Using Internal Links to Boost Rankings
Internal linking is an important, but often overlooked step in the search engine optimization process. While having only internal links pointing to a page is not going to earn you a top position ranking for any ultra-competitive keyword, it could be enough to drive you to number one for long-tail keywords and less competitive terms. So let's take a look at the different methods you can use to point internal links to your web pages and boost your rankings.
Navigational (Menus)
Navigational links are included in the menus found at the top of your site, on the left or right hand side, and the footer of each page. These links appear on hundreds or thousands of pages of your site giving you a lot of keyword rich anchor text for a specific page, but you also have to think about the user. Don't stuff links in the menu that they are not going to find relevant.
One of the problems with navigational links are that you are limited in how many you can use. Obviously, you don't want every single page on your site to link to every other one. Unless you have a really small site you would run out of room quickly. Most of your navigational links should point to your category or tier two pages using the keyword anchor text you are really wanting to target for that page.
If you are using relational menus you can change the anchor text used in your navigation on the different menus used for each category. This will give you a boost for any slight variations of the keyword, but you have to be careful when using this technique. You don't want to make a drastic change and confuse the user.
Context (Within the Content)
Contextual links are included in the body of the content that you write. You can use these links to direct the reader to more information about a subject or to anything else that's relevant. I have found a single contextual link is given more weight than an individual menu link.
It's important to make the contextual links appear naturally in your content. You don't want to keyword stuff your content just to give yourself a chance to link to a page using a certain anchor text.
If used the right way contextual links can provide a big boost to your site. Think of Wikipedia. They do a massive amount of internal linking across their site and as a result they rank very highly for a wide variety of keyword terms. They do not stuff these keywords into the text, the author writes naturally and links to relevant pages wherever it fits.
What is Anchor Text
If you have been optimizing your site for the search engines, you probably already know what anchor text is, but for the complete beginner who sees this term all over SEO articles it can be kind of confusing. Basically anchor text is the clickable text of a link. For example, if I link to my article covering on-page optimization the HTML code looks like this:
<a href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/on-page-website-optimization/">on-page optimization</a>
and the anchor text is "on-page optimization."
Importance
Why is anchor text so important? Because the words used in the anchor text go a very long way towards getting the page being linked to ranked for the keywords used as the anchor text. The example link above will give a slight boost to my page in the rankings for "on-page optimization".
For competitive terms, a single link is not going to give you a big boost. Competitive terms can have hundreds, if not thousands, of links pointing to the top pages for the given keyword.
Internal & External
It's not only important to link to your own pages using the anchor text you want to rank for, but you also need links from other sites. In fact, links from external sites are going to be given more weight, because it is easy for you to create pages and send links to your own page using whatever anchor text you want. In theory, links from other people's sites are tougher to earn and thus deemed more trustworthy.
Use Variations
It is important to mix up the anchor text that you use to point to your pages. If 100% of your external links are pointing to a page with the same anchor text, it looks spammy. I'm not entirely sure if there are filters set up to catch this type of search engine gaming or not. It seems likely to me that there are, but either way it's not a good idea. You want to rank for every possible combination of the anchor text, plus any modifiers that could be used to describe the page so mixing up the anchor text to your page makes a lot of sense.
For example if you have a page that sells "men's hats" you might also want to rank for "hats for men." By driving anchor text to the page with a variety of terms, you can rank for different variations.
What the experts do is drive enough anchor text to rank on the first page for several related keywords, then take a long hard look at their analytics. They check to see what keywords are driving the most traffic and what converts the best. Those are the keywords that take top priority. The answers are not always as obvious as they seem and can lead to a more efficient use of resources going forward.
Relational Menus
If you are using the same menu on every single page of your site (a global navigational menu) then you are pushing a lot of link juice to the pages you are linking to. However, what if you could instead redirect some of that PageRank to your tier three pages in a user-friendly way? Not only would you see a boost in the rankings of these pages, but it is also a very user friendly way to show related content the visitor might be interested in.
What I do is use relational menus. I call it "relational" because depending on the category of the piece of content the user is currently on, the menu will change.
