Internal Linking Strategy and the Benefit of Having a Sitemap

Internal Linking Strategy

Building internal links is the best option to create incoming links to the web pages of your website or blog. To create natural incoming links, you need to combine great content and internal linking.

Internal link building strategy is divided into two sections:

• Website Construction
• Within Your Content

Let us see how website construction can be effectively done for improved internal linking building process.

Site Navigation:

Site Navigation can be broken down into two sub-divisions such as

• Main Page Navigation: This navigation usually links to the main pages on your website. For example: Home Page, About Us, Contact Us, Site Map, etc.

• Sub Navigation: This navigation could include categories. E.g. For services, an eCommerce website or blog.

You can have all your site navigation together in a dynamic menu, or else, you can split up the site navigation into a main navigation bar and sub-menu. But, you need to improve your internal link building as well as on-site search engine optimization.

To do this, you need to

• Use text links instead of using image links
• Use a CSS dynamic menu instead of using a JavaScript driven menu
• Provide breadcrumb navigation
• Include a site map link on your website
• Have your categories well organized and use keywords to describe each category
• Have your home page link to your domain name
• Make a conscience choice regarding the file names of your web pages

Tips for general site construction internal linking:

• Use the same extension at the end of your links for all links
• Make your internal links absolute links
•  Include the title attribute in your links
• Include related pages and article links at the end of the page
• Use keywords and phrases for your linked text

Internal Link Building within Content

To build your internal link, you need to link your web page content to related web pages on the website or blog. Smart internal linking constricts web content structure and this informs the search engines about which word or keyword are related to your web pages on your website.

The tips for in-content internal link building are similar to the tips given for your site construction:

• Use text links, not linked images
• Link to your domain name when you want to link to your home page
• Use absolute links, not relative links
• Include the title attribute in your links
• Use keywords and phrases for your linked text

Benefits Of Having A Sitemap

One of the most important elements of business success is a website’s ranking with the search engines. It is imperative to get your web pages indexed, so that you can show up your business website in the results of searches usually done by using the famous search engines.

Indexing is nothing but a process by which search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, send their robots to process and sort out the web pages on your website. Some search engines may find it very difficult to find out all the web pages on your website, if the web pages are deeply buried.

Some techniques are there that help the search engines to find all the web pages on your website. These techniques enable your website visitors to find all the web pages and move through your site easily.

The following tips are basically for the search engine “Google”, because Google is the one that is dominating the internet at present. When compared to other directories and search engines, such as Yahoo, MSN, etc., Google has the ability to bring in more visitors to your website.

Indexing Depth

The Google’s robot visits your website often only if you update your website on a regular basis. Based on the layering levels of your website’s tree, the depth of indexing will be done by Google.

The first level page is your homepage and any page that is linked to the homepage is the second level. Also, the pages that are linked to the second level pages and not linked to the home page are considered as the third level pages.

While indexing your web pages, the depth that Google will travel will depend on the page ranking of each web page on your website. If your homepage has a good ranking, then the second level pages will be indexed by Google. However, Google will not index any pages at a level beyond the second level pages.

Sitemap

A Sitemap helps your website visitors to find any web pages that they are interested in viewing on your website. It gives the visitors a quick and easy way to navigate your website. It also has a benefit for the search engines.

The New Sitemap

Google sitemap is a new kind of sitemap that you can use on your website. This sitemap slightly differs from traditional sitemaps. It is a file on your website’s server that displays all the web pages on your website and also their attributes. This helps Google to read the file and know about the web pages on your website. By using this Google sitemap, you can specify how much each web page on your website is updated and what the index priorities are for each web page