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.