Part two in our series on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covers the basics of internal linking. If you remember the pages that you created in part one (corresponding to the specific keywords and phrases you are targetting), the next step is to create links from all the other keyword references on all the other pages on your website to those keyphrase landing pages.
This can include keywords that appear in the body of other content but you may also want to consider adding menu items which contain keywords or phrases and are linked to those pages. If you have the ability to set up a "tagging system" to allow you to tag content with keywords and keyphrases you can help associate your site with a wider range of keywords in addition to the main keyphrases you are focusing on.
Essentially what internal linking does is explain to Google and other search engines which pages you consider to be the authoritative pages for the keywords that you link from. Google keeps track of how many incoming links the page has, and which keywords it is linked on. In general, the more links the better (especially if they are linked with the relevant keywords). Google loves it when you can tag items with keywords and gobbles up the results pages that you get when you click on a keyword.
Examples of internal linking on our site:
- In the first paragraph on this page, we are using internal linking to link to the summary page which gathers all content that is tagged with "SEO." We also link to the first edition in this series ("Part 1: Keywords and Keyphrases")
- We have set up "Tag clouds" in the right column on many of our pages. The tag clouds on most of our design pages list different types of design (from web design to print tologos) and the tag clouds on the blog pages list the "free tags" that can be added to designs or blog entries.
- Following up on the example we used in part one, we've combined our results page for tagging items as "Non profit web design" with our keyword landing page. We added a short introduction and all the result list beneath it. The tag cloud links to that page and we've added a small menu item in the footer of the site, all linking back to the target page. (We're currently at position 31 out of 24,200,000 results in a Google search, up three or four positions as some of our more recent changes begin to get crawled.)
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Internal Links