Wednesday, May 31, 2006
The power of Interlinking pages
Many webmasters and site owners are great at optimizing their home page or index page. They do this by optimizing onpage factors like H1 (Header) tags, title, keyword density, alt tags, etc, and offpage factors like the number and quality of inbound links (ibl's) from other sites. That's fine and is very very important, but you should take the time to optimize all of your inner web pages as well. There are big opportunities there. Matter of fact, google a term such as “raleigh real estate”. Look at how many rankings in the top 10 are not top level (home page) pages.
If you can get a good pagerank (PR) – look up pagerank in Google - for all of your inside pages, as well as your home page, it greatly increases the chances of these pages being ranked highly in the search engines for their chosen keywords, and increases the number of visitors you could get. These can and should be different key words than in your main page.
I recommend that all of your main web pages are just one click away from your home page. You will often see a large number of links at the bottom of a home page. This is how many sites do that. You should have a well-structured navigation menu on your home page. Each link within the menu should be an anchor text link containing your main keyword(s). For example, let's say you had an inner page about hair loss. Now you may have done keyword research and found the term "wedding koozie" to be too competitive, so let's say you have decided to optimize your web page for the less competitive term "cheap wedding koozie". In this example, your link from the navigation menu should be "cheap wedding koozie" rather than "wedding koozie".
You can dramatically enhance this interlinking structure and boost the pagerank of your inner web pages further by including this navigation menu on all of your inner web pages. This means that all of your main inner web pages are always just one click away and will dramatically boost the number of inward links that each page has. This is an important and time consuming step that many website owners simply do not do.
Another way of doing this if you do not want to include a navigation menu on every page is by including a link tree on every one of your inner pages. These are those links that you often find at the bottom of pages, and are again a very good way of interlinking your web pages. As before, be sure to include your main keyword(s) within each link. This is very powerful.
To conclude, to rank highly in the search engines, you should focus on on-page optimization, and more so off-page optimization. Just as every inward link to your site from another website acts as a vote for your site, and boosts your pagerank and search engine rankings, a link from another page within your site also acts as a vote and will also have a positive effect on your ranking. There are some arguments as to how important this vote is but I say go for it. A good interlinking structure within your site will ensure that every page is fully optimized and has the optimum number of links from your other pages allowing you to rank higher for all of your inner pages as well as your home page.
If you can get a good pagerank (PR) – look up pagerank in Google - for all of your inside pages, as well as your home page, it greatly increases the chances of these pages being ranked highly in the search engines for their chosen keywords, and increases the number of visitors you could get. These can and should be different key words than in your main page.
I recommend that all of your main web pages are just one click away from your home page. You will often see a large number of links at the bottom of a home page. This is how many sites do that. You should have a well-structured navigation menu on your home page. Each link within the menu should be an anchor text link containing your main keyword(s). For example, let's say you had an inner page about hair loss. Now you may have done keyword research and found the term "wedding koozie" to be too competitive, so let's say you have decided to optimize your web page for the less competitive term "cheap wedding koozie". In this example, your link from the navigation menu should be "cheap wedding koozie" rather than "wedding koozie".
You can dramatically enhance this interlinking structure and boost the pagerank of your inner web pages further by including this navigation menu on all of your inner web pages. This means that all of your main inner web pages are always just one click away and will dramatically boost the number of inward links that each page has. This is an important and time consuming step that many website owners simply do not do.
Another way of doing this if you do not want to include a navigation menu on every page is by including a link tree on every one of your inner pages. These are those links that you often find at the bottom of pages, and are again a very good way of interlinking your web pages. As before, be sure to include your main keyword(s) within each link. This is very powerful.
To conclude, to rank highly in the search engines, you should focus on on-page optimization, and more so off-page optimization. Just as every inward link to your site from another website acts as a vote for your site, and boosts your pagerank and search engine rankings, a link from another page within your site also acts as a vote and will also have a positive effect on your ranking. There are some arguments as to how important this vote is but I say go for it. A good interlinking structure within your site will ensure that every page is fully optimized and has the optimum number of links from your other pages allowing you to rank higher for all of your inner pages as well as your home page.
