Internal
linking is one of the basic fundamentals of any SEO project, but it is also
something that I see done wrong on a daily basis. It is an area that if done
incorrectly, it can lose you money and sales. If customers are confused by
internal links or they can’t find the page that is going to make you money,
they are not going to convert to sales.
Internal Linking
The most
common thing people do using internal links is to link back to the page that
you are already on. Now the problem is that customers are not stupid, if they
click a link that takes them back to the page they are already on, it’s going
to confuse them, or they are just going to be annoyed that they have been sent
back to the same place. Yes, it is good for SEO reasons, but there are better
ways to get that benefit without resorting to spamming links back on yourself.
So don’t do same page links. In fact, it’s just as beneficial to have a link
from another page pointing to that page with a link, than to link from the same
page to itself.
Anchor Text
You should
definitely have anchor text links. They are a great way to give relevance to
the page that the link is being passed on to, and if you include the keyword,
then it ties up the two nicely. It goes wrong when you have too many keywords
in an anchor text link. If you have gone past four keywords, you have probably
gone too far. You want to give a little bit of information on what that page is
about, but don’t go including a super long tail keyword in there. Don’t have
long anchor text links.
SEO type Issues
You should
definitely give customers the ability to filter the search results that they
see on your website, but the search engines don’t necessarily need that
information. They should already be able to find the pages on your site through
a site map. So have filters, but don’t make them indexable by the search engines.
Blog Categories.
An excellent
way to put your blog information so people can find it easily and read it later
is to have categories. Don’t put every blog post into multiple categories, because
that defeats the point, and also don’t let search engines index them, because
they are already going to see that content in your RSS feed and by the blog
itself. In terms of an HTML site map, that is a common way of telling users and
the search engines what all of your pages are and it does not have to be HTML. It
can be whatever format the site is coded in. The important thing is that there
is a page somewhere where people can see all of the pages on your site. Now you
may have hundreds of pages, in which case don’t put them in a big ugly list.
Tab the pages, have them hidden with plus and minus symbols so people can use
it. Don’t just have this page as a dump of content for the search engines. If
you can make your site map useful for customers, then they will use it. Yes,
have a site map. Of course, an XML site map is another way to get your internal
links picked up by the search engines.
Consider your Main Site Navigation
How quickly can
customers get to the page on your site that are going to convert them. If it is
more than three clicks away, you are going to start losing them. If you can put
it in your navigation itself, so they can get there really quickly, that is
going to help you out. So have navigation, and if you can put a drop-down menu
on there, that’s great. Don’t flood it with too many pages. Make it clear where
they need to go and what they need to do, and you will improve the revenue that
your site creates.
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