Today’s lesson for our 30 Days To Better SEO series is about increasing the amount of internal links that point at the page you’re trying to improve.
What are internal links? Links from within your site.
You can get a great boost to your SEO results by increasing internal links for a few different reasons. PageRank is part of the system Google uses to rank pages and the more you can increase the PageRank of a page, the better it will rank. Google also uses the anchor text of the links pointing at a page as part of the ranking system, and you have total control over the anchor text you use on your site.
Internal Linking Case Study
I had a good friend email me about a year ago because one of his pages had lost a ranking. He was top five in Google for his keyword, and that ranking was lost overnight. He asked me for advice so I did a little investigation for him. What I figured out was that he had a ‘Recent Posts’ section, just like we have here at The Keyword Academy:
My friend had published enough posts to push the post in question out of the Recent Posts section. In other words, he had a link from every page of his site one day, and lost all those links the next. That lowered his internal links that were pointing at that post, lowering his PageRank for that post as well as the amount of links that used his keyword as anchor text.
In this case it made sense to add a new section to the sidebar called ‘Important Posts’. He added a link to his post in that section, replacing the links that were lost. Within a few weeks, his ranking was restored.
Ways To Increase Internal Links To The Page You Want To Improve
The most obvious method is adding a link to your sidebar. For some sites, that link won’t really fit in so this isn’t possible in every case. If you can’t do that, you can edit a bunch of other pages to add links that point to the page you want to improve. You want to link from as many pages as you possibly can because the more links you create, the more PageRank and keyword authority you’ll be able to pass to the page you want to improve.
I see a lot of people get lazy with this aspect of the game and honestly it’s an area where I gain a lot of advantage over many of my competitors. It also makes my sites more useful and that’s always a good thing if you want to get more links from other people.
Naturally, if you want to gain maximum effect, you will want to use your keyword as the anchor text of the links.
For Wordpress I use an awesome plugin called: Internal Link Building
It automatically lets you enter in what keywords you want to link to certain posts and how many times per page to have that link. You can spin which urls get which links using the ‘|’ deliminator.
Very cool and easy to use.
SEO smart links is what i use, just set your keywords that you wan’t linked and the plugin does the rest as well as linking pages, tags, and categories all completely configurable.You can set up affiliate links to open in a new window and set to nofollow if you wish.
I also have the top commenter’s plugin along with sidebar post widget. another good one is the robots plugin or use headspace 2 to nofollow your archives, privacy or policy pages. I will have a look at your suggestion and see how it compares to SEO smart links.
Thanks for the read
i JUST checked you suggestion out and yep your right it is the beez kneez, definately give this one a try
Cheers (-;
That’s one area of seo, internal linking, I know I’ve fallen short on. But after reading your post I did some internal linking and will try to remember to add links as I write new posts. I also put up a side bar “popular posts.”
thanks Court
This is so true! I just last week moved one of my blogs from one host to another and since my old host did not have cPanel, I more or less rebuilt the blog at its new location. As I was going through and pasting in all the text from my old posts, I realized I had many new posts I could link the old ones to, so I went through everything very thoroughly and linked everything that seemed relevant.
Well, what do you know, today when I checked my stats, my blog is for the first time #1 on Google for that keyword! It’s been hovering on the border between the first and second page, but never made it any further up than #8 before.
The internal linking plug-in for wordpress is awesome – definitely should use it, I saw a huge difference over a couple of weeks, which I can only attribute to me using it since I did nothing else.
Brawnydt & Chelle, is this the one you use?
http://seoroi.com/specialty-services/new-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-internal-link-building/
That does seem easier than doing it all manually…
@Cattie – Yup, that’s the one I used
I still do ones manually when posting new posts and such and want to vary the anchor terms, but it makes it nice and automatic for times when I’m in a hurry or not thinking, geez, I wrote an article about this last year…
I have created internal linking frequently when writing a new blog post but did not realize the importance it carried. Now I will need to go back to old posts and see if I can add some more.