The Importance of Internal Linking

It is often believed that in SEO the most important links are external links leading to your site. Whilst these are indeed extremely important it is also very important to get the Internal Linking structure of your own site right.

Main Site Navigation

This process begins when you are deciding what keywords to use in the main navigation of your site. It is a good idea to use your most important and most relevant keywords within the main navigation as this is one of the first things the search engines will look at when crawling your site.

However don’t be tempted to try and stuff loads of keywords into your navigation as 1) It looks messy and 2) You can potentially get punished by the search engines.

Website Footer

Another form of Internal Linking that will also help the Search Engines is having a footer that mirrors the main navigation but can also contain a few extra pages that aren’t linked from the main navigation (these are usually pages like Privacy Policy or Terms & Conditions). It is very important however not to be tempted to keyword stuff in this area. I have seen sites where the footer links cover more area than the main content of the page! This again looks messy but will also reduce the value of each individual link.

Internal Text Links

Internal Text Links are links that are placed within the content of a page. When a relevant keyword is used in the content of your site you can turn that word into a link to the relevant part of your site. An example of this would be ‘We are a Web Design company based on the Wirral’ where web design links to the relevant page on our site (yes I know a cheap inbound link to our site on that one!).

And you guessed it, it’s important not to add too many text links as it will look messy and reduce the value of the links.

These steps alone will not boost your site to the top of the rankings, however they are an important part of the overall SEO process and for the time it takes it is definitely worth doing.

SEO, PG Tips