Internal Cross Linking

The power of internal cross linking cannot be overlooked for SEO and should be a mandatory part of any search engine optimisation campaign. Many website owners obsess about how they are going to attract external links and if you read this blog you will know how much emphasis I place on doing this. However did you know that there is a supply of links you can harvest right before your very eyes? Linking content throughout your own site is a highly effective search engine optimisation strategy. It is useful from a usability point of view because it helps readers easily locate other pages on the site. However it is also extremely SEO point of view as it helps the search engine spiders find pages within your site and most important of all build relevance. Furthermore, as it is your website you have complete control over the link. You can decide on the exact anchor text you use, where you place the link and what sort of link it is. You are 100% in control of your internal cross linking and that is a very powerful position to be in.

Using Internal Cross Linking To Build Relevance

By now you should probably understand that search engine algorithms rely on something known as ‘citation’ to ascertain the relevance of page for a particular keyword. Without wanting to bore you with the details, search engines have evolved out of a science known as information retrieval (IA). This science has existed since the middle of the 20th century and was originally used for organisations with huge databases of information. Basically when queries were inputted systems powered by IA would return documents based on 2 major factors, namely relevance and popularity. The keyword point to note is popularity, if there were many citations (think links) to a documents and the text was relevant then that documents would appear close to the top of the query. This is a another blog post in its own, just merely take away the fact the modern day search engines rely (heavily) on links (i.e citations) from other websites to ascertain the subject matter of the page being linked to. Please take a moment to digest what I have just written as this is extremely important information.

By strategically implementing internal cross linking you can help to build up your own citations to certain pages in your own site. Image for a second you want to rank your website for the keyword ‘cheap leather jackets’. Apart from doing all the standard Onpage search engine optimisation, you can build subsequent pages around the page attempting to rank for that and build links back to that main page with the keyword phrase ‘cheap leather jackets’. Therefore when the search engine spiders come and visit your site they will crawl the links and see that all surrounding pages are linking to the main page with the keyword ‘cheap leather jackets’. Logically they must to a certain degree conclude (or make a mathematical calculation) that the page is about ‘cheap leather jackets’. Essentially you are using the power of internal cross linking to help build your case to the search engine that your site is indeed about ‘cheap leather jackets’. Now assuming that you can get some quality external links with the anchor text ‘cheap leather jackets’, you will be well on your way to ranking well for that term.

Now of course the search engines understand that as a owner of a website you have a vested interest in making it rank for certain terms. Therefore of course they cannot rely on internal cross links as they only method of citation, so they are always going to place emphasis on external links. However that is not to say that internal links are devalued completely and will definitely be of a value to you. In fact there are many respected SEO’s who talk openly how they have ranked website purely on the power of internal cross linking.

Dirty Little Secret For Maximum Internal Cross Linking Impact

I want to share a method that I use to rank my websites and clients websites using internal cross linking. This is extremely powerful and can be used to rank your website highly. Remember how I was talking about how search engine are powered by a science known as information retrieval? And that they rely on the relevance of document to partly determine its position? Well it is your job as a website owner to make the search engines think your site is as relevant as possible for a particular search query. How do you do this? You do it by giving the search engines content they think is extremely relevant to your keyword and then use those pages to link back to the main page that you are trying to rank. How do you find what the search engines think is relevant to your site, very simple you use the freely available Google Wonder Wheel tool. This tool tells you exactly the type of content you need to put on your website to make it seem relevant to the keyword. Use that content to then link back to your main page. Therefore when the search engine is crawling your site, it will see that firstly you have lots of content that is relevant to your keyword and by using internal cross linking you are re-emphasising it to the search engines. Trust me this is extremely powerful and not really used by many people. Once you start to do it properly you will notice a massive positive impact on your search engine rankings.

So next you are fretting over were you are going to get your next links from, don’t sweat because they are already there! Make sure you are utilising your own internal site architecture to its absolute maximum before you do anything else. Honestly you really will be surprised at just how powerful this can be. Furthermore the beauty about this is once you domain starts to age and pages start to gain page rank, you can use those pages to give other pages a much needed boost.

To your massive success.

Guy

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