The Logic Of Internal Linking – 15 SEO Steps to Web Design Heaven
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Credit: AlbertoSantander
Live Internet Marketing recently hosted a short presentation by Rez Sarmadi, one of their resident Marketing Gurus, and Co-Founder of Sarbro Solutions about methods of internal ranking that will greatly help your Google Rankings. I was very excited to hear Rez’s presentation, and it delivered well beyond expectation.
1) Begin Your Internal Link Strategy When You Design the Site - According to Rez, Internal linking doesn’t start once the site is created, but rather is a part of the actual site design. The best time to begin internal linking is during the planning stage of the website.
2) Outline Your Sitemap - and what pages you will be including on the site. Brainstorm and think of different pages on the site until you have every possible angle covered. Then begin building your sitemap.
3) Define the Description and Content of each Page on your sitemap. This gives your website focus, and will help any marketing campaign as well.
These processes will help you create a structured internal (and external link campaign, by having already thought of how all of the pages that you have / want will be included.
4) Have a Dynamic Navigation Bar - Your Home page should link to just the main pages on the site - the main pages, as well as the ones that are content rich. On your category pages, however, you should place links to all of your sub-pages. This will ensure that you aren’t linking out of your home page to too many pages.
5.) Create Two Sitemaps, One for the search engines, and One for visitors - Search engine sitemaps are typically XML files, with thousands of pages. While this is fine for the search engines, you want to have a sitemap for visitors also. This page should contain your most popular pages, as determined by your stats. It is Rez’s firm belief that Google actually looks at the pages with the most traffic, and gives them a bigger weight in the search engines. Therefore, you should place your highest traffic pages on the visitor sitemap - in addition to the main category / navigation of the site.
6.) Create a Glossary Page – The site should include a glossary page, with terms for everything that is relevant to the site. Be sure to link to this page as well, as it is high in content. The glossary page should be a static HTML page, not a popup. This way it is more search engine friendly. Also, link to it, as it’s a high content page.
7) Categorize the Glossary - this way you have more detail. Feel free to link to other sources, whether it’s to Wikipedia, images and more. This increases relevancy, and linking to external sites is not a bad thing, even if they are your competitors.
Create a Link Directory – It’s important to have a link directory. This allows you to have data and content on different genres, categories and keywords related to your site. Add interactivity through commenting and related data on the site (such as each sites page rank. )
9) Add Tags, and Tag clouds to Your Site. Don’t make it too prominent, as it could annoy visitors. If you can swing it, you can add it to your directory as well. This allows you to automatically
8.) Relevancy – Today the search engines are taking a large amount of the relevancy into account when indexing websites. Relevancy factors to consider include content, popularity and age.
9.) Link format – Home page links to the category pages, the main pages link to the detail pages. Add a description page that explains each product, another page that talks about the history of each product that is listed.
Specific Web Pages – These are internal linking techniques that can be applies to each specific product or service page on the site.
10.) Duplicate Content – Try to avoid duplicate content, but if duplicate content is necessary at least use the keywords that relate to that specific page. Avoid linking to old pages (stale content), the older URL’s are more valuable, but if it’s not updated don’t link there.
11.) Video for Specific Pages – Create a video tab for each of your specific pages. You can embed the video, or link to it directly.
12.) Links Page for Specific Pages - Have a page that links to other sites for each specific product page. Be careful to avoid over linking, however, as Google considers this spamming.
13.) Keyword clouds for the Specific Pages – Create a keyword cloud for each product page, but make sure it is out of the way and unobtrusive. Also, taking it a step further, turn the keywords that appear in the tag cloud into hyperlinks themselves.
Bonus Web Pages
– These are pages to add to take internal linking to the next level and get an edge over the competition
14.) Recent and Top Search Terms – Create a static page filled with the most recent and most popular search terms, and a small description for each term.
15.) Referrer page – Create a static page that lists the sites your visitors are coming from.
These tips can help maximize internal linking within a website. The most important time to begin internal linking is before the website even goes live; proper planning can create an environment great for SEO, and make navigation of your site easy and logical.
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