When you read about SEO. Thats Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated or the profession of trying to put a website at the top of the organic search results for any given keyword.
Having just read the first line of this article I have realised just how much jargon we use in this industry and that for the novice, and we were all novices once, it must be somewhat confusing.
So let me simplify. If you have a website it is normally because you have a product or service that you wish to sell to the public. To achieve sales you need people to visit your website. Your visitors are called traffic. The best way to gain traffic is to appear in the organic search results of Google, (and other Search Engines) for search terms that are relevant to your business. For Eample I own a website for Estate Agents in Spain to list their property on a MLS. The Biggest search term for this industry is Spanish Property, which receives about 10x as much traffic as any other search term. Therefore in a perfect world my aim eventually is to reach No 1 position for this keyword. In the interim you must aim to reach a Page 1 position for smaller traffic keywords which are less competitive and more easily achieved. Think of your keyword goals as a Christmas tree with the most competetive as the fairy on the top. The least competitive and most easy to achieve are at the bottom of the tree. There are many more of them to choose from so be selective, but a wide base of keyword terms that bring you a visitor a day is easier to achieve than trying to rank for one term that will bring you a 100 visitors.
Now most articles that you will read will start to talk about the fact that to rank for any given keyword you need to build links pointing at your site from other sites with the keyword you are trying to rank for in the anchor text of your link, (thats the clickable part of the text that sends the visitor to your site) . This is all true. You will read about the need for Directory submissions, writing articles, reciprocal linking strategies and many more ways to gain links from your piers so that you may build your link popularity and get your deserved place on the first page of results for the keywords you have chosen.
I will leave all those noble strategies to other for now and focus on a method of obtaing as many links as you want for yourself without going outside the remit of your own website. Do not get me wrong. All that you read about in-linking is bona-fide and should be persued as part of a multi faceted approach that is necessary for successful placement in the Search Engines. This article is designed however to highlight the importance of internal linking strategy of your own site that can make a great effect on your Search Engine position. It is an overlooked subject and often missed by many site owners. It is often the key to out ranking your competition but also should not be confused with a tradition of spamming the content of your web pages to gain position by stuffung the content with meaningless keywords and links.
Those strategies have pretty much been taken care of by the Search Engines in their algorithms.
When linking your pages internally there are some guidelines to consider.
These include,
The percentage of links pointing at any given page with the same keyword anchor text. If the percentage is too high it may be deemed to be spamming, so always keep your link texts varied leaving the most important keyword links coming from the most important pages of your site.
Use your footer to carry links to your most important pages. That way you are linking your most important pages from every page on your site. These can also be used as a baseline link for a generic keyword creating a good number of links to an important page. If you then link in content links with a more specific target keyword from an internal page you will gain good points for the important keyword along with recognition for the baseline links in your footer.
A final example as this subject will need to be extended later.
If you create a hundred pages of quality content about your site subject or product and you have 1 link in the footer to your homepage. Lets say its a site selling property and your footer link is property homepage. In the text you carry a link for Spanish Property for Sale also to the homepage. You now have 200 links pointing at your homepage with 50% of them tartgeted at your keyword.
If the assumption is correct that Google allows and reads up to 100 internal links on any given page without penalty then you can see that by interlinking your pages in an intelligent manner you could end up in our example with 10 000 links from a 100 good pages of content.
Whilst it is by ne means the only thing to consider, it makes a good start.
