SEO Advice

Most webmasters know that it’s important to have a text based footer with links to main sections. This is a good idea for a couple reasons: it provides actual text that the search engine spiders such as googlebot can read and associate with the page it links to and also provides a link to your main pages from every single page. Along these lines, its also key to have a site map that includes a link to every page in your site. This is where most sites stop in terms of internal linking but this is just the beginning.

Your site should be well linked internally before you bother spending time on link popularity and backlinks from external web sites. Its a lot easier to make your site well linked internally than it is to get other sites to link to you; start with easy stuff that you have full control over.

If you use blog software, it can be very easy to increase internal linking with a little effort:

• Have a list of popular search keywords or phrases, put these on each page and link to the search results (assuming your blog has a search function)
• Setup tags and/or categories and classify your blog entries - make sure the tag list and categories show up on every page (for an example of tags, look at this site on the right hand navigation)
• Create a “related articles” blurb for each article - most blogs will either support this feature or have a plugin to support it

Not only will these improve your internal linking within your blog but they will also make navigation easier for your readers.

All the ideas suggested here are very simple examples. How you increase your internal site linking depends on your web site and the content. The point is merely to suggest basic ideas that many sites could employ and get you thinking about more complex ways to optimize your site.