SEO: Optimize Your Internal Linking Structure

A good internal linking structure means that it takes a very few clicks around three to get you to the targeted link from your Homepage. A solid Internal linking structure can increase your overall bog authority which can help increase your search engine rankings for your individual posts.

Since search engines rank each page on your site and not your site as a whole, it’s important that you’re internal pages rank well. If you’re interlinking your blog posts, it would mean that you’re passing the link juice to all pages on your site which is very advantageous from an SEO point of view.

Internal Linking also enhances user experience by making it easier for them to navigate through your site which just a few clicks.

4 Steps to Optimize your blog’s Internal Linking Structure

1. High Level Navigation – Ensure that you have an excellent navigation structure for your blog. You can utilize headers, sidebars and footers to place text-based links which are crawlable to improve you’re blogs overall navigation structure. Avoid the use of flash images and links contained within a javascript – they are not followed by search engines.

You could also make use of breadcrumbs on your blog. As per Wikipedia “Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, usually below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point”

Typical breadcrumbs look like this:

Home page > Section page > Subsection page or Home page >> Section page >> Subsection page

You can get the Breadcrumbs WordPress Plugin to achieve this.

2. Interlinking & Anchor Text – Interlinking related pages / post helps enhance reader experience as you are providing more information to them. Anchor text helps indicate to your readers an overall summary of the page you’re linking to. If you have multiple pages & posts on your blog, there will be a few posts that attract more traffic than others. Using Interlinking with Anchor text, you will be passing traffic to them as well.

You can check out Insights Plugin and SEO Smartlinks to interlink your blog posts with Anchor Text

3. Broken Links – Whether you like it or not, over a period of time you will find broken links on your blog. They are neither liked by search engines nor readers. You can use Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin to find & rectify them.

4. Sitemap – Have two sitemaps, one for your users and one for search engines. An XML sitemap helps google learn about your site’s internal structure, thereby increasing chances for search engines to find and index you internal pages. A sitemap for users can have all the category links & links to internal pages of your blog.

Do let us know if you follow any other tips to optimize your blog’s internal structure.

Top 10 Search Terms

• curiouslittleperson com sitemap
• interlinking of xml sitemap

You Should Also Check Out

1. SEO:The Most Effective Permalink Structure For Your Blog
2. Importance of Deep Linking in SEO
3. 4 Great Methods to Deep Linking Your Blog Posts
4. SEO: The Importance of Anchor Text
5. Importance of Keywords in SEO
6. The Importance of Backlinks for Your Blog & SEO
7. 3 Advantages of Interlinking Your Blog Posts
8. SEO Checklist: For Blog Posts
9. SEO: Do URL Shorteners Pass Anchor Text & PageRank
10. Add Alt Tag for Images Smartly with SEO friendly Images

Tagged as: anchor text, broken links, interlinking, internal linking structure, SEO, sitemap