SEO Tutorials: Internal Linking

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to another page on the same website.

Code Sample

<a href="http://www.same-domain.com/" title="Keyword Text">Keyword Text</a>

Whatever keywords you are using in anchor text that should match to the target page.

These type of links are useful for three reasons:

They allow users to navigate a website.
They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.

Internal links are most useful to go from one page to another page and pass the link juice from one to another page.

In this above example there are two internal links for page A. One to page B and other to page E now when crawler comes to page A, it will go to page B and E but it has no way to reach pages like D & C so if page A is having higher page rank then link juice will get pass to page E & B but not to page C & D. Even if you are having good content, keywords on these pages(C & D) then also it will be of no use because crawler will never reach to these pages.

This structure has the minimum amount of links possible between the homepage and any given page. This is helpful because it allows link juice (ranking power) to flow throughout the entire site thus increasing the ranking potential for each page. This structure is common on many high performing websites (Amazon.com, IMDB.com, etc...) in the form of category and subcategory systems.

Where to use proper Internal Linking and common reasons why pages are not indexed ??

1) Links in Submission-Required Forms :Links which are present on submission form or the links which are accessible via any form are invisible to the search engines.

          2) Links in Un-Parseable Javascript: Links built using Javascript may either be uncrawlable or devalued in weight depending on their implementation. For this reason, it is recommended that standard HTML links should be used instead of Javascript based links on any page where search engine referred traffic is important.

             3) Links in Flash, Java, or other Plug-Ins: The links embedded inside Flash, Java applets and/or other plug-ins are usually inaccessible to search engines.

                      4) Links in Robot.txt: Search engine will not crawl links which are present in robot.txt. If you want more information on robots then find this link.

             5) Links in Frames or I-Frames: Technically links in frames and I-Frames are crawlable but users who are having good technical understanding that how search engines index and follow links in frames should use this element.

            6) Links with no follow tag: Links which are having no follow tag will not get link juice coming from main page. For more information please find this link.