The Importance of Internal Link Building
When internet marketers start thinking about ways to increase their web sites page rank and to get more visitors to the web site, they often overlook one are of link building, that being internal links. Links that are internal on your website serve a great bit of good and they are easy to do, especially with a wide variety of plug-ins available is you are using say WordPress for your site. Here is a look at some of the key reasons why internal linking is critical for your websites success.
1. It improves the user experience – I know this point may seem counter intuitive because most internet marketers want people to not necessarily find something they like and then hopefully they click an ad and leave the site. Having your articles linked together can lead the reader to another source of information that they may be looking for. It may also lead the reader to recommend the site to their other friends or family members so you get additional referral traffic.
2. Pass the link juice – while having internal links are nowhere near as powerful as having one-way incoming links, internal links can help pass the link juice from one article to another. Not every post you have will have the same page rank. Some are going to rank higher than others and having links that point from the higher pages to the lower ones will help pass a little bit of the page rank around.
3. Use the proper anchor text – if you have a post that you are trying to rank for using the keyword “baseball”, then the anchor text you use on other posts pointing to that article should all use the same anchor text, so it shows the search engines what the page is really about. Pointing an internal link with an anchor text is the same as if you were pointing an external link to the page. Just because a link is internal does not mean that you want to be sloppy and have any old word as the anchor text pointing at the post.
In addition to setting up a good internal link net, you also have to be sure you are working constantly on getting good high quality backlinks coming into your site. One of the easiest ways to get this done is by using article directory sites or free article directory websites to submit articles to that will have links pointing back to either your home page or internal posts on your sites.