Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

The internal linking of your pages is very important to the Search Engines. Internal links are the links on your website to other pages on your website. Improper internal linking can cause parts of your website to go unnoticed by the Search Engines. Most Search Engines recommend that all pages of your website can be accessed by no more than two clicks from your home page. Pages that are deeper than three pages can be left out by the Search Engines. In general, Search Engines will find pages much deeper than three levels. However, since most Search Engines suggest that your web pages be within two clicks of your home page, I suggest that you do this.

One easy method of making the Search Engines aware of all the pages on your site, is by creating a site map. A site map helps the Search Engines in two ways:

1.It makes it easier for the Search Engines to crawl all of your pages.
2.It adds an extra internal link to each page on your site.

I highly recommend that you have text links pointing to every page on your site. This allows you to put relevant anchor text in the link to each page. The anchor text, is used by the Search Engines to help them determine what your page is about and raises your Search Engine ranