Jonathan Leger – SEO And Internet Marketing Blog Internet Marketing Blog

Use internal links to help your ranking

My AdSense SEO ebook really
focuses on the importance of in-bound links. Really, links are the number one most important factor for getting good rankings in the search engine these days.

But in-bound links aren't the only links you should focus on. It's also important that you focus on your own internal links. While not as powerful as in-bound links from other sites, they are counted by the search engines.

A common mistake that is made in website navigation is to have every link to the home page use the anchor text "Home" or "Homepage" or something like that. Search engines use the
anchor text of internal pages to rank your site, too, so using "Home" won't help you rank for anything but the term "Home"!

If you're trying to rank your site for the keywords "Green Widgets", for example, use the anchor text "Green Widgets" to point to your home page.

If your site is broken up into categories, make sure in the navigation of each page you have a link to each category of your site that uses its keywords. So if my site is about "Widgets", and I have the categories "Red Widgets", "Green Widgets" and "Blue Widgets", then I want my navigation to look like this:

Widgets -> Points to home page
Red Widgets -> Points to red widgets section
Green Widgets -> Points to green widgets section
Blue Widgets -> Points to blue widgets section

Don't make the mistake of not using every link you have on your site to help get that little extra ranking boost. It may mean the difference between you ranking number one or
number two for your term. That little edge always helps.

P.S. After getting your internal linking structure down, it's time to start getting external links and really rank your site. For that I recommend SEO Elite and Jack Humphrey's Power Linking methods.