How important is strong internal linking?

Sure, we’ve been told over and over again by insightful SEO Advisors that your company’s website needs to link up to other reputable sites.   Incoming links are essential to realizing better keyword rankings on the major search engines, including Google and Yahoo.  How about your internal links?  How important is it to create and cultivate a strong internal link structure?  What type of role can be played by links leading to pages within your own website, in terms of enhancing that site’s Google PageRank value?

It turns out that proper internal link structuring is not only important, but actually essential to your website and to any SEO strategy.  This is particularly so for those sites which are just getting off the ground or to domain names which have been recently bought and launched.   A strong internal linking mechanism helps to bring in those incoming links from other sources and to “bleed” the Google PageRank (“link juice”, if you will) to the other pages within the site.   Thus you can better realize high search engine rankings not only for your index or home page, but also for the pages of secondary importance containing valuable information.

In addition to enhancing SEO efforts and helping to achieve higher engine rankings, strong internal linking is also user-friendly.  Good internal links make it much easier for site visitors to move around.  If your site has a bunch of “click here” links to secondary pages, you are probably doing it an injustice; visitors are not only finding out next to nothing about the linked page – they are less inclined to click along and dig deeper into your site.   Not only that, those “click here” links aren’t exactly spider-friendly; since they are so generic in description, they leave out relevant and important information for the search engine spiders when they do decide to crawl the site.   The less information on your site that the spiders find, the lower your site’s ranking will be; this reality definitely applies to “click here” and other non-descriptive links.

Another way in which site set-up is problematic for internal linking concerns your site’s bells and whistles.  These include the flash-based and image-based navigation tools which many sites employ as the main method for visitors to browse.  Search engines still prefer simpler site designs, with keyword-rich text links allowing for easy spider indexing.   If you do decide to stick with the flash and/or image navigation, then be sure to complement this with an additional text link navigation menu at the top or bottom of each website page, preferably the top.  You also have to ensure that you correlate text links with keywords in the title pages of all linked pages.  If the first words in the title page are Item ABC, all incoming test links to that page would also read Item ABC.  This type of consistency enables both users and spiders know what each page is all about.  Always keep in mind the needs of the site visitors when designing your text navigation; in other words, it should be as user-friendly as possible and try to make the visitor as satisfied as possible.  Visitor satisfaction will lead to positive site referrals, and that only helps!

Adding a sitemap link to your text link navigation menu will also promote better internal linking.  You do not always know where those visitors are coming from; make sure that, regardless of where they arrive from or how they get there, both visitors and spiders can crawl to every single one of those pages.  Sitemaps should also be in line with both Google and Yahoo, so you would do well to confirm with both engines that they are indexing each of the pages.  Having your pages indexed in Google and Yahoo does not necessarily mean you will get high keyword rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages, but at the very least it provides you with valuable information on the dynamics of your site’s internal links and which external website pages are linked to your internal pages.. 

Another way to ensure better internal linking is to actually restrict the number of incoming and outgoing links to only those relevant to your site, since too many of them can dilute the link value being spread to your own internal pages. 

Employing descriptive internal links and strong text link navigation will enhance your site’s internal linking mechanisms.  Adding an informative sitelink map to your text link menu, limiting incoming and outgoing links to site-relevant ones and having your pages indexed in Google and Yahoo will make your internal links even more potent!   Good internal linking is really important, but the good news is that with some honest work it is not that hard to do!