1) What is the internal linking structure?
– The way the pages of a website link to each other.
2) Why is the internal linking structure important?
- To make Google understand what are the most important pages from your website. You know which the most important pages are, but does Google know? If the internal linking structure is good, after the first crawling, at a command like site:mysyte.com, you will obtain a list of pages sorted out by importance. If the list corresponds with the order chosen by you, then you’ve made a good linking structure.
- To highlight the important pages, but also to decrease the power transferred to less important pages or to pages that will rank first from the start.
- To cut short the link-juice route to the important pages. Every time you will receive a link to a less important page, the juice has to get to the important pages fast.
- Because it’s difficult to manipulate. If you place links to the less important pages of your website anywhere, then the quality of your website will decrease.
3) What are the characteristics of a good internal linking structure?
- The most important pages have the largest number of links pointing to them (and the most powerful ones).
- In a good linking structure, the internal links point to the same page with different anchor texts. By linking with different anchor texts you tell Google more about that page.
- Linking through text in the body of the content, not only from menu items.
4) What does a good internal linking structure look like? Example of a website that has 7 pages:
List of all the pages by order of importance:
- Personal injury
- Accident Claim
- Medical Negligence
- Car Accident
- Accident at work
- Injury Solicitors
- No win no fee
Number of outgoing links – 2 on the homepage and 3 on every other page (in body links, excluding menu links and other standard links), a total of 20 outgoing links.Number of incoming links (the blue page has blue incoming links):
- Personal injury – 6 links
- Accident Claim – 4 links
- Medical Negligence – 3 links
- Car Accident – 2 links
- Accident at work – 2 links
- Injury Solicitors – 2 links
- No win no fee – 1 link
This is just an example; the most important pages have powerful internal links pointing to them and they also have the biggest number of links. You can empower any page you want by placing more links to it. Also use different anchor texts for internal links (secondary keywords, other keywords for which you intend to rank).
5) Use MindMaps to plan your internal linking structure. For the drawing above I used MindManager. I can’t even think about starting a new website without a good plan. The process is this:
- Do research and identify the keywords for your new website
- Group them by order of importance and divide them on separate pages
- Sort the pages by order of importance and decide on the number of links on each of them.
- Set up the way in which the pages link to each other, draw the map (use whatever suits your needs)
- Choose different anchor texts
- Create the content, the links and place them online
Don’t neglect the internal linking structure, it’s like the blood vessels of your website.
