What is Smart Internal Linking for SEO?
What is smart internal Linking for SEO?
Many beginner SEO webmasters and SEO pros are familiar with linking. Linking means creating internal links from one set of pages to another pages of the same site in order to transfer the weight (or juice, whatever you prefer to call it). However, when you are actually working on the SEO of the website, the ocean of questions comes up and the most important question of all is of course – “What is good linking for SEO?” This question itself logically assumes that there is a possibility of “bad linking” as well.
Let’s sit down and try to understand the smart internal SEO linking of the site.
User’s point of view
From the user’s point of view, smart linking lets them easily and freely navigate through your site, which saves time to find needed information.
Search Engine Robot’s point of view
From the search engine robot’s point of view, linking is also important, in order to understand the structure of your site via its navigation. However, internal links also influence the static page weight and the anchor list that gets formed by the search engine robots.
Smart linking can be pretty much summed up by the list below:
- Static weight. The most important pages need to have the most weight.
- Linking weight. The meaning of the text in the link itself has to be understandable to the user as well as the search engine robot.
- Navigation. The comfort (effortlessness, easiness) of the navigation and the minimum levels of the depth (how many clicks away from the main page, the depth of the navigation, try to keep it below 3 levels).
Now, let’s look at each of these individual points in the list above.
Static weight distribution
I think we all know and understand that the most important pages that you are trying to optimize must have the most weight. Using internal linking you can direct the static weight to the desired page, for example the first or the front page of your site.
Where to direct the weight depends on what types of requests are you targeting when optimizing your site. If it is a High Level request, then most likely it is very important and in this case I recommend optimizing the main page to match this request. This is because your main page normally has the highest internal static weight, since all pages in the menu link to the main page (if everything is done properly).
Diagram: High Level
If you are targeting the Mid Level requests then it’s better using the second level pages, which can have links coming from the main page and the other pages from other levels, creating an artificial targeted weight for the mid level requests.
Diagram: Mid Level
Thus, you should optimize your low level pages (for example third level pages, which are 2 clicks away or deep from the front page) for the low level requests. This will mean linking the front page and second level pages to these third level pages.
Diagram: Low Level
If you have only one request to optimize, try to have as many links as possible directed towards the page you are optimizing. These links need to come from all of your internal pages. Smart linking by transferring the page weight means maximum concentration of the weight (or juice) on the page (or pages) you are optimizing.
Linking weight distribution
It’s known to many Internet heroes out there that the links to the pages you are trying to optimize, need to have keywords in their text for example:
<a href="http://profitseo.com">Batman is welcome here</a></p>
“Batman is welcome here” part is the anchor of the link. We will talk more about this matter in the future posts, since this is a very important area of SEO.
However, this is important so let’s zone out all of the noise around us and focus right now. Here we go – there is a secret here that many SEO pros miss. Imagine, that pages of the third level (2 clicks away from the main page, which could be articles, news, blog posts, and so on) linked among each other, which also have links to them from the main areas of the site. So far, we have 2 links to each page of this third level: one from the main area, and the second from another page of the same level (these also could be the links from the main page or several links from the lower level pages). The secret here is to use the keyword in the anchor (keyword or keyword phrase in the link itself).
Diagram: Anchor keywords
In the case diagram shown above, the link anchors (red arrows) can be in the following phrases:
a) who is batman
b) what to do about batman
c) world saved by batman
As we all guessed, “batman” is our keyword or a request used to optimize the chosen page. Using “batman” in different phrases increases our low level request SEO.
Remember, not only the external links need to be with unique anchors, but also the internal ones. In this case, it’s much easier to optimize your site pages with low level requests.
Navigation with smart linking
Let’s agree that your site has more than one page (hopefully), which means you will need a navigation in your site, using which your users and search engine bots will travel through your site, studying it and learning ways to move around it. If the navigation is build correctly, then any page of the site is not deeper than 2-3 clicks away from the main page. The deeper your navigation depth, the less interesting your site becomes for both your users (visitors) and search engines. With good navigation on your site there shouldn’t be a single page that’s impossible to reach via internal pages.
The easiest way to create a good navigation – is to place menu of categories that have links to the informative pages:
Diagram: Navigation
Webmasters of the complicated sites (usually portals) need to be smart (let’s hope) and use tricks like “bread crumbs” and “tag cloud” (there is one on this site to your right). In this case even the oldest pages will be no deeper than 3 clicks away from the main page.
Why is it so important to have the minimum level of navigation depth? The main reason besides brushing away your visitor and search engine interest, it also causes the slow (very slow) indexation of your pages, which is bad for SEO. Often indexing of some pages might be skipped if they are deeper than 3 clicks away from the main page. Even if somehow you manage to stick those pages into the search engine index, chances are it will be ages before these pages get indexed again. So, it becomes simple here – use smart linking to increase SEO of your site.
Note to self:
“Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it.” — Cullen Hightower
Beck @ ProfitSEO.com
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I am confused about this point “deeper than 3 clicks away from the main page.”
It means that we should only internet link the recent posts with our new post OR what?
We should not internet the old post(Lets say the last one post) with our new post.
Please explain this point, i am confused.
Thank you
No problem. You shouldn’t have any page to be more than 3 clicks away from the main page. This will increase visitors time to browse your site. Also, the search engine robots will not index those pages.
I hope this helps.
Sir i am still not convinced.
Lets say i wrote 10 posts in 10 days.
Then i should interlink
No.10 Post to the new No.11 Post
And i should not internet No.1 Post (which is old) to No.11 (which is new)
This is what you are trying to say OR What.
Please sir guide me.
Thank you
Look at the bottom of each post on this blog there is a link to the main page – “Beck @ ProfitSEO.com“.
This is done to transfer the weight to the main page, since this is what I am optimizing (the main page).
But sir the Link has nofollow attribute.
Then how can a link with nofollow attribute can give benefits. (need more explanation)
Thank you
My site doesn’t have enough pages to matter at this time. When the time comes, those links will become dofollow links. It’s a good idea to plan your SEO targets ahead of time and set a date when each step will be implemented. It doesn’t mean that you have to have your links as nofollow as well. You can have them as dofollow and index right from the getgo.
I hope this helps, if not let me know.
Sir can you explain how these link will become Dofollow in the future.
And supposes at this time you have 1000 pages in your blog, then adding the Home Page link (Weather nofollow or dofollow) in every page is good in term of SEO or not.
It’s easy to change the attribute from nofollow to dofollow, I am sure you know how to do it since you noticed what attribute my internal main page linking has. It’s actually pretty easy to change nofollow to dofollow and index to noindex either via plugin such as Robots Meta or via the .htaccess file (even if you have 100,000 pages). Internal linking depends on which page you are trying to optimize and which page will have most of the weight in order to gain higher PageRank.
Ok thanks for giving me allot of time to answer my silly questions.
But one last question.
Why nofollow attribute is there at this stage and why you will remove it and make it dofollow after some time.
What is the logic behind this.
Making those links dofollow will send the weight towards a page these links are linked to. I do it this way because I want to monitor the results when for example 500 posts become dofollow all at once and links start transferring all the weight towards my main page. This blog is my experiment blog where I will be trying different ideas, so stay tuned and we will learn a lot together.
Sir is this not spam that 500 Dofollow links are coming from one location at the same time.
No, it’s not spam, since it’s within the same domain. You can have unlimited amount of internal links if you like. It’s called internal linking and search engines love it.