Internal Linking Strategy

Building a site's internal linking

Internal links are the cheapest promotion tool available: they need no agreement with anyone else's site and are entirely under your control. They are also the one used worst.

What is included

• analysis of the current structure: which pages receive links and which have become dead ends;
• finding pages with no inbound links — neither a person nor a crawler will reach them;
• building two-way connections between articles and commercial pages;
• forming topical clusters around your main areas;
• work on anchor text — so it describes what is at the other end;
• hub pages that gather a section and distribute weight onwards.

Typical findings

The blog lives separately from the commercial pages. The most common situation: articles get written, traffic arrives, and there are no links to services in them. Someone finishes reading and has nowhere to go.

One-way relationships. The article links to the service, the service does not link back. Half the connection is lost, though completing it costs nothing.

"Read more here" links that tell neither the reader nor the search engine anything.

What I do not do

I do not add links for the sake of quantity. Twenty links in a paragraph do not pass weight better than three well-placed ones — on the contrary, the more links a page has, the less each one counts.