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Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website
By Dave Davies

Welcome to part five in this search engine positioning series
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/10-step-series.htm). Last
week we discussed the importance of content optimization. In
part five we will cover your website's internal linking structure
and the role that it plays in ranking highly, and in ranking for
multiple phrases.

While this aspect is not necessarily the single most important
of the ten steps it can be the difference between first page and
second page rankings, and can make all the difference in the
world when you are trying to rank your website for multiple
phrases.

Step Five - Internal Linking

With all the talk out there about linking, one might be under
the impression that the only links that count are those from
other websites. While these links certainly play an important
role (as will be discussed in part eight of this series) these
are certainly not the only important links.

When you're about to launch into your link work why not stop and
consider the ones that are easiest to attain and maximize first.
That would be, the ones right there on your own site and those
which you have total and complete control of. Properly used
internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal.

The internal linking structure can:

1. Insure that your website gets properly spidered and that all
    pages are found by the search engines.
2. Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase.
3. Increase the PageRank of an internal page.

Here is how the internal linking structure can affect these
areas and how to maximize the effectiveness of the internal
linking on your own website.

Getting Your Website Spidered

Insuring that every page of your website gets found by the
search engine spiders is probably the simplest thing you can do
for your rankings. Not only will this increase 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
potential to rank for.

I have seen websites that, once the search engines find all of
their pages, find that they are ranking on the first page and
seeing traffic from phrases they never thought to even research
or target.

This may not necessarily be the case for you. Hwever,having a
larger site with more pages related to your content will boost
the value of your site overall. You are offering this content
to your visitors, so why hide it from the search engines.

Pages can be hidden from search engines if the linking is done
in a way that they cannot read. This is the case in many
navigation scripts. If your site uses a script-based navigation
system then you will want to consider the implementation of one
of the internal linking structures noted further in the article.

Additionally, although image-based navigation is spiderable,
the search engines can't see what an image is and thus, cannot
assign any relevancy from an image to the page it links to other
than assigning it a place in your website hierarchy.

Building The Relevancy Of A Page To A Keyword Phrase

Anyone who wants to get their website into the top positions on
the search engines for multiple phrases must start out with a
clearly defined objective, including which pages should rank for
which phrases. Generally speaking, it will be your homepage that
you will use to target your most competitive phrase and move on
to targeting less competitive phrases on your internal pages.

To help build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase you
will want to use the keyword phrase in the anchor text of the
links to that page. Let's assume that you have a website hosting
company. Rather than linking to your homepage with the anchor
text "home" link to it with the text "web hosting main". This
will attach the words "web" and "hosting" and "main" to your
homepage. You can obviously leave the word "main" out, however,
in many cases it does work for the visitor (you know, those
people you're actually building the site for).

This doesn't stop at the homepage. If you are linking to
internal pages either through your navigation, footers, or
inline text links - try to use the phrases that you would want
to target on those pages as the linking text. For example, if
that hosting company offered and wanted to target "dedicated
hosting", rather than leaving the link at solely the beautiful
graphic in the middle of the homepage they would want to include
a text link with the anchor text "dedicated hosting" and link to
this internal page. This will tie the keywords "dedicated
hosting" to the page.

In a field as competitive as hosting this alone won't launch the
site to the top ten. It will, however, give it a boost and in
SEO, especially for competitive phrases, every advantage you can
give your site counts.

Increasing The PageRank Of Internal Pages

While we will be discussing PageRank (a Google-based term) here
the same rules generally apply for the other engines. The closer
a page is in clicks from your homepage, the higher the value (or
PageRank) the page is assigned. Basically, if I have a page
linked to from my homepage, it will be given more weight that a
page that is four or five levels deep in my site.

This does not mean that you should link to all of your pages
from your homepage. Not only does this diffuse the weight of
each individual link, but it will look incredibly unattractive
if your site is significantly large.

Figure out what your main phrases are and which pages will be
used to rank for them and be sure to include text links to these
internal pages on your homepage. It's important to pick solid
pages to target keyword phrases on because you don't want human
visitors going to your "terms and conditions" page before they've
even seen the products.

If that hosting company noted above has a PageRank 6 homepage,
the pages linked from its homepage will generally be a PageRank
5 (sometimes 4, sometimes 6 depending on the weight of the 6 for
the homepage). Regardless, it will be significantly higher than
if that page was linked to from a PageRank 3 internal page.

How To Improve Your Internal Linking Structure

There are many methods you can use to improve your internal
linking structure. The three main ones are:

1. Text link navigation
2. Footers
3. Inline text links

Text Link Navigation

Most websites include some form of navigation on the left hand
side. This makes it one of the first things read by a search
engine spider (read "Table Structures For Top Search Engine
Positioning" http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/
se-friendly-design/table-structure.htm by Mary Davies for
methods on getting your content read before your left hand
navigation). If it is one of the first things the search engine
spiders sees when it goes through your site it will have a strong
weight added to it so it must be optimized with care.

If you are using text link navigation be sure to include the
targeted keywords in the links. Thankfully this cannot be taken
as meaning "cram your keywords into each and every link" because
this is your navigation and that would look ridiculous. I've seen
sites that try to get the main phrase in virtually every link.
Not only does this look horrible, but it may get your site
penalized for spam (especially if the links are one after
another).

You don't have to get your keywords in every link but, if
workable, every second or third link works well. Also consider
what you are targeting on internal pages. If your homepage target
is "web hosting" and you've linked to your homepage in the
navigation with "web hosting main" which is followed by your
contact page so you've used "contact us", it would be a good
idea to use the anchor text "dedicated hosting" for the third
link. It reinforces the "hosting" relevancy and also attaches
relevancy to the dedicated hosting page of the site to the
phrase "dedicated hosting" in the anchor text.

Footers

Footers are often the overused and abused area of websites.
While they are useful for getting spiders through your site and
the other points noted above, they should not be used as spam
tools. I've seen in my travels, footers that are longer than the
webpage content areas. Not only does this look bad, but it
reduces the value of each individual link (which then become 1
out of 200 links rather than 1 out of 10 or 20).

Keep your footers clean, use the anchor text well, and link to
the key internal pages of your website and you will have a well
optimized footer. You will also want to include in your footer a
link to a sitemap. On this sitemap, link to every page in your
site. Here is where you can simply ensure that every page gets
found. Well worded anchor text is a good rule on your sitemap as
well. You may also want to consider a limited description of the
page on your sitemap. This will give you added verbiage to
solidify the relevancy of the sitemap page to the page you are
linking to.

Internal Text Links

Internal text links are links placed within the content of
your work. They were covered in last week's article on content
optimization (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/
search-engine-positioning/optimization.htm), which gives me a
great opportunity to use one as an example.

While debatable, inline text links do appear to be given extra
weight since their very nature implies that the link is entirely
relevant to the content of the site.

You can read more on this in last week's article.

Final Notes

As noted above, simply changing your internal navigation will
not launch your site to the top of the rankings. It is important,
however, to use each and every advantage available to create a
solid top ten ranking for your site that will hold it's position.

Improving your internal navigation will get your pages doing
better, will help get your entire site spidered, will help
increase the value of internal pages and will build the
relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.

Even if that's all it does, isn't it worth taking the time to
do it right?

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Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and
ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of
success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may
have about your website and how to get it into the top positions
on the major search engines.
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