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Internal Linking – An
introduction
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The web as they call it is a mesh of links. The wired
world is now being counted for what it is. A Network. The
more your pages are wired or integrated into the overall
web linking architecture, the better it is from search
engine ranking point of view. Google specially thrives on
crawling on links. Its pagerank is a measure of this.
We will, in this article, measure the importance of good
internal linking architecture on Googles pagerank .
When setting up the linking architecture of your site keep
in mind that links are of two kinds:
-Internal links
-External links
Internal links are the constituent elements of the way
your web site is organized. They are the bridges by which
one page of your site connects to the other & more
importantly outlines, which page of your site will connect
to which other page/s.
External links on the other hand are the community tools
by which the online community votes for you by linking to
you. The more popular you get is a function of more
incoming links into your website. This in turn is
interpreted by search engines as a measure of your online
value creation.
In essence, if your pages are orphaned (no one links to
them) or lying isolated within your web site thats not
good news from a pagerank point of view. To enjoy a good
pagerank for the pages it is imperative to have proper
linking amongst various pages within the website as well
as having good quality external links coming into the
page.
A factor to be cognizant of while linking is that one
should focus on quality links & not always quantity.
Consider that, there is a huge difference from a link, to
your page from another page with a good pagerank than a
page from a low pagerank
Internal Linking: A Primer
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Proper internal linking ensures that the web pages are
accessible to search engines & that they are indexed
properly. (This is not to discount the navigational ease
of the end user) A good internal linking structure should
be intuitive as well as functionality driven. That will
benefit everyone.
Internal linking on the other level decides the pagerank
flow within the website. The pages that are linking to
that page get a pagerank benefit from that page. Then it
stands to reason that if the maximum number of pages
linking are internal pages they will retain the maximum
pagerank emanating from that page. This will boost their
ratings as well.
Hence one rule of thumb says that have as many incoming
links to your web page as possible (this will boost the PR
of that page) from outside resources or may be good PR
pages of your site. Try & pass on the benefit of that
page to the other pages of your site by proper
interlinking. Inward looking as it might sound, this makes
lot of good online marketing sense.
External Linking
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External linking on the other hand is more difficult to
control & hence more valued by search engines. This is
what really builds up the PR of the web page. Good quality
(High PR) incoming links are craved by the online
promotion experts all over .
Linking Attribute
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It is always preferable to have a text link rather then a
Graphic/Image link, because in a text link you can use
Keywords as the text on which hyperlink is given (anchor
text). In effect you can make your anchor tag keyword
rich. Anchor tags’ text is a very important criterion in
search engine ranking matrix.
Search engines look at not only how many people are
linking to you, how important they themselves are but also
what they are saying while linking to you. In fact search
engines like Google have gone a step ahead. They not only
look at the anchor tag but also the text surrounding it.
Essentially they are trying to establish the relevance of
that link to your pages content.
If anchor tag is so important & more often that not,
one cannot control what the world says while linking to
you then it is very useful to have internal links speak
the language of keywords. This means that it is a good
practice to use keywords as the internal linking text.
However if you are using Graphics/Image linking then you
should not do it using image map because many of the
search engine does not follow image map. To overcome this
problem make use of the ALT attribute. ALT attribute give
the information about the image and where it is going to
provide the link.
Another important aspect of the internal linking of your
site is the sitemap. A sitemap is a page that contains
links to every page on the site. There should be a link to
the sitemap on every page, or at least on the homepage. A
sitemap helps you to have an overview of your site linking
architecture as well as it helps SE crawl the entire web
site.
Internal Linking Architecture
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There are three forms that can be assumed while planning
the sites internal linking pattern.
Hierarchal
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In this kind of Internal linking all the pages of the
website are connected to the home page and home page is
individually connected to all the pages of the website,
but there is no linking between the pages of the website.
Looping
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In this kind of Internal linking the home page is
connected to the primary page and the primary page is
connected to the secondary page and this process goes on
till the last page and the last page is connected to the
home page in this way a loop is formed.
Extensive Inter Linking
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In this kind of Internal linking each page is connected to
each other in the website.
What kind of internal linking is preferable in a certain
case, is dependent on the objectives you are trying to
achieve in terms of Pagerank optimization, user navigation
ease & site theme. One tip to bear in mind is that
internal linking should reinforce the theme. One should
not cross-link between the pages on the site which are
unrelated by themes. This will dilute the theme intensity
& affect the page rankings on SERPs.
Redundant Internal Links:
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Two category of internal links that should be guarded
against are: broken links & dead links.
Broken links
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Broken links are the links that are in the website and
when they are clicked they don’t open a webpage rather
they show some error.
Dead links
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Dead links are the links that are in the website and when
they are clicked they don’t open a web page and they
don’t even show some error.
To summarize pagerank of a site apart from other factors,
can be guided by the way information is organized within a
site & the way it is presented. Careful planning with
setting up the information flow will go a long way in
helping optimize the pagerank of the site.
Do let me know if you have any queries and I'll be happy
to answer them for you.
This article can be reprinted as long as the resource box
stays intact.
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