My Success Diary

f you have any knowledge of search engine optimization at all you will know that link building is an important part of any strategy to build traffic and raise your PageRank. Not only do more links mean that more people can find your website, it also helps the search engines to see that your site is an active one that links to and from other websites as well.

But there is a third type of link building that not everyone gives the same priority to, and yet it is just as important as the others for a number of reasons. This type is called internal link building.

So what exactly does it involve?

Internal link building is the simple process of linking from one page of your website to another. As such it provides a network of links which make the overall structure of your website much stronger, enabling people to find their way around more easily and discover areas of your website which they may not otherwise have seen.

But there are other benefits as well. It is in your best interests to make sure internal link building is a regular part of your search engine optimization efforts, because it’s almost like setting up a trail for the robots to follow when they discover and index your website.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s suppose your website has a mere ten pages, but you don’t indulge in any real internal linking at all. When the search engine robots come along and land on your home page, they may only find two or three other pages and index those before moving on to another website, perhaps via an external link you have provided at some point.

But if you have made the effort to create a network of internal links leading to and from relevant pages, you have in turn increased the chances of the robots being able to find and index more pages of your website. That means that your performance in the search engines is likely to improve, as more of your pages have the potential of turning up in the search results.

Internal linking also helps to keep older content in the game. Instead of being buried in the lower reaches of your site, you can link to it from relevant places that people often visit. For example, let’s suppose your website is on the subject of writing and selling e-books, and your home page currently features a new article on professional e-book design. You remember that you wrote an article a few months back on free design services for e-book covers, so during the new article you make a reference to it and provide a clickable link to the previous article.

This means that you will generate fresh traffic to the old page, and start raising your PageRank on older pages as well as newer ones as well. It also means that more people may find your site via an old article, and then go on to see the home page and explore your site from there.

So if you aren’t already taking a pro-active view on internal link building, you could be missing out on a lot of benefits – and visitors.

Julie-Ann Amos is a professional writer and business consultant. She has over 14 books published in many countries. She runs Exquisite Writing, a large freelance writing agency that produces a wide variety of business writing, articles, web pages, website contents, books and ebooks for an international client base. Topic experts available for a wide range of subject areas.

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