Internal Linking and Why it is Important

If you read my article on Getting Your First Links, you will know that I recommend not only building links to your home page, but to your internal post pages as well.  This practice is called “deep linking” and it is a great way to get your posts to rank in the SERPs for your cousin keywords.

If you did not read that post, I will quickly explain what I mean.  When I submit a post to an article directory, or someplace else for the purpose of getting backlinks, I will include a keyword anchored link to my home page, and a second one to a post page on my site.  That gives me a “base link” to my site’s home page with a variation of it’s main KW and a “deep link” to the article I am promoting at the time. This helps pass authority to your posts, and gets and keeps them indexed.

There is another form of deep linking, however, that many feel is just as important.  It is building an internal linking structure within your site.  This is a technique that I learned from Mark and Court (you better know who they are by now. lol), and is referred to as a “link net”.  There are two ways to do link nets:

Manual Link Nets

When you post an article to your site, it usually does one of two things: either it targets a keyword or it supports a keyword.  Often, a post can do both.  Let’s say that the main keyword for this site is “Internet Business”.  I will post an article that targets that KW and I will find the first instance of it and make it a link to the home page. I also know that I will be using cousin keywords later, so I will put them in the post, but not link them to anything yet.

The next article I post will be on a cousin keyword – let’s say, “earning online”.  I do the regular linking (internet business links to the home page and earning online to the post permalink) and publish the post.  Now, I will go back to the previous post, find “earning online”, and link that KW in that post to the post I just published.  Later on, as I add more posts to my site, I will be linking instances of keywords from articles back to the articles that I wrote to target them.  Does that make sense?

As you can probably imagine, that’s not too difficult with smaller niche sites, but it can get pretty crazy with bigger sites.  Think about it: you have a site with 30 posts, and you add a new one to target a cousin KW.  You have to figure out what posts had that KW in them, so that you can go and link those posts to the new one.  Now imagine if your site 100 posts!  Don’t worry, there is an easier way!

Automatic Link Nets

Here comes your salvation!  It is a little plug-in called SEO Smart Links.  You can get it there, or search for it in your wordpress admin area.  This is the plugin that will automate your link nets for you.  I have it installed on every single site I own, and it works great.

What SEO Smart Links does is set up your site so that KWs will automatically link to your posts, pages, and even your category and tag pages, if you want.  I will usually set it up to do my posts.  I then use the Custom Keywords feature to point keyword to certain posts.  Let me explain that a bit…

Normally, for a article to be linked to, the text has to be exactly the same as the title of the post.  Let’s say, I want the main keyword of this article to be “internal linking”.  I don’t want to have “Internal Linking and Why it is Important” as my anchor, so I set up the custom keywords like this:

internal linking, http://internetbusinessguide.info/internal-linking-and-why-it-is-important/

That way, every time “internal linking” shows up on my site, it will link to this article.  Pretty cool, huh?  Just make sure you set the options so that you are only linking to the same keyword once per article.  Also, for sites with smaller posts, I set the max links to 3.  sites with longer articles (like this one), I set to a max of 5.

So Why Do All This?

Here is the thing – when you get a link from somewhere, that site passes along some of its “juice” to your site.  Link nets do the exact same thing, but internally.  You can see that for yourself if you have any sites that are PR2 or higher.  Go to your tag cloud and start looking at the PR of some of your tag pages.  Even if you haven’t linked to them from outside sources, some of them will have pagerank.  Why?  because you linked to them internally from within your site.  Every article you post has tags (hopefully), and every post lists it’s tags via anchored links.  That is where they get their authority.

Personally, the way I set up my internal links depends on what I am trying to accomplish.  This site, I have not been concentrating on targeting KWs with my posts (for the most part).  Most of my other sites I have.  This one, I am more looking for “tag” traffic and home page traffic, so I don’t have any custom KWs set up here.  I still do manual linking though, and you can see that I have some tag links set up.

For those of you who have been asking for an example of one of my sites, I took a screen shot of custom links set up on my 10 month old mid-sized site.

As you can see, I have each keyword set to go to a link within my site.  BTW, the site just went to #4 in Google for “solar lights” and “solar lighting” according to my personal searches and #2 if you check scroogle.  It will be #1 within the next couple of months (I hope).  Due, in part, to internal link nets.

There is one other thing that I would encourage you to do as well.  While you are looking for plugins, search for YARPP.  It is a plugin that will list your related posts at the end of each article.  More internal linking.

Related posts:

1. Earning Online | Link Building Strategies
2. Earning Online | Growing Your Site
3. Earning Online | Getting Your First Links
4. The Keyword Academy Review
5. Earning Online Blogging | Your First Real Post