Internal Linking to Improve SEO

So you’ve got your sites content, made sure that you’ve made use of your keywords in your header tags and meta tags but still you’re struggling to rank well for those keywords. At this point most people consider embarking upon some degree of backlink building.

Backlinks can help improve your sites rank for your keywords but it comes with a few issues attached! First it takes time to build quality links, you need to spend the time finding linking opportunities which means lots of research and emails. It also means that you’ll need to spend time creating content for guest posts or spend money hiring a writer to create it for you.

The second issue is that Google are doing everything they can to stop link spam which means if you’re not careful then you could end up harming your sites ranking instead of improving it! In one of Googles latest patents they describe a system that will basically produce unexpected and random ranking changes for any pages that they suspect spammy links may have been created for. The point of this would be to monitor the site and see if any changes are made to try to counteract the changes that have been made, apparently they believe this will help out the spammers but in my opinion this is another step that can harm legitimate sites and once again raises a question about the opportunities for negative SEO. I.e. If someone bombards you with enough spammy links you can expect your rankings to randomly fly up and down the SERPs until Google decide whether or not you are a spammer! Bottom line is that it’s becoming obvious that Google haven’t got a clue what a spammy link looks like and are resorting to desperate tactics to try and have them out themselves!

Due to the time, money and risks involved in link building many businesses will outsource the task to an SEO company. Depending on how competitive the keywords are these campaigns could take from anytime between 3 to 12 months!

So what else can you do to minimise the need to create backlinks? Well the answer is so simple that many don’t even consider it. You have complete control over your own internal links and these links are highly trusted and actually give the engines a clearer picture of what your site is about than external links.

So the trick is to always link internally whenever you see an opportunity in your page copy and make sure each service that you offer has it’s own page. Make sure that the copy for each service includes links out to the other services you offer on the other pages and also make use of the <title> tag in your links which will give you another opportunity to add your keywords and a variation on the main phrase you are targeting. For example if I was targeting SEO London as my anchor text I would then have a title tag that would appear when you hover over the link that said something like “Effective SEO Services in London”. Now with many pages on my site all linking in to the SEO London page I have a lot of opportunities to vary the anchor and title text and actually target a variety of keyphrases. When you multiply this for all the services you offer then you suddenly gain an awful lot of relevant and highy trusted links without ever leaving your own site! These links aren’t going to disappear overnight or be deemed as spam, these are high quality links that you have complete control over.

So I suggest you use a service such as serpbook to track your rank for the keywords you want to target and then improve your internal linking structure and see the results for yourself. You’ll be surprised at the results. Once you’ve seen an improvement then move on to look at linkbuilding if required, the relevance of your internal linking will actually help any external backlinks you build and of course you will need to create less links as you should have already seen an improvement in rankings.

Don’t want to do this yourself? Then get in touch with Steady SEO and have an SEO expert do it for you!