SEO Dance

Link building does not have to be done solely off-page. On-page optimization also requires link building within the pages of a website. This is what internal linking is for. Proper internal linking makes it easiers for readers to jump from one page to another or in case of a blog, from one blog post to another.

So if you’re wondering whether this SEO technique is a black hat or a white hat one, don’t fret. Internal linking makes it less difficult for visitors to navigate a website, and that means it improves the usability of a website. So, yeah it’s a white hat technique. And that holds true for search engine spiders, too. Remember those mechanical bugs that consistently checks a website’s content to report whether a search engine should index your site’s content or not?

To better prove that internal linking is a white hat SEO tactic, Google’s webmaster guidelines for SEO clearly include internal linking:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

So how do you actually make internal linking work for your site or blog?

Inform readers about another post or page using a hypertext link.
If you have been blogging, a hypertext link is as easy to create as clicking the ‘URL’ icon while a word or phrase is highlighted or that icon with the image of a globe and a link. A hypertext link looks like this “[URL="http://www.seodance.com"]SEO Dance [/URL]“.

For a hypertext link to be more effective in augmenting the usability of your website, a good anchor text helps greatly. An anchor text is the title that you give your link. The more descriptive and relevant the keywords you use as an anchor text for your hypertext links, the more the readers will be convinced to visit that page or blog post. And, this well-anchor-textedness of a link is good news to those who are vying for more SEO-friendliness of their websites because SEO experts state that search engines award a good search engine placement for content with hypertext links having relevant anchor text.

Help readers find what they want with a well-constructed website menu or navigation area.
An HTML-coded links in a menu is widely-suggested as opposed to the use of any flash-based design for a menu if being crawled by SE spiders is the goal.

- Descriptive Categories
Optimizing the use of categories to make a site’s visitors navigate better is as easy as researching the keywords that departmentalize a site’s content. Getting clever with categories like getting too clever with titles might not be helpful if driving targetted traffic to a website and the other pages inside a site is the priority. Simple and descriptive categories is still the way to go.

- Tag Cloud for Blogs
One way to perform SEO for a blog is to use tag clouds. Tag clouds are the web 2.0 versions of a blogs navigation area. A tag cloud is a large list of keywords/tags on a page that the blogger wants the search engines to relate to a feed or listing. source

- Sitemap for Websites and Blogs
Another recommended way to improve the internal linking structure of a site is to create a sitemap and submit it to Google. According to Google’s webmaster help center, a sitemap file will inform the search engine about the pages of your site and the level of importance of each of your site’s page and the frequency of their being changed. More sitemap info.

- Footer Links
Sprinkling a few links to your key posts or pages on the footer section of a website is another method to make spiders grasp better the site’s content. Including the a link to the sitemap is also recommended if you are to make the footer area helpful in making a site well-optimized using internal linking factors.

Also, one should not forget to use all the navigation accessories in moderation as they might backfire and turn off your readers because they can make a site look too busy when used excessively.

Do you have some internal linking secrets to share?

internal linkage, link building, internal link structure, SEO linking, tag cloud, sitemap