Internal Linkbuilding Strategy

Formalising an internal linkbuilding strategy for our clients is essential. As an internet advertising agency providing SEO services, we need to make sure the sites we promote are fully optimised on-site.

Even if you are not an SEO agency and are optimising your own site you can still employ all of these techniques. It just takes a bit of organisation and dedication.

Essentially, when you are creating internal links you are trying to provide as much weight and relevance to your links and content as possible. This way Google can determine the context of your site and the pages within it.

If you want to add weight to a link make sure your cross site linking is relevant. The anchor text should be content specific. Search engines like Google associate the link text to the page it is linking to. It's no good having the anchor text  "SEO blog" if the page it is linking to is about   beer and has no reference to search engine optimisation.

To add additional weight to your internal links be careful not have too many other links on your pages. Google suggests that you have a clear link hierarchy and no more than 100 or so links on each page. If you have more than this, it could negatively de-value your links. Here's a link to Google's webmaster guidelines.

Another important point I find is that you don't want to waste link juice on pages that may not be particularly relevant to what your site is trying to rank for or they just may not be high converting pages. These could include your privacy policy or FAQ page. There is no point wasting juice on these pages, if it does'nt provide conversions or search engine credibility. Instead, I suggest you make these links no follow to try an attempt to prevent them from being crawled by the search engines.

Some additional information:

Ideally as a rule your main service or product pages should have a link from the homepage. Also in my personal opinion you should avoid linking to pages with the text "click here". It provides no contextual relevance to users or search engines. If you are just starting out you should pick several high traffic terms, but also some longtail terms as well. The reason for this is simple; it's going to take you a while and a lot of effort to achieve decent rankings for competitive terms. So it makes sense to supplement your efforts with a few easier wins.

For more information about our SEO service please contact Louise our client services director.