For search engines rankings links are of major importance and therefore are worth serious consideration for any search engine optimisation campaign. Links can act as a voting machine - links from quality web pages to your own web page are essentially declaring a vote of confidence regarding your site and content. It’s not only external links which can help with SEO however, liking to internal web pages within your own web site can be useful for visitors navigation, as well as improving search rankings.
Benefits of internal linking
Whilst SEO is an important aspect of any web site development for most web masters, it is the visitor experience which web site owners should always strive to improve. This is, after all, what entices long term repeat visitors and incoming links. Linking to internal pages within quality content benefits the visitor greatly, if done so correctly. For example, a web site about watches may have a web page which explains which watches may be best for an active person. Within the content it may state “some level of water resistance would be ideal”, with the words “water resistance” linking through to a web page explaining specifically about water resistant grading.
Having a web of links is what the Web is all about. Finding web pages about specific things you are interested in is what makes the Internet such a great informative tool. This web structure also allows a lot of web pages to become indexed in search engines as the search engines bots (which scan web pages) follow the links on the pages to locate more content. Having plenty of entry points to a web page is a great way to ensure your web page is included within the major search engines.
As well as improved indexing, linking to internal pages can also have a positive impact on search engine rankings. Pages linked to from many quality sources on your web site can enhance their within search engines. As mentioned above, we should not abuse this however. We should always try to think like a visitor and link to web pages (internal and external) which we believe a visitor will find helpful. Also, try to minimise the number of links within the content to no more than half a dozen, although this is a rough figure and not always appropriate.
Database driven web pages
The content displayed on web pages which is delivered from databases can be used to automatically link to important internal web pages. Using a server side scripting language (such as PHP), we can parse content through a “function” which converts a given set of keywords into links. For example, a car web site could have it so content is automatically scanned for specific car makes, and if any such makes are found within the text a link is added. Such an approach is a great long term way of ensuring plenty of internal linking.
For static web pages it is well worth the time of going through each web page to ensure you make the most out of your internal linking to enhance your visitors’ experience.