Internal Linking To Satisfy Search Engine Optimization And Your Visitors

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 27 of March , 2008 at 2:28 am

There are often conflicting opinions when it comes to internal linking and site layout. Back in February we wrote a post on internal links using a tiered structure. I have also read articles that state, amongst other things, that ’sidebar links are actually harmful to your site when it comes to search engine spidering’.

I am not going to argue with the last statement, rather, I believe you can optimize your internal links to to get the most benefit from a search engine whilst still publishing a site that is easy for your visitors to navigate.

A quick recap of the February article. Building a 3 tiered page structure where you have a ‘home’ page as tier one, dedicated pages A, B and C as tier two and sub pages on each of the dedicated pages, A1, A2, A3 etc. The tiered approach sees links to pages A, B and C only on the home page. Each dedicated page would then cross link to its own sub pages. The sub pages would not link from the home page. Thats the design in a simple nutshell.

If, as some Search Engine Optimization experts state, linking from a sidebar for as well as from within a pages content may harm your site you are left in a quandary. Your site is well optimized and appears in the top five results for keyword searches. You are receiving a ton of traffic from those searches. The least you can do is make easy for those visitors to navigate through your site with clear and easy to understand menus.

Sidebar or menu links are not worth a lot when it comes to Search Engine Optimization practices. Linking from the content is worth far more. The simple solution is to include a side bar or menu system with links leading to your A, B and C pages. If you include the noFollow tag on each of these links then the search engines are not going to follow them.

By restricting the movement of the search engine spider the only links with relevance will be the links withing the articles. The nofollow and noindex tags can be very useful when it comes to controlling what areas of your site you want followed and indexed. This includes areas like site wide links that may clash with more important in content links.

Category: Internal Linking

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg

No comments yet.