October 9, 2006 Sometimes I get so caught up in describing some of the complexities of SEO, I neglect the simple things. So today I think I will discuss internal links. Internal links are any links on a page that lead to another page of the same site. The idea of internal linking in reference to SEO, is to write the anchor text so that it shows a search term, and leads to a page dedicated to that specific term. Did that sound tricky? Let’s give an example So I have a car sales website. Omitting the amount of other SEO work involved in actually ranking in such an industry, let’s just say I wanted to be found using terms like ‘car sales’ or ‘used cars’ or specific models like ‘used chevy.’ I would obviously use these terms in the content of my site, and I would probably have pages dedicated specifically to each of these terms. Well, in the text, close to the beginning if at all possible, I would want to use the desired term as a link to the page that deals with that term. Ex:

«Blah blah body text…Used Cars…blah rest of text»

Where «Used Cars» would be a link to the used cars page. This will show the search engines a little more weight to that term, as your site must be relevant to it because there is a whole page in dedication. Now, You don’t want to overdo it. Personally, unless I have more than 500 words on a site, I really don’t like to use this method more than one time. If you have a bunch of links all over your content, not only will it look a little funny to a visitor, it will also likely smell spammy to a search engine. Also, the weight given to these links is getting lighter, but it’s still there and still a very valid and worthy SEO tactic.

I’m going to post today (maybe tomorrow if my lunch goes wrong) about how internal links come into play with regard to link popularity. This is really fun to explain. Good luck out that.

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