SMarT Marketing

A website’s internal linking structure is simply how each page links to other pages on the site.  Seems simple enough, but surprisingly, many internet marketers overlook how important it is to search engines such as Google to properly display and name internal links.

Each page on a website should link to many other pages on the site.  The most common place to accomplish this is in the footer.   It is out of the way, yet if users get lost on a site they will often look in the footer for the link they want.  This is the same reason it is important to have a link in the footer to a sitemap that lists all pages on the site.  If a website is a hotel, the links are doorways.  The more doorways, the more chances a search engine bot will visit every room.  The more rooms a search engine bot visits, the better chance a room (web page) will come up in the search engine rankings.

Here’s an example of a strong internal linking structure:  www.compren.com.  Notice how the footer is filled with links to the main internal site pages.  You will also notice each link is named according to the page it links to.  For example, the link the goes to the computer repair section is named computer repair and service.  This helps make that page more relevant for “computer repair and service” since there is a link on every page to this page, using the target keywords.  It is obvious a search engine bot would be able to easily find this page as well.  And, if I were a customer and was looking for the computer repair information, I would know this link goes to the page I want.

Make it easy for search engines and users to find your pages using internal links named properly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.