Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Internal Links

Com­pleted So Far:

Basi­cally, there are three main ‘pil­lars’ of search engine optimization:

1. search engine friendly design,
2. search engine friendly con­tent, and
3. hyper­text links

So far we have looked at devel­op­ing and imple­ment­ing the design and con­tent pil­lars, now it’s time to add some hyper­text links to our website/blog content.

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New Devel­op­ments:

Inter­nal links (links that point to loca­tions within your website/blog) and out­go­ing links (links that you make to some­one else’s website/blog), are not as valu­able to search engines as incom­ing links are (links that some­one else makes to your website/blog) but they are still well worth the effort to cre­ate. We will look at incom­ing links in Friday’s post. Today I wanted to high­light a few impor­tant points and guide­lines about inter­nal and out­go­ing links.

Inter­nal and out­go­ing links are the two types of links that you, as a blog/website author, have con­trol over, which makes them eas­ier to add to your website/blog than incom­ing links are.

Inter­nal Links

Inter­nal links are the hyper­text links that you make from con­tent you have included on a post to con­tent you have included on a page, or on another post, or fur­ther down on the same post, or some vari­a­tion on those themes.

The basic premise is that you have used hyper­text links to con­nect one part of you blog/website to another part of your blog/website. An exam­ple is this series on Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog. There is an Intro­duc­tion post that has a list of all of the posts that are in this series. I have used this list to link the Intro­duc­tion post to the indi­vid­ual posts, and have linked the indi­vid­ual posts back to the Intro­duc­tion post.

Search engine bots and spi­ders use these inter­nal links as path­ways to wan­der around your website/blog. In this way, you increase the like­li­hood that the bots and spi­ders have iden­ti­fied all of your pages and posts and this could help improve your search engine ranking.

One way to check and see which of your website/blog’s posts and pages Google has iden­ti­fied and ranked is to type: site:your website/blog’s URL. So, for exam­ple, to see what Google’s bots have iden­ti­fied on this site, type site:www.agelessnomads.com into Google’s search and you should end up with a long list of pages that Google’s bots have found. This tells me that Google’s bots have found my website/blog and scanned all of the pages and posts. Searchers can now find this web­site — it’s up to me now to do what I can to increase the page rank­ing so that when some­one does a search this web­site will show up on the first or sec­ond search engine results page.

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Tip: Always use rel­e­vant key­words in and around hyper­text links. In fact, if you can use key­words to click on, instead of using ‘Click Here’, that’s even bet­ter. Search engine bots and spi­ders are already look­ing for key­words and they are also already look­ing for hyper­text links. Using the two together is a very pow­er­ful com­bi­na­tion.

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Next Step:

Inter­nal links are only one type of link­ing strat­egy that you can use on your website/blog. Link­ing your website/blog to some­one else’s web­site or blog also attracts search engine bots and spi­ders, and can help improve your blog/website’s over­all search engine opti­miza­tion. Friday’s post will look at how you can use out­go­ing links to your best advantage.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog from the begin­ning by going to the Intro­duc­tion post.

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