SEO basics: correct website structure through internal linking

Many web­mas­ters associate search engine op­ti­mi­sa­tion with link building. This is where external links (directing to your website) are generated in the hope of in­flu­enc­ing search engine rankings in a positive way. Since the Google Penguin update, however, it’s been a lot more difficult to actively practice link building. This is because many – often dubious - link building methods that orig­i­nal­ly had a positive impact on a website’s ranking are now penalized by search engines. Con­se­quent­ly, the websites using these link building are punished with a decreased ranking. Because of this, many website operators have decided to optimize their website’s internal linking and link structure.

Since search engines don’t publish their al­go­rithms, the extent of the influence of an internal link on a page’s ranking can only be estimated. What is known is that internal linking doesn’t influence a site as strongly as external linking. All the same, it is relevant for web crawlers, since they reward a user-friendly internal link structure.

Web crawlers (also known as robots, search bots, or spiders) are computer programs that are used by search engines to evaluate websites. They analyze sites by following their links, and including the detected pages in their index. If a website has a user-friendly internal link structure, this makes it a lot easier for crawlers to evaluate all the web pages, which in turn has a positive effect on the page ranking. A well-linked site is ben­e­fi­cial for both visitors and crawlers.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly with internal links, you can make the most of the link strength of in­di­vid­ual pages: link juice is also passed on in the case of internal linking. Link juice (also called link power) indicates the strength of a link, which is then passed on to the linked pages. If you compare link power to a river, each tributary flowing off from it would represent a link: each section carries part of the link power on further. While an optimal dis­tri­b­u­tion of link juice is one of the most fun­da­men­tal chal­lenges for the search engine optimized structure of internal links, it is by no means the only one.

• In­her­it­ing link juice: link power is es­pe­cial­ly high on websites with good rep­u­ta­tions, meaning it should be dis­trib­uted according to how important the subpages are. It’s important to know that link juice is evenly dis­trib­uted from the output to all the linked web pages. The link power is divided by the number of linked pages. So if a web page links to ten other pages, the linked pages benefit from more link juice than if the web page linked to fifty other pages.

• The number of links pointing to a web page: if many internal links are connected to a certain page, the web crawlers will presume that this page is more important. Central pages (such as a site’s homepage, important subpages, or landing pages), should therefore be the most-linked to. It’s advisable to use internal links rather sparingly, i.e. only when they are useful to visitors.

• Flat link hierarchy: a website’s in­di­vid­ual subpages should not go any deeper than they need to. The starting point is usually the homepage: if it takes ten clicks to reach a page from the homepage, the crawler will rank this page as less important than a page that can be reached in three clicks.

• Position and ap­pear­ance of links: when working out the im­por­tance of links, the crawler also takes into account the structure and the design of in­di­vid­ual web pages. A promi­nent­ly-placed link (e.g. at the top of a page, in large font, or included in an image) is given more worth than less obvious links (e.g. at the end of a long article or in the website’s footer). Links in texts should always be high­light­ed (for example, in another color).

• Context: links to other sites rank even better when both sites contain similar topics. This is where relevant anchor texts come into play. Anchor texts are the part of the text you click on to access the link. If you want to link to another page that has in­for­ma­tion on a product you’re writing about, make sure to include the name of your product in the anchor text. These link texts (whether internal or external) inform the search engine as well as the user about the content of the linked page. Anchor texts should also always be in­di­vid­u­al­ized, since this practice is rated more pos­i­tive­ly by search engines.

• Bread­crumbs: bread­crumb nav­i­ga­tion enables website visitors to keep track of where they are on a website. This is often shown through a line of text, where the in­di­vid­ual menu items are shown along with the site you’re currently browsing (e.g. an online store homepage → online store → pants → jeans). Here, the whole website path is displayed which is helpful to users as well as search engines. If the nav­i­ga­tion­al structure is labeled through schema.org, web crawlers can easily analyze bread crumb nav­i­ga­tion.

• Accompany image links with alt text and title: if an image is linked, you should def­i­nite­ly provide a de­scrip­tive title and an alt text for it. Only then can search engines know what content lies behind the image link.

• Get rid of defective and un­nec­es­sary links: faulty links, which can lead to 404 error pages, should be deleted. The same goes for un­nec­es­sary links; otherwise, precious link juice is just getting wasted on mean­ing­less internal links.