While many website owners focus on obtaining external links, it’s easy to miss internal link building, which is still an effective way to boost rankings for other pages within your website and the the best part of Internal Linking is that you have complete control over the implementation!

To get the highest possible return for your SEO, follow these simple guidelines to ensure internal links are working to improve your rankings.

1. Optimise the anchor text
You should ensure your anchor text targets your core keyword for the page. This is a good tactic to use in site-wide footer links, or even in the navigation, provided what you put there still makes sense for your visitors.

2. Ensure all links are do-follow
Google ignores link value from any links marked as “nofollow”, so make sure that you haven’t marked internal links with the “nofollow” attribute.

3. Use content based links where appropriate
Aside from the main navigation and footer links, linking to the main pages within the body text of your web page is another way to help rankings. Remember that it’s important to use your target keywords as anchor text, but make sure the actual text fits within the context of the sentence, so that the link doesn’t look out of place or seem irrelevant

4. Keep the total link numbers low
Make a note of the total number of links on any given page and try and keep this number as low as possible. This is because individual link “juice” is divided amongst ALL the links (external and internal) on the page, so the less links you have, the more value each link is going to pass on. Having hundreds of links on a page will dilute the effect of each link to almost nothing!

If you follow these simple guidelines, you should start to see some positive effect on the rankings for your keywords.

Mr Google, Matt Cutts, mentioned at PubCon recently that there are over 200 variables in the Google algorithm & although no-one but Google knows what they are exactly, we can have a reasonably good guess at many of them. In fact, WebmasterWorld have set themselves a challenge to list them all!

Here is what has been included so far:

Domain

• Age of domain
• History of domain
• Keywords in domain name
• IP address of domain
• Location of IP address / Server

Architecture

• HTML structure
• Use of Headers tags
• URL path
• Use of external CSS / JavaScript files

Content

• Keyword density of page
• Keywords in Title Tag
• Keywords in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
• Keywords in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
• Keywords in body text
• Freshness of content

Per Inbound Link

• Quality of website inbound linking
• Quality of web page inbound linking
• Age of website
• Age of web page
• Relevancy of page’s content
• Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
• Anchor text of link
• Title attribute of link
• ALT tag of images linking
• Country specific top level domain
• Authority of top level domain (.edu, .gov)
• Location of server
• Authority links (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links

• Uniqueness of class C IP address

Internal Cross Linking

• Number of internal links to page
• Location of link on page
• Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties

• Over optimisation
• Purchasing links
• Selling links
• Comment spamming
• Cloaking
• Hidden text
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Manual penalties

Miscellaneous

• JavaScript links
• No follow links

Pending

• Performance / Load of a website
• Speed of Javascript

Not included, but often focussed upon

• XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
• PageRank (General indicator of page’s performance)