Link building consists of inbound link building and internal link building. Inbound link building is a tedious task and I believe most of you find it hard to implement and time consuming. During the process of building inbound links, you often need to to lots of keyword research and site research that is suitable for creating link pointing back to your website with correct anchor text.
Most bloggers or marketers overlook internal linking. They are focused on inbound links, keyword research and anchor text selection. Actually internal linking is a easy technique which does not require much effort compared to inbound link building.
Internal links are not as effective as getting links from other websites in search engine rankings. But it does impact your search engine rankings if you have strong internal linking strategy. Previously I have written a blog post talking about how Wikipedia can get high rankings for many keywords with its strong internal linking strategy.
There are 2 simple yet effective internal linking tactics that I have implemented in this blog.
Popular Post Internal Links
In my widget sidebar, I have shown top 10 popular posts ranked by total number of view. Popular post is a good way for your visitors to understand what are the best articles in your blog. It not only increase the pageview of each visitor, but it also make it easier for search engine crawlers to index your web pages. It is a win-win solution for both human and machine.
I am using WordPress.com Popular Posts to automatically generate popular post for you without any maintenance effort.
Recent Post Internal Links
Another simple technique I have used is recent post. It is showing my recent 5 blog post to all visitors. Since your visitors not necessarily land on your homepage, it make sense to guide your readers to your newest content if they are interested. Search engines can also find your new blog post by following your old links which already indexed.
I am using default Recent Posts widget in WordPress to show your recent post to your readers with easy configuration.
Conclusion
In your internal links, you no need to care too much of the anchor text compared to inbound links. It is good enough as long as it is showing your post title. Internal linking is easier to implement compared to inbound link building. You can start your internal linking journey by implementing techniques mentioned above, popular post and recent post.
Related Posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
What a useful article! I now know to keep my popular and recent post widgets active as I plan to enhance my layout for my users and SEO.
Thanks so much for the tip!
I use them both. I have them directly visible to visitors, just below the header. My popular posts has number of views embedded with it.
You are a webmaster! great work man, I am impressed
The internal linking structure can indemnify that your website gets properly spidered and that all pages are found by the search engines, it builds the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase and amplifies the PageRank of an internal page
Insuring that every page of your website gets found by the search engine spiders is doubtless the simplest thing you can do for your rankings. Not only will this boost up the number of pages that a search engine credits your site with, but it also increases the number of phrases that your website has the prospective to rank for.
There are many methods you can use to develop your internal linking formation. The three main ones are:
1. Text link navigation
2. Footers
3. Inline text links
@Tushar,
Thanks for your great and informational comment.