For example, on this site I use a right-hand menu structure. On the homepage and all of my category pages I list the different categories. However, if a visitor clicks down to read a pice of "Search Engine Marketing" content the right-hand menu changes to show links to my most popular and important posts pertaining to SEO. What this does is increase the PageRank that is pushed to these pages, enabling them to rank higher in the search engine results.
Other webmasters who use this trick also try to block the links to other category pages, thus preserving and pushing more PageRank to the tier three pages. However, I leave the links to my other category pages as well. For me, these pages serve as landing pages for highly competitive keywords so I still want to push as much link juice as I can to them.
If you try to block link juice from passing through your links you have to use javascript or other technical tricks of the trade. It's easy to screw up. If you do mess something up, you will be doing yourself more harm than good.
In WordPress I use this simple trick to display relational menus. On the template that shows your posts find the call to include your menu. It will look something like this:
<?php
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");
?>
You want to replace that code with something like:
<?php
if ( in_category('keyword-strategy') ) { include(TEMPLATEPATH."/keywordsidebar.php");}
else if ( in_category('search-engine-marketing') ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/seosidebar.php");
} else if ( in_category('social-media-marketing') ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/socialsidebar.php");
}
else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");
}
?>
In place of "keyword-strategy" you will want to include the slug of a category on your site. Obviously name the sidebar something specific for each category of menus you want to include. You can do this with as many categories as you have on your site, just keep adding "else if" statements to include them.
If the category related to your post is not in your list, the default is used. If you select more than one category, the one that shows up first in your if statement is displayed.
Homepage Linking & Navigation
Once you have learned how to organize the content on your site you need know a little bit about how to internally link your pages together. Above all else, you want to make things easy on your users so set up your navigation to make it easy for them to get where they want to go.
With this article I am going to focus on linking for the search engine spiders. You will be designing your link structure to get more of your pages indexed and to focus more link juice on your main pages.
When you are trying to build up your important pages there are two things to consider: limit the number of outgoing links on that page and increase the number of pages linking in to that page. Here are four ways to do that.
1. Combine Your Overhead Pages
Every site has some standard fluff pages that they need to include but do not need to show up in the search engine rankings. These can include a privacy policy, terms of service, contact us, earnings disclaimer, etc. Instead of wasting valuable link juice pointing to an individual page for each, create a single page with all of this information and use named anchors to point users directly to the specific section they are looking for. In my PageRank sculpting article I describe in detail how this is done.
2. Control Your Outbound Links
The last thing I want you to do is create a site that is a "black hole." These are sites that link juice enters but can never, ever escape because the site will never link to anyone else. You should freely link to other sites that provide valuable information to your readers.
What I am suggesting is that you avoid linking to other sites from your homepage, category, tag, and archive pages (the pages you are driving a lot of link juice to). It's easy to take the links out of your summaries (the short versions of your post that display on these pages). This will keep your PageRank flowing to your own internal content while also allowing you to link out freely from inside of your articles.
3. Use a SiteMap Wisely
I use an archive page that links to all of my categories and sub-categories. If your category archives are large enough where you have several pages of archives, you want to link to each of these pages from your sitemap. This ensures that every piece of content on your site is only three clicks away from the hompage. By linking to the sitemap from my homepage it increases the chances that the spiders will crawl every single page of my site, leaving no piece of content so far from the homepage that it is forgotten by the spiders.
You should limit the number of links on this page to 100. The search engines don't crawl an infinite number of outgoing links on a page, they normally cut it off around 100 so if you have a large number of categories, create additional sitemap pages.
4. Limit Global Navigation Links
Most sites have some sort of global navigation menu. This menu is the same on every single page of the site. If you are going to have one of these, you want to limit the number of links in the menu as much as possible. This conserves pagerank on every page of the site and pushes more to the few pages you link to from the menu.
Another tactic you can use is to change the navigation as users dive deeper into the site. For example, on this site if someone clicks on the "Search Engine Marketing" category and then clicks through to a piece of content, the menu changes from what's on the homepage to my "SEO" menu listing the important pieces of SEO content I have written.