Usually SEOs talk about link building as an external exercise but what about the secret links we look past every day? The links on your own websites can be used to increase page ranking in the search engines.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text - The clickable text that acts as a link. In the HTML code, the anchor text is the words placed between the anchor tags: <a href=”someplace.html”>this is anchor text</a>

Anchor text is important because Google and other search engines often treat it as a more credible headline than the page title. If you want to rank for a specific term it needs to be in anchor text somewhere - in sites linking to you or in your own site structure.

By just taking a look at your site navigation you can probably find a couple ways to improve your anchor text. For example, most websites have a main navigation that looks something like:

• Home
• Services
• About
• Contact

“Services” or “Link Building”?

Right away you should be able to see a couple small changes that could make a big difference. “Services” should be the name of the services you sell. The word “services” is so broad it isn’t going to help you in the search engines. When somebody looking for what you sell enters the name of your service you want that page to be eligible for the search engine results page, right?

About “About”

“About” is another broad word that doesn’t help you. “About Linker’s Union” would be much more descriptive to the viewer and let the search engines know that is someone is looking for information about the Linker’s Union website that would be the place to go.

Contact Who?

Same applies for “Contact”. And this is an entirely underestimated page when it comes to ranking. Most SEOs and webmasters do not put enough energy into getting this page to pop. After all, what conversion do you want from people that hit your site? You want them to buy something and if they aren’t doing that you want them to contact you so you can convince them to buy something, right? This is even more important for websites that front a brick and mortar business where the viewer may be looking for directions.

The basic navigation updated:

• Home
• Link Building
• About Linker’s Union
• Contact Linker’s Union

The same concept can be used in internal linking between pages or blog posts. If I were to reference my 27 favorite link building tips I’d want to highlight the words I want that page to rank for instead of using generic words like “click here”.

Overcoming Supplemental Results

Pages that are in the Supplemental Index are pages that don’t have enough PR or that don’t change much over time. The problem with being in the Supplemental index is pages there don’t show up in the search results unless there are not enough relevant pages in the main results to show.

By cross-linking related internal pages you increase their PR getting them out of the Supplemental Index. Gary at PhoenixRealm has a tight article (complete with pictures!) describing a good internal linking strategy.

The Wasabi plug-in is often used to automate related posts for WordPress. And Jim Boykin has a great post on getting pages out of supplemental hell.

Managing Link Weight

Sometimes you have pages on your site that just aren’t going to do the search engines any good. The problem is those pages suck up some of the PR or link juice that could be helping other pages do better.

Link Weight is the amount of link juice a link passes. Consider two nearly-identical pages. They have the same PR, the same quality backlinks, etc. But one has 4 links pointing away and the second has 20. The difference in value for those links is what link weight is. The page with only 4 links out passes a lot more weight than the one where the weight is divided by 20.

There is no truly accurate way to determine link weight as it is roughly based on PR and Google doesn’t show accurate PR scores anymore. But what you can clearly see is that some links are stronger than others because the page they are on has fewer outbound links. You can use this to bolster more important pages on your site by funneling the link juice where you want it.

Consider removing links where they aren’t needed. Or adding the “nofollow” attribute to links that go to pages that are not important. This will strengthen the links to the pages you want to rank better.

What about blocking whole sections?

You can use your robots.txt file to block the search engines from crawling sections of your website but I don’t think that stops the incoming PR flow, just the outbound. For example, on this site the dashboard has a PR score that must come from the “site admin” link in the navigation. I recently nofollowed that link to stop wasting link juice on a page that should never be in the SERPs.

Daniweb has an interesting thread on using the robots.txt to block links but even they didn’t come up with a solid answer. The best way to prevent PR leak to hidden or unnecessary pages is to not link to them at all, or if you do, include a nofollow on that link.

Other ways to distribute link juice

Reality SEO discusses additional methods for distributing internal link juice including navigational systems like breadcrumbs, topic group lists, and sitemaps.

Think about a standard blog and why blogs seem to naturally raise to the top of the SERPs and internal link structure is often the answer. Blogs have a clear primary navigation plus secondary navigation that often lists the latest posts, posts by category and posts by date. That means each new post on the site gets 4+ links as soon as it is posted. This helps the search engines find the page quickly and get it in the index and passes along link juice to push that page up at least a little.

You may also want to consider how powerful Wikipedia has become in the search engines. Wikipedia’s internal link structure has helped a lot to make that happen.

Don’t get too greedy

Don’t horde your PR by nofollowing external links. It is an jerk thing to do and will hurt your progress to pick up links in the long run. External links to related pages actually help your rankings anyway.

Blogger’s Blog covers another internal link trend that should be avoided where websites create mini-pages to link to internally that then link to the source document. This is not a user-friendly thing to do.

Final Thoughts

Internal linking may not be enough to push your pages to the top of the SERPs but it can certainly help. And if your internal link structure has problems it can actually prevent your site from ranking well in the search engines. Take a few minutes to see if some small tweaks on your site could yield big benefits!

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