Interlinking and SEO
Interlinking is very crucial to your SEO strategy. It means how you link to your inner pages, the web pages residing under your domain. These links could include:
- Your navigation text links
- Your breadcrumb links
- Subject area links
- Individual page links
You can use all these links to strategically increase your keyword density and improve your search engine rankings.
Navigation links
Some people are dead against using images as your navigation links but if you use the ALT attribute of the image tags and use the right text, it’s same as using the anchor text. But the point is, you can use your navigation to create the right keyword density by using appropriate anchor text. Through your navigation, if you link to your web designing services page by using “Web Designing Services” as your anchor text it is much better than simply using an image without the ALT attribute.
Breadcrumb links
Breadcrumb links are navigation links that appear at the top of the page as your visitor first clicks in a category, then a sub-category and then a link. For example, view this breadcrumb navigation: Web Designing >> Free Web Templates >> Template Name. All the expressions in the above mentioned breadcrumb navigation contain relevant keywords.
Subject area links
Content websites having information on varied subjects can use those subject names as anchor text and increase link-based SEO relevance. For instance a website publishing SEO information can have interlinking as a separate subject and then link to that section from various pages with interlinking as the anchor text.
Individual page links
These are the most important links in terms of interlinking because they directly link to the pages. These can be your main navigation pages being referred to from your inner pages, or some support pages that don’t need a place in the navigation scheme but supply small chunks of information as and when needed.
The interlinking helps the search engine spiders navigate your website and evaluate it in a realistic manner, according to the keywords and phrases you use as anchor texts.
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Great tips. Now if only I can convince my clients that using these best practices are very important.
Good sound SEO tips, if any clients don’t agree point them to W3C because they really make use of inter-page linking using good Anchors.
Yes Gary,
I think it also helps to avoid “abandoned” and duplicate content - to a certain level on the blog/site.
I like this advice. The thing that I would say is useful was the link anchor text, and interlinking pages. I actually didn’t know that spiders use the links to navigate the site, I thought it just ripped through the site. XP
- Ryan
It’s either search engine or users like you and me, interlinking always help to get best out of it. Although search engines keep on changing their algorithm most of the time, but still remains with this concept. So as I think it’s better to stick and upheld the interlinking concept while marking promotional strategies.