Whilst no-one can doubt that external links are all well & good why do I consistently see people not making correct use of their own Internal Linking?
After all, using the right anchor text within your own site is bound to have some sort of effect?
This blog is a testament to that exact theory. I’ve been using various internal linking strategies since launch & I’ve had nothing but sucess in a number of different areas:
- Increased Indexing (A post is now normally indexed within 24 hours)
- Deepness of Spider Crawling
- Picking up More & More long tail searches (by using varying anchor text in links)
- Ranking on Competitive Keywords with not that many “External Links”
- Maintaining a high proportion of indexed pages
- Reducing Supplemental Results
Have a static sitemap, this allows SE Spiders to find all your pages & also you’ve got some nice anchor text leading to each page. I use the Dagon Design sitemap for Wordpress.
Have a related posts section after every post, this means you’re automatically linking to another 5-10 posts on EVERY PAGE. This dramatically increases the crawlability of your site & also naturally boosts your rankings. I’ve found this to work quite well even for affiliate review sites.
Interlink your pages with keywords. I use SH Autolink for this. Normally when I write a post I try to think of the most appropriate Anchor Text for it. Then I link to that page with the chosen Anchor Text. Say for example I might choose Internal Linking Strategies for this page. Any time I type that word on any other post, it’ll automatically link to this post.
Refer to other posts as often as you can. This not only helps your readers explore your blogs much deeper but it also makes other posts more relevant for more & more search terms. I try to vary the anchor text I use up to 5 times to give pages the ability to rank for larger breadth of keyword terms.
Optimize your Template to include proper anchor text. For example in my template I decided to call “Home” “Earn Money” instead. This means for every post I write I’ve got a link to my home page with the anchor text “Earn Money” instead of it saying “Home.” You can do this right across the board for things like reviews, popular posts & interviews.
These are all things that you can apply to your blog quickly & easily without paying any money & without having to hunt down any external links. Write some good content & the battle is half won
