Traian Neacsu’s latest article is titled “Internal Linking Strategy and Guidelines”. [‘Internal Linking’ Article]

Traian Neacsu’s latest article:

Internal Linking Strategy and Guidelines

Here are 10 + 1 principles for internal linking for search engine optimization purposes:

1. Define your targeted keywords so you will know what to use in your anchor texts when you link to other pages

2. Create a page for each set of keywords; you can effectively target only one primary keyword and up to three secondary (variations) keywords on a given page, i.e. your primary keyword can be wastewater and a variation can be waste water

3. It is recommended to make all your links absolute – if you have a simple html site this will be easy; if your site is more complex you may want to define your site root in a config file and use your server language to add the root URL automatically

4. Get more internal links via cross linking related pages – if you have older articles/posts when you write a new one you should link to the older ones

5. Cap all outbound links – at most 100 out-bound links from a given page, less than 50 recommended. In case you have too many outbound link you might find it useful to “sculpt” some of them, using Javascript, no follow, links under images or other advances techniques to hide links

6. Context is the key, link within content – it is known that footer, navigational or menu links are discarded by search engines. The best is to link to another page within a paragraph/phrase

7. Use optimized anchor texts to interlink related pages. Don’t use terms like read more or click here

8. Be consistent with your anchor texts. Don’t link to the same page with more anchor text themes – in other words if you’re home page is about oranges don’t link to it with the anchor text apples

9. Ideally, the anchor text used to link to a page should be found also in the title tag of the linked page

10. First occurrence matters – if you link to multiple times within the same web document, let’s say once in the header, once in the content and once in the footer – search engines will give more importance the anchor text in the first occurrence

BONUS

11. Crawl your site with Xenu Link Sleuth. Once the crawl ends export to TAB separated file and use Excel to sort pages by links in column. Do the pages on the top correspond to your targeted page? If unwanted pages are the most linked, go back to Xenu, export PageMap to TAB separated files and dig deeper to see how pages are interlinked.

Traian has almost a decade experience in online marketing and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, an Internet Marketing Company that provides services to SMB clients around the world. For more information about this SEO Company visit: http://www.pitstopmedia.com

** This news post is submitted by Traian Neacsu.

Sharing is caring