Importance Of Internal Link Building
Monday, September 7th, 2009I know that some people are under the misconception that link building just means building links from external sites to your own. They may or may not be all that sure why this is important but they know that is must be important because everyone tells them to do it. Learn about Unique Article Wizard. Discover Web Traffic Machines.
Everyone is right but external link building isn’t the only kind of link building you should be concerned with. Internal link building is important too, maybe not quite as important as those external links but even that is debatable. In case you aren’t familiar with this terminology then an internal link is one that links one of your pages to another one of your pages on the same site.
If you want some confirmation that maybe I am just not making this stuff up, check out your Google Web Master tools dashboard and click on one of your sites. If you look at the menu on the left then you will see one marked links. Click on it and read what you see……Internal and External links are tracked in Google WMT so it must have some purpose right?
You bet it does….so let’s take a look.
Google Spiders - Internal links connect pages to each other and help the spiders find their way around your site. The more easily the spider finds your other pages then the better.
Anchor Text - The anchor text that you link to each page with is like a road sign for Google. It tells Google what that page is about and Google uses anchor text to determine relevancy etc as we have already discussed. Choose your anchor text wisely and make sure it is a keyword you are trying to rank for on that page.
Visitor Traffic - Readers love checking out links. If they hit one of your pages and like what they read then links to other pages or similar articles might keep them on your site long enough for them to find a product they want to buy.
Authority - Google assigns authority (PR) to pages based on the number and quality of links. Most sites have 95% of their external links pointed to the homepage. You can transfer some of that authority by deep linking to pages inside your site. The more links to every page on your site, the better. Learn Link Building with Social Bookmarking!
Indexing - Google will usually only index about 60-80% of the pages on your site because they find no value on some pages. If you build links internally to all of your pages then you will increase the number of pages indexed and that means more content to attract search engine visitors.
These are only some of the reasons why you should link internally on your sites. If you don’t buy into it by now then nothing I am going to say will convince you. The question is how to do it properly.