Internal Linking and SEO

How does Internal Linking Helps?

The links coming to your website from outside that is other websites matters a lot. The inbound links help the website and the page in terms of increased weight age for PR calculation. The links received from any external website / source is one part of the overall linking program of your website.

What about the internal links within the website? This is a very important technique for SEO which is ignored by many websites. The more internal linking you have, more suitable your website is for crawling. In fact some improvement in the internal linking, navigation can improve your visibility in search results drastically.
There are few factors which are required for improving internal linking of a website

• Easy to understand sitemap: En easy to understand sitemap can be a well beginning. It is an important element of any good website. It serves two purposes, firstly it can give crawlers a good starting point to crawl all the pages on a website and secondly it can give visitors also a place to start looking for the information they need.
  Tip: While setting up a sitemap, use your internal directory structure to group the links within a heading. This gives a neat, uncluttered site map.

• Footer Links: Footer links are placed at the bottom of the page. This also services two purposes, first it helps the crawlers to crawl the entire site and second it helps the visitors to jump to other page in case the page is very long. They need not to go back to the top of the page to navigate to other pages. I short; it facilitates movement of crawlers and visitors within the website.

• Using Menus: Menus are the best possible tools for navigation. They guide the visitors to the various pages and sections of the website. Similarly the crawlers also follow menus and move around the website. This is the one of the way to facilitate the deep crawling of a website. For this purpose, the menus should be in a readable format for crawlers. Avoid having FLASH menu items as it can confuse the crawlers. Though they can read if but why to make it complex for them. Feed crawlers with easy to understand HTML menus so that they can do their job effortlessly, this is what an objective of SEO is, isn’t it?

Use a judicious mix of the keywords while strengthening the internal linking structure. A good structure helps crawlers to crawl properly and better search engine rankings and it helps visitors too to find the relevant page of your website thus improving sales conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp