Internal (In-Line) Linking

Internal linking, also known as in-line linking, is the process of linking page A to page B within your website. That is, any hyperlinks within your domain that point to another page in the same domain are considered to be internal links. Let's assume we have a fictional website with a total of five pages, each with its own unique and original content. Navigation to these pages is usually achieved through a menu system, standard placement being along the top of the page or on the left-hand side of a page. The menu system is nothing more than a series of links to the external pages. When linking, it's extremely important to link ALL pages in the website that you wish to be picked up and indexed by search engines (more on indexing in part 4). Just because you've created a website it doesn't mean search engines can find your web pages. When a search engine crawls a website, it follows a series of links within the website in order to discover the pages within the domain. In most cases the website's homepage is the first page a search engine spider will hit. Once the crawler has entered your website, it will recursively follow any links that it finds and use them to index your site. If one of our 5 pages did not have a link pointing to it from the home-page or one of the sub-pages that was linked from the home-page, chances are it will never be picked up for inclusion in the search engine results.

Don't just rely on the links in your main menus as the sole means for linking your internal pages. It's important that you add links anywhere it makes sense, especially within the body of your content. For example, imagine we have a website about auto insurance that contains a page titled "Auto Insurance Programs". In this webpage our content contains information on three distinct auto insurance programs that we can find from most insurance providers. Perhaps the page does a quick comparison of the programs or a general overview. In any case, the page is made up entirely of strong, rich content. This page a perfect page candidate for internal linking! When a search engine spider scans the page, it's looking for links to other pages that are relevant to the content within the page. In this case we would want to create links to each of the three distinct auto insurance programs within our site, each being it's own page. When the page is complete there would be three links within the content of the page that link to three distinct pages that are completely relevant to the content in the page. The major search engines put more weight on links surrounded by text.

Properly linking your WebPages is an extremely important task in your SEO efforts. Not only do links act as a method for spiders to index your site, they also tell the engines about the content of your site's pages. Though you never want to over-do the number of links on a page, the general rule of thumb is to link to an internal page where ever it makes sense.

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The Importance of Anchor Text