Optimization of Internal Linking

Internal linking refers to the links pointing to other pages within your site. Its importance has not valued as much as external links. But well-built internal links help your site rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs) as well as provide a good user experience. Also, its great advantage is that you have the entire control of how to manage them.

Use these tips to write the most efficient internal links both for your site visitors and the search engines.

1) Make the homepage navigation menu as text links. Images, DHTML, and JavaScript navigation menus look fancy and artsy. But thats all about looks and the search engines dont really know how to interpret them. The search engines read web pages rather look at them. If youd like to keep your attractive image and dynamic menu effect, make sure that you have text links to those somewhere in the homepage.

2) Use descriptive anchor texts. Make them different from on another even though they point to the same page.

Anchor text is the visible clickable text in a hyperlink. Anchor texts are considered as keywords that user would use to get to the page. Therefore, its an advantage when the anchor text describes the content of the page. That is, use the keywords and phrase that would represent the page best.

When you refer to your homepage, give different anchor texts to each link instead of saying Homepage all the time.

3) Use nofollow attribute to control which links are more important compared to others. When you add rel=nofollw to a hyperlink, the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN dont count the link in search engine rankings. (There is a debate on Googles actual behavior on this. It is said Google may still count it a little, or soon it will if not now.)

Why to use rel=nofollow?

4) Make the main pages of your website accessible by one or two clicks from your home page. Make them easy to spot by visitors as well. The more clicks it needs, the less important its considered by search engines. The more clicks it needs, the more chances there are for users to leave your site. This is user-friendly and search engine friendly design.

Tags: Ad, Google, optimization, search engine