Linking pages together can be used to create a ‘flatter’ website that is easier to trawl, but it can also lead to much better search engine rankings because it also makes it simple for Google’s robots to see the best bits of your site.
Read On:
Getting started with internal linking
Constructing a site for Google spiders
SEO: how can you move up the rankings?
So how do you go about linking?
Step 1: Identify your best pages
Before you can plan your internal linking, you’ll need to know which are your most important pages. So, how do you discover your site’s most important pages?
If you’re selling products you can set up Google Analytics to track your sales. You can then find the pages that are generating most revenue (and profit).
If you’re a blogger making money through advertising, you might want to promote the pages that get lots of traffic and clicks on your ads. Again, you’ll find these in Google Analytics.
If you don’t yet have Analytics set up, make that a priority.
Step 2: Link to your site’s most important pages
Once you’ve identified your most important and your most profitable pages, you’ll want to make sure your site structure helps promote them. For most sites the home page is the most powerful page, it’s the page that attracts the most links.
Site navigation is likely to pass link power from the home page through the category pages on to the product pages. Still keeping things simple, let’s assume that our site has 36 links from other sites pointing to our home page.
Let’s use a simple example. Let’s assume that a home page has three links to its category pages. What happens is that each link transmits one third of the link juice from the home page. So, each category page has 12 units of link juice.
And each of those category pages links to three product pages. So, each of the product pages has four units of link juice. Of course, this is a massive oversimplification. But, it helps highlight the problem you face with linking.
So, now let’s say that page three makes a large proportion of the profits. So we’d like to improve its ranking. The site navigation links are passing four units of link juice, but we’d rather it had more.
The solution is to link to the most important commercial pages direct from the home page. So, you’d have internal links from the home page, as before, but you’d also add in a link from within the body copy, direct to this highly successful page.
In this case, the home page still has 36 inbound links. But, now each of the category pages receives one-quarter of the link power – nine units. And the page three also receives nine units of link power. Each of the category pages continues to pass on its link power.
So, most of the product pages receive three units of link juice. But, page three – the super successful page – receives 12 units in total. Which means it’s likely to rank higher in Google’s results pages. And that’s really beneficial for you, because that’s the page that pays your wages.
Step 3: growth
Of course once you start to get more complicated as a business and your site has more and more pages this process gets more powerful, but also a lot more complicated. The key, however – even if you have a really massive super complex site – is to go back to step 1 and identify the most important pages and link them.
While often you can do this to some of the main pages using buttons in the menu bar, you may need to use links in the home page text more judiciously and use those to link to the next set of pages of importance beneath the main ones. Its hard work but ultimately worth it.
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