4 Ways to Really Make Your Internal Links Work Hard For You
*The following is the guest post by Duncan*
External hyperlinks are great for SEO, but it’s the internal variety that you can manipulate to your heart’s content and optimise for search engines. Given this level of control you have over your own links, are you sure they are working as hard as they can be for you? If they aren’t complying to the advice below, then chances are they are slacking and need to be given 100 push-ups right now!
Keywords in Anchor Text
This might seem like an obvious one for some people, but you would be amazed just how many sites don’t think to include keywords in their internal links. This one of the major factors that search engines look at when trying to determine what a page is all about, so as long as you are not compromising on usability, you should get those keywords in your links. For example, let’s say you have a site offering corporate hospitality that covers all the major sporting events. Rather than link to the Superbowl page with the text “Superbowl”, it would probably be much better for you to use the term “Superbowl hospitality”, or “Superbowl corporate hospitality”. Don’t go crazy though and starting linking to your homepage using the term “corporate hospitality events” or “premium client entertaining” etc, as this will just start to confuse users.
Important Links Moved Up The Source Order
Many people don’t think to move their most important internal links up the order in the source code. Search engines tend to crawl the links at the top of the page first, so it stands to reason that the first elements should be the most important ones. Let’s say for example your category page links appear in the source code below your ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, ‘RSS’, ‘settings’ links etc. Whist these may be important to users, it is unlikely you want to pass power to these pages for ranking purposes and so you can move them down the source order. There is no need to change the look of the page, just use JavaScript to move elements about. Matt Cutts even hints at the fact links found in different parts of a page might be treated differently by Google:
Text Links Above Images
Tying into the idea above, when linking out to the same place twice or more from a single page, always put your most valuable link first in the source order, as this will be one search engines pay attention to. By ‘most valuable’ I mean most search engine friendly, which is often a key-worded text link. This is most often a problem for ecommerce sites as displayed by the product screen shot below.
Here there are 3 links all going to the same product page. First is the image link, second the product title link and third the price also links to the product page. On this occasion the image link appears first in the source code and is likely to be the one that search engines crawl. However, we really want search engines to look at the keywords in the product title text link, so it would be more beneficial to move this above the image link in the source code.
Links Limited to Around 100 Per Page
It is has been stated in the Google Webmaster guidelines for a long time now that you should limited the amount of links (internal or external) to around 100 per page. The reasoning for this suggestion has changed a little however since it first appeared in the guidelines. Originally, Google’s crawlers could only index around 100k of a webpage, which they roughly equated would be around 100 links. However, as Google has become more power they can index far greater amounts of data.
The argument they give for still including the 100 link rule in their suggestions is a usability one. They say that people don’t like pages full of links and it is more ‘user-friendly’ to break the links up into separate pages. There is however clear SEO benefits to keeping the number relatively low as otherwise the link power of the page will be diluted too much. Roughly speaking, the link juice of a page gets divided by the number of links heading out from it. Therefore, if you have 1000 links on page, each of those linked to pages will receive very little (relative) power indeed. It is usually advisable to try and spread links over more pages or better yet categorise them onto strong, stand-alone pages to improve user and search engine friendliness.
Duncan is an online marketing expert at a Sussex-based SEO company. He blogs about topics from social media to link building and content optimisation.
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29 Responses to “4 Ways to Really Make Your Internal Links Work Hard For You”
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Great tip on keeping the links above the fold. You can optimize your images even further by having your keyword as the image name as well as the alt text.
wow such a usefull article, i have site and its not getting good trrafic,but after appyling these things, my website ranked high in google
Agreed with the previous comments; very great information!
Keep up the good work
Thanks for sharing! Internal linking is the best way to link up our articles in our blog. It might help us to increase the traffic too.
Your point and tidbit that “search engines tend to crawl the links at the top of the page first” is good to know and I was not aware of that source order factor. Most of the sites that I have put together has always had the links on the bottom or to the side just for easier navigation for the end user but after reading this you make a good point and it seems once again I need to do some more updating! Thanks for the info.
I agree internal links play an important role for getting links crawled and considered as backlink. Thanks for the update.
such as a grat articles … very useful information
I totally agreed with you. I read your article its has good information for us. We should try to get internal links. We can get more importance and ranking through Internal links.
This is very interesting indeed about moving the text link and anchor text above the image. Keyword rich anchor text is better for sure than an image as a link, even if it has an alt tag and a file name with the keywords in them.
Internal Links really helpful for a website. A well optimized website really required effective strategy. Nice info
Wow, thanks for your great information. I am impressed by reading your article. these points are very useful. this site is looking very nice. thanks for sharing this!!!!!!!!!!
Very neatly explained post on importance of internal linking. Following these basic tips would help our sites internal linking structure proper & good search engine results
Great article. Internal linking always seems to get a little forgotten, so it’s nice to see such a great article explaining how to do it correctly.
@Shalini, No doubt a great article shared here. Read more http://myearnmoneyblog.com/wordpress-how-to/increase-internal-links-of-your-blog-with-these-wordpress-content-related-plugins/
There are many little SEO tips people seem to forget to add in. Usually they focus way too much on the more obvious aspects; i.e. page titles, meta tags, headers etc. What they need to remember is every little really does help and if you may have done what your nearest competition hasn’t then you’ll be in good stead. A great way to get your linkage in the page source is to add title and alt tags to images and domain links etc
this is google www.google.com
Very useful article thanks for the tips.
This is a great article and I picked up some really useful stuff here. Reminded me to put the links I want Google to rank higher higher up in the source code.
Thanks for sharing
M
This article is great and really worth while. I have never known that there is a limit of 100 links per page, i thought google indexing was more powerfull than it was and will update very frequently
I have done some of above tips and the result is significant.
This is a very informative article on internal links and how will the internal links does great work for you.
Alot of people forget about internal linking strategies while building their site this is a school boy error as this is the easiest place in the world to get a link.
I admire the valuable information you offer in your articles. I will bookmark your blog and have my children check up here often. I am quite sure they will learn lots of new stuff here than anybody else!
http://www.instanttaxsolutions.com/ – tax attorney
http://ener-uno.net/ – seo specialist
When I first got into SEO I had no idea about internal linking and just focused primarily on external links. Once I wised up and did some internal linking using keywords, I was pleasantly surprised to see a nice boost in my rankings. Definitely worth the effort.
Just bookmarked the blog, amazing information resource.
Great tips ! I test on my page and only first link to the same page is crawled and better don’t use links in images, they are useless in my opinion.
Baz? ?eyler sadece ?a??rt?c? ve bizim için büyük ve karma??k bir s?n?r? varsa, ben ne teknoloji s?n?r bilmiyorum.
Wonderful post. Most people do not know how to make their internal links to work for them. I am sure they will learn quite a lot from this post. Key words in anchor text is very important and can really improve the number of links.
Very informative article. Bookmarked!