Internal Link Building Tips to Remember
Linking building and site structure go hand in hand. You might be tempted to only spend your time on building your external link structure but it is also important to not forget about spending time doing something about your internal site structure as well.
Key Areas of Your Internal Link Building Include:
Footer Links: Your footer is an amazing way to really increase your internal link building. There are many ways you can approach constructing your bottom navigation and it depends on how your site is built but a bottom footer with links to your important pages is a great way to strengthen your internal link building.
This is an example of our footer. You can see we have links pointing to all of our most important pages throughout our entire website. This helps drastically with our internal link building efforts.
Interlinking Pages: Different websites have different ways they achieve this but interlinking pages also strengthens your internal link building. For example, if you have a product or service that is similar to another product or service you can hyperlink a keyword on one page and link directly to the other page of the similar product. This is not only good for internal link building but also user experience. You have now created a quick and easy pathway for a reader to use in order to find another useful service.
Blog: Launching a blog embedded in your website is also a nice way to interlink your website. As you write blog posts and those blog posts bounce around in the search results you can embed hyperlinked keywords to other important blog posts and also service pages in your posts. This could also help your external link building because if someone takes a post you wrote and spreads it through their social channels that could build up new one way links pointing to your website.
Internal link building is very important to the overall success of your website and your long term SEO efforts. Remember that your website is the foundation to everything you do online so make sure your website is 100% efficient.
18 Responses to “Internal Link Building Tips to Remember”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Great internal linking tips. In on page optimization, internal linking is also important. Now a days, links with keywords in top section of the header also popular in SEO for improving the internal link popularity. Good article.
My view is that if a page within a site doesn’t have internal or enough internal links to it then you yourself have determined it to be of minimal importance therefore a search engine will too.
I think this works in the same way external links do and provides that importance for those individual pages within a site. As usual though it is advised not to over do this either as it can have a negative effect.
Just a point on footer links, this can be a great way to enhance localised optimisation by creating a small ‘areas covered’ section in the footer which links to main town / city areas you are targeting.
Thanks freelance, glad this article helped give you more information about internal link building…
imain nav has more impact than footer or sidebar navs, but yea i agree – design your landing pages and on page then think about your in bound links…
its worth looking into your out bound links too – linking to authoritative sources from your sites is indeed a good idea too.
good post thanks for the read!
I’ve been seeing a lot of conflicting info about the value of footer links. Marc Lyne over at Search Engine Land has noted that homepage footers may even carry penalties (http://searchengineland.com/9-seo-realities-47300). It’s not the only time I’ve seen that theory discussed in the last week. It makes sense to me since in some cases, like if you have a top nav and a side nav, that footer is going to be the third instance of those links on that page, and that may look spammy to the bots.
Hi Rebecca,
Thanks for reading and your comment.
I suggest a footer navigation to help your internal link building, but not in a spammy manner. Just like in the article that you referenced, make it part of the site. The rule of thumb that I always use and recommend to our SEO clients is to create the footer to help enhance the user flow and experience on the site. This is especially true on sites that have top level and side navs. I think the search bots could see the links as spam, when they are just links with no user flow…
Thanks again for reading!
Nick
Thanks for the post, I am quickly learning the power of good site architecture and internal linking. I realized that our site does not footer links and our most important links in the top nav. is in flash and not being indexed! We have some work to do, so thanks for the info.
HI Jared,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Unfortunately, as good as Flash looks, often times it is very tough on SEO especially if it your bottom site footer – no help with your internal link building efforts there!
Thanks again & Take Care,
Nick
great tips for internal linking. I have still som work to do on my site with the footer linking. I have also heard that it could have som negative effect if it is to spammy…
Hi Christian,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Exactly the key is to create your footer so it is not spammy and actually helps the visitor/user experience of your website.
My strategy is easy K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid) -Over complicating anything keeps your readers confused and repeating links too many times may even seem insulting and repetitive to your visitors. Keep your visitors happy by keeping your links highly visible and easy to access and most of all make them easy to understand where they go to.
Use pictures for internal linking also and add alt tags .
I have found an abundance of footer links do slow down a sites page load speed . 2-4 links seem ok though.
Have a great day.
Mark D.
Great post on internal linking tips, i suppose this can have a positive and negative affect in terms of SEO I think the key is not to be spammy and keep it relevant to your industry
Hi Mark,
Thanks for reading and your comment!
Interesting point about more than 4 internal links slowing down the page load time, I have not heard of this before, but I will look into it further!
Thanks & Take Care,
Nick
I love your site.
Every single article seems to give me yet more knowledge SEO related.
Now all I need is the time to implement it all….
Thank you so much Nick.
Keep up the good work!!!
Jay Rowden – Photographer
Thanks for the Advice on the footer column, which we now intend to implement in order to assist our readers to navigate our site.
Thanks folks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
One of the projects I have undertaken is to link from blog post to blog post. It captures more audience that way and extends your brand.
Rob
Hi Rob,
That is so true! Many people often tend to forget about how important it is to truly build a solid brand.
Thanks for reading!
Take Care,
Nick