SEO Internal Link, or Internal Link SEO

Here is a simple link-building plan for your internal links. The plan assumes you’ll be creating an intermediate to large content site (more than 25 pages) that will grow over time.

Step 1: Design The Site

Under no circumstances should you design your navigation first. Create the site and add the navigation later. Why? Because you need to customize the navigation to fit the needs of the site.

Good site navigation for large and growing sites helps people find new content fast and important content all the time. Believe it or not, you can NOT achieve these goals with a single navigation system.

Step 2: Set The Pace For Growth

Sure, your bes friend is getting married, your kids are going to college, you Dad is retiring next month, you have a high school reunion coming up, etc., etc. So what? Create a schedule for when you’ll add content to the site and use it to stay on track. Don’t carve the schedule in stone. Just put it in a spreadsheet, a word processing document, an email to yourself — someplace where you won’t ignore it but where it’s easily replaced or updated when the right time comes.

Step 3: Add The First Navigation Layer

Your internal links need to be reasonably and logically descriptive, informative, and useful. If you want to use them to reinforce relevance for specific keywords, do so, but be sure the right page comes up in a site search after the site is fully indexed.

Relevance should be built through on-page factors: titles, meta descriptions, Hx headers, multiple keyword occurrences in indexable text, emphasis of keywords in reasonable amounts, and page names. If you’re building relevance in your pages through link anchor text you’re doing it wrong.

Your first navigation layer should be available on every page of the site. It should at the very least take your visitors to these pages: site root URL, Contact, “About Us”, and HTML site map. You can include other destinations but they need to be at least as important as these pages. And don’t you dare put “rel=’nofollow’” on any of these links.

Step 4: Create Your Link Warehouse(s)

This is really your second navigation layer. A link warehouse is a page where you temporarily place links for the sake of introducing people to your deep content. Many Web sites use their root URL page as their link warehouse, setting aside some or all of their front page content space for links (coupled with little blurbs) pointing deeper into the site. You can profile your latest blog post, your sale information, new feature articles, and recently updated product and information pages in your link warehouse(s).

How many links should a link warehouse include? I would not include more than 40-50, and that is the top end of my personal preference range. However, some link warehouses include up to 2-300 links. It depends on how comfortable you feel with providing that kind of variety.

Your link warehouse(s) should never have more than a fraction of the number of links embedded on any HTML sitemap page. If you have a 10-page sitemap and each sitemap page includes only 50 links you probably should limit yourself to putting no more than 10 links on a link warehouse page. Why? Because the link warehouse page should be focused on what is special, important, most recently updated, created, etc.

Set boundaries and respect them.

You may not need many link warehouse pages. In fact, most sites get by with just one. If your site includes 10s of thousands or even millions of pages of content, it’s okay to have a lot of link warehouses (in fact, Amazon is a perfect example of a site that uses a large number of link warehouses).

Step 5: Create Secondary Navigation Layers Where Needed

Many large content sites divide their pages into logical hierarchies. Don’t get hung up on theming or siloing content. All you need to understand is that each logical section within the hierarchy needs to include its own navigation layer. Visitors should be able to reach the very topmost pages on the site, the parent of the current section, sibling pages in the current section, and any children from the current page.

Step 6: Create Tertiary Navigation Layers Across The Site

A tertiary navigation layer might be an internal banner network, a widget with featured links, hard-coded embedded cross-promotional ads, or micro-directory link lists (such as are used for “Related Posts”, “Hot Topics”, “Recent Articles”, “More Articles In This Category”, “More Articles By This Author”, etc.).

Tertiary navigation can (and should, in my opinion) be tied to topic not location or site structure. The tertiary navigation CAN and SHOULD help build relevance through linking, but remember that the link anchor text works for the linking page too, not just the destination page. Use tertiary navigation layers wisely and efficiently.

Links should never get in the visitor’s way. Links should be there for the visitor’s convenience. They should be clear and obvious and their placement should make as much sense as possible.

Step 7: Embed Cross-Navigational Or Cross-Promotional Llinks In Copy

As you add copy to your site (or update old copy), be sure you know have an easily accessible list of older URLs to draw from to embed as links in your new pages. These embedded links help draw people further into your site and provide the spiders with yet one more pathway for discovering (and rediscovering) content.

Follow these steps and you’ll find your internal links do very well for you, your visitors, and the search engines. And here are a few rules to abide by when placing links on your pages.

• Never use “rel=’nofollow’” for content you create on your own site. If you link to yourself, always trust yourself.
• Autoembed “rel=’nofollow’” on links you allow other people to create on your pages. If you want to implement a “dofollow” policy that is fine, but be aware that unscrupulous SEOs share lists of “dofollow” sites for link spamming.
• Use concise descriptive text. Link anchor text should not overwhelm the visitor.
• Create X links per page. I prefer a minimum of three internal links per page. Some people insist on more. Use this rule in moderation.
• Leave links in the warehouse for 1-3 weeks. You want the links to be visible for a reasonable length of time to ensure they are crawled at least once. It’s okay to leave special links in a warehouse longer than 3 weeks.
• Kill sprawl before it gets too big. If you find yourself adding too much content to one section, don’t hesitate to create a new section. If you wait too long, restructuring all that content and navigation becomes tedious.