It may surprise you to know that a lot of companies that focus on SEO often overlook the importance and SEO value that can be gained by having a good internal link structure in place. These same companies put all their time and effort into building and developing inbound links to their website. You can often gain a few extra places in the search rankings if you have the right internal link structure with the right keyword rich anchor text in place to complement your on going inbound link building activity.

Sometimes you may find that your preferences for your website in terms of design features might clash with your ideas for developing internal links. This is something your going to have to work out with your webmaster or the person who has the most authority regarding the layout and design of your website. Your aim will to be strike the right balance between the number of internal links you deploy and your websites user interface and aesthetic design features.

A lot of websites use a type of the split menu navigation system. Whereby tabs across the top bar of the page are used to navigate to different sections of the website and link boxes on the left side of a page are used to navigate around categories and the content pages below.

You may prefer to use a breadcrumb trail navigation process throughout your website instead. Breadcrumb trails offer great value not only from a usability point of view but also from an SEO perspective as well. The breadcrumb trail drill-down sequence looks like this:

Home Page > Section Name > Category Name > Page Name > Page Description.

So if were to put the guitar example into practice the breadcrumb trail might look like this example:

Fender Guitar World – Fender Guitars – Fender Stratocaster – Luxury Fender Statocaster Guitars – Custom Build Luxury Fender Stratocaster Guitars Online

Bread Crumb trails are great from an SEO perspective on 3 accounts:

• It can help with page rank valuations as the navigational structure of your website is evenly distributed throughout each page.

• The first text that appears in the body of your page will most likely be from the bread crumb trail. As we know Google and the search engines give prominence to words and phrases that appear closer to the beginning of a piece of content on a page. By placing your prime keywords and phrases in a breadcrumb trail you will stand out more to search engines.

• By using a breadcrumb trail and depending on the size of your website, you may naturally have to include more keyword rich anchor text internal links throughout your website in order to create the best navigation process possible for the user. The more internal links included (in moderation) the better in terms of the SEO value it will render.

However you should only include internal links in moderation. Having loads of internal links on every page which link to various other pages on your website doesn’t look natural. You should link keywords and key phrases in the body text of a page to the content most relevant on other pages of your site. Again this should only be done where possible in moderation.

An important last point to consider is the structure of your internal links. You should have a detailed plan thought out about what sections, categories and pages you want to send your internal links to. If you focus on developing a solid internal link structure for your most important pages (i.e. linking page A to page B, linking page B to page C… linking page C to page A and so on).

You should always avoid creating loops when you design your internal link structure. Google and the major search engines will dismiss the link value altogether and in some cases they may not even index various web pages that are dominated by internal link looping.

Internal links that are designed well help both the search engines and the users with website navigation. In terms of SEO benefit optimizing your website with good internal links can add value to your inbound linking and other associated off page activities.

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