How To Use Internal Link Building

Many people know about how getting links to your website from other websites gives you a boost in terms of SEO (search engine optimization). But did you realize that you can actually get similar results with internal link building? The way that your blog or website is set up can have a significant impact on your search engine rankings, especially if you have a site with many different pages. There is a right and wrong way to go about internal linking.

Keep in mind that there are three factors of internal linking that you need to address: site navigation, in-context linking and anchor text.

Site navigation is how your visitor will move through your site. This is the first step in getting your internal link building set up correctly. Basically, you will want to be linking to your best pages from the navigation menu. It doesn’t matter if those pages are main categories or just regular pages. In most cases, you’ll have two navigation menus. One will be for the whole site and the one purpose of this is to show your visitors the main sections of your website. The other navigation menu will be for informational pages such as those that have your contact information, a description of your site, etc.

In-context linking is just what the name says. Links that are within the context of your website or blog’s text and not in a list or navigation bar. Search engines prefer in-context links to link lists so it’s important to make sure that your related posts or web pages are linked to each other through your in-context links. How often you do this depends on how expansive your site is. If you have a relatively small blog or website, you don’t want to be using a lot of inter-linking. Choose the most important keyword phrases and link them to your most important pages. If you do have a larger site, feel free to use this method a little more liberally. Interlinking on a large site has a much greater effect than it does on smaller sites.

Anchor test is also very important for search engine optimization. Many people make the mistake of turning "useless" words into links. For example, you can include the phrase "Click here" and link it to the page you want your readers to be taken to. Or you can use the phrase "Get marketing help here" and link just the words "marketing help" to the page. Marketing help is a much stronger anchor text word to use. Not many people are searching for the term "click here" on the internet. You need to tell the search engines what words are relevant.

If you can keep these three internal link building elements in mind, you can either get started on the right foot with a new blog or website or you can re-structure what you already have online fairly quickly and easily.