Internal Linking
In this article of the search engine optimisation (SEO) manual I will be talking to you about Internal Linking and how it can help search engine rankings. Linking is used widely in SEO as a way to getting higher search engine rankings, linking from other websites is an extremely popular way to get these rankings but linking to your website from external sites is not the only effective way. Internal linking can also help; this also gives you full flexibility and control over your links. Meaning you can control the text that is put in the link, as having appropriate link text for pages is vital.
Site map
One way to achieve good internal linking is having a sitemap, I do not mean an XML site map which benefits search engines, but a HTML sitemap for your visitors. There are hundreds of tools out there which can create these for you, using one of these sitemaps can drastically help improve rankings and traffic to specific pages within your site.
Blogging
Blogging is a very simple yet effective way of increasing your internal linking; this can be done in a number of ways. You could write blogs which continue on from each other, this is also useful when writing about a subject you could spread over a few blogs. You could write a series of blogs and link to them all from each page. You see this method used a lot around the web and is an effective way of gaining those page rankings.
Footers
Footers are another useful way of providing people with all important internal links; quite often footers will go unused. This can be a vital space to put internal links, as more often than not visitors will scroll down after reading the pages content to check the footer for relevant links. This could be an excellent place to put links to various articles which are of the same or relevant subject. The footer is also a great place to put a link to your site map, as this is a common practice and users are likely to look in the footer for the site map.
Navigation
Having good site navigation is vital, not only from the users perspective but also the search engines. Having good site navigation can help greatly, as linking to most pages on your website with relevant link text is a great way for the search engines to associate those pages with the correct keywords.
Conclusion
As important as internal linking is, you should not abandon thoughts of external linking, as both of these help with rankings. The internal linking is used more to boost the ranking of certain pages within your site.
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