If you own or run a website and are not following these six tactics for properly linking your website together then you are losing Google traffic as you read this. Internal linking is the links on your website that point to other pages within your same website. External linking is when you link to another website. Tactics are specific things to do to achieve desired results, or any mode of procedure for gaining advantage or success.
There are things you can do when developing or refining your internal linking structure. If you carry out the following tactics, you are going to achieve two things. One, you will make your website better from a user's perspective. Two, you will rank better in Google. And it is no coincidence that Google rewards you for doing things that make the website user's experience easier and better. In fact, the most important thing I can recommend is that you create, design and link your website together in a way that benefits the visitor first. Your visitors are most important, not Google rankings.
Links from other websites that point back to your website are essential in getting top search engine rankings, especially with Google. These links vary in their effectiveness and value depending on the website from which they are coming. But did you also know that internal links often can have similar effectiveness and value as external links.
1) Add links in your navigation or footer as text links to all your important pages and main sections.
This is a very easy and an extremely effective tactic that not all sites do, and even fewer do for maximum results. This is the first thing I look for when reviewing a website for a client. Unfortunately, sometimes artsy Web designers add cool buttons, which are images, to all the main sections of the site, but neglect to include text links as well. Or a programmer decides to make the website's navigation a dynamic drop down menu in DHTML or JavaScript but forgets to include text links to the same pages represented in the menus. Search engines cannot follow image links or links created in JavaScript, they can only follow simple text links, so be sure you add them to your site as well.
So if you want search engines to visit and index (or record) ALL your website's pages, be sure there are text links pointing to all the main sections of your site and to all your important pages.
2) Make use of the rel="nofollow" HTML tag.
This is fairly simple. Google created this tag which tells them NOT to count the link in their search engine ranking algorithm when used on a link. There is debate that maybe Google does count them a little, or will some day in the future. But for now, this tag does greatly decrease a link's value in Google's eyes.
Therefore, consider using this tag on some of your links within your site. For example, let us say you have a homepage and then create two inner pages, and that is the extent of the site. Let us further say that you add a link to both pages on your homepage. If your homepage has some external links pointing to it, then it has some value in regards to Google's ranking system. When you link to each of your two new pages within your site from your homepage, each page gets only 50% of the value the homepage has. (This is all measured in Page Rank). Your first inner page is the one you want to rank well in Google, but you do not care if your second inner page even gets found by Google or ranked. You could add the "nofollow" tag to the second link on your homepage, thereby giving the first inner page 100% of the homepage's value.
Think of the implications. Imagine if you had a website with hundreds or thousands of pages and used the nofollow tag throughout. To understand how to implement this tag, see the two links in HTML below, one without it and one with it correctly included.
<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com">Your Website</a>
<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com" rel="nofollow">Your Website</a>
Finally, if you have pages such as a privacy page, terms page, checkout pages or contact pages that you do not care if they rank well in Google, be sure to use the "nofollow" tag when creating internal links to these pages.
To be continued..
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