Internal linking when done correctly can have a massive impact to your SEO campaign. Not so long ago Page Rank sculpting was all the rage and was at the forefront of most SEO’s internal linking strategy. Although the game has since changed there are still some aspects to consider that will help make your site interlinking that bit more efficient.
1. Link Positioning
It has been widely accepted that search engines segment pages whereby they break up a web page into parts and place different weight on various regions of the page. A post from David Harry way back in Jan 2009 explores this aspect in great detail and is worth revisiting. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines also state that they work “hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices
that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content”. So taking this into account you would be best off placing your vital links on white space sections of your pages for maximum impact.
2. Number of Links on a Page
Webmaster Guidelines state that you should “keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)”. More than this and the search engines may struggle to crawl the whole page due to the 100 Kb size limitation and as Matt Cutts puts it could cause search engines to “truncate the page and [not] index the entire page”
Top this off with Page Rank being spread too thinly and you can see why it is important to pay attention to the number of links on a page. You have to ask yourself what links are necessary and it is also worth stripping out any duplicates. Most importantly following on from point 1 you should place your most vital links in the optimal places for maximum impact i.e. embedded in content towards the top of the page.
3. First Link Counts
This area is of particular interest to ecommerce sites however it is not exclusive to this field. Search engines put weight on the first link it sees to a particular page and ignores any others pointing to the same page. This creates a problem for ecommerce sites where they commonly use images to link to products or subcategories before the descriptive text link which is usually positioned below the image. Take into consideration that search engines read a page from top to bottom in the source code the first link they come across is an image meaning that the keyword-rich anchor text link does not get counted!
4. Usability
However although link placement is important you should never jeopardize usability. There are numerous fixes and work arounds that can help make your site more optimal without changing the layout of your pages (such as absolute positioning with CSS). At the end of it all you want to achieve your goal of generating much needed conversions and so good usability is an absolute must.
So there you have it, a quick guide to internal linking intelligently on your site…