Internal linking is an effective way to improve the position of a webpage in the search results for a given keyword. Internal linking works particularly well for very big, content rich sites. I find internal linking an easy way to optimise large corporate sites. Often, many of the more advanced SEO techniques can be difficult to implement on large corporate sites because some tasks can be quite intensive on the server and compromise stability.
“Internal linking just requires FTP or CMS access to the site in question. Then you just add in a few links to other pages on the site. This usually means no development time is needed, no form filling or business cases will be needed either!“
Internal linking process
- Keyword to target: “Hotels in Spain”
- Determine the page you want to rank higest for this keyword
- Use site command in Google to find internal pages: “Site:www.yoursite.com hotels in spain”
- Make a note of the pages that appear first for this keyword
- Each of these should be linked to the target page
- Use relevant link text too, like: “Hotels in Spain”
This technique is easy to do and works really well for a big site that doesn’t distribute link value around well. This helps to emphasise to search engines which pages contain information on what. Also, it helps users navigate to other parts of your site. The page targeting your keyword, will now begin to rank higher over time. I’ve used this technique on many different sites, as usual, the older domain sites benefit much more from this than new sites.
About Paul Allen
[...] technique is similar to using nofollow to sculpt pagerank on internal pages. It’s just a more effective way of getting pagerank to important pages, and keeping it there. [...]