Internal Linking - SEO Tips
Every website is in effect a “mini Internet” it has all the features that are found within the much larger “real Internet” there are pages, content and all the other features you see as you browse the web. On the web site owners use search engine optimisation (seo) to ensure their site ranks well within search engines. What if we take a look closer and work within one website to in effect use internal site optimisation.
What you should think about is what pages do you want to perform well within your site and what pages do not really matter. For many sites the homepage will be very important. Another thing to remember is that a lot of users will arrive on internal pages so you should make it nice and easy for them to reach your homepage. Examples of pages that do not matter so much are your terms of service, privacy policy and other purely information pages. Pages that you should pay close attention to are your pages that actually contain product information or information about the services you offer.
The first thing you need to do is determine what pages on your site you class as important. I will use for example purposes a site that sells “pot plants” The site contains 6 pages. Homepage, about us page, price list, terms of service, privacy policy and a products page.
The first page we will think about is the homepage. Ideally this will be the first page that a user will see so it must contain enough information to let the user know as much about the site as possible. It should also be clutter free and to an extent optimised for the sites keywords. What could happen is that the homepage will link to each of the other internal pages but I would recommend against this. You need to consider the importance of each page and determine the linking priority of each page based on this. For example at this point the terms of service is not all that important. What is important is working towards getting a sale. The page that has the highest priority would in this case be the “products page” What could happen in this case would be to have some very brief “teaser” information about the products with a link to the “product information” page. This will maintain the flow through the site. Another page that is fairly important would be the “price list” page. In this case I would tend to link from the price list from within the products page. The products page has more priority than the price list so there is no real use in having a link to prices from the homepage.
In terms of the about page and the terms of service page each of these pages are every low priority. You may choose to link to only one of these pages from your homepage. Personally I would link to the “about us” page from the homepage and use this page to give the user as much info about your company. You can also explain a little about your products or services and have a link going to your “products page” within this page I would also have a link pointing to your “terms of service” and “privacy policy” page there really is no point in linking to these pages from an important page.
What you can do is point links from your minor pages to your more important pages try wherever possible to divert your user away from these pages to your more important pages.
One goal you should always aim for is to have your homepage no more than two clicks away from any page on your site. You can easily reduce this to one click by having a logo on each of your pages that links back to your homepage. Your homepage is without a doubt your most important page so it should be the easiest page to get to.
This method of controlling your traffic flow is not only useful from a user point of view. It will also help out when your site is spidered by search engines. It will make it easier for them to find your important pages and will most certainly give more importance to your highly valued pages. This method also works co control the flow of Page Rank within your site by assigning more Page Rank to your more important pages. It also ensures that a steady flow is passed back to your homepage from each and every page on your site.
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