Webmaster Tips to Improve Link Structure of Your Website

Internal linking structure is commonly known as website navigation and it is an important part of a Search Engine Optimization. Internal linking is a fundamental requirement for your end user and search engine spiders. Logical and intuitive navigation helps a visitor to find their way around your website easily and also helps to increase your response rates like enquiry calls, sales etc.
The internal link structure of a website allows spreading the link power of a website's home page to the individual pages of website.

For an example, if 1000 other websites link to your home page, then your home page has a certain link power that can be spread to the other pages of your site. If you link to 50 pages on your home page then each page will get 1/50 of the link power. If you link to only 10 pages, then each page will get much more link power passed to it (1/10).

In this way, link power and rankings are directly proportional to each other so the more link power a page receives, there will be more chances for that page to get higher rankings on major search engines. Internal link structure of a website allows it to direct search engines to the most important pages of the website.

A well-constructed and coded linking structure helps search engine spiders to easily access your site. But often webmaster do not pay attention on internal linking structure of their website which sometimes creates problem in indexing by search engine spiders and also makes it harder to get rank well on major search engines.

How to improve Internal Link Structure of a website:

Improving or editing your internal link structure may sure help to get higher rankings for your home page as well as other pages of your website. Here you can find some useful tips that can help you to improve the rankings of your website:

1. Accessibility: Always make sure that all important web pages of your site are easily accessible from home page and not away more than two clicks from your home page. Search engine spiders also prefer pages to visit or index which are just few clicks away from home page.

2. Relevancy: Relevancy is also so important to get higher rank in search results so always link to the pages for which you want to have higher rankings from all pages of your website that are relevant to that page. It will be better idea to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.

3. Keywords In Anchor Text: Make sure that you have added your targeted keywords in the anchor text of your internal links to pages for which you want to have higher rankings on major search engines and also remember to you use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted.

4. Add No-follow Attribute: Add no-follow attribute to all links that are not so important for purpose of search engine rankings. For example, web pages that includes terms and conditions, privacy policy etc. of your website are not have much importance for ranking so its better to add a no-follow attribute to them as these pages have not any need to be listed in search engines.

It will be better to have fewer links on a page as it increases the importance of a single link to the other on your site. You can also remove all unnecessary links from your page if possible.

5. Use Robots Meta Tag: Using robots.txt file or the robots meta tag can also help to improve ranking as it help to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. If search engines don't crawl your pages which are not so important then there will be great possibility that they can take a closer look to the pages for which you want to be ranked well on major search engines.

6. Check For Errors: It is also so important that your all internal links should be error free so always check your website that it doesn't contain any errors like 404 not found errors etc. and if found then immediate correct them or redirect these links to the most appropriate pages. You can use online web tools like Xenu to check errors in internal links of your website.

After optimizing the link structure of your website, you can start link building campaigns to get more and more quality links for your website that will help to get higher rank to your site.
If you have a well optimized internal and external link structure, then it will be hard to any other website to beat your site in terms of ranking.