Internal links may be the poor relation in overall website linking strategy, but spending some time getting them in place will reap dividends for your search engine rankings and will also keep your visitors happy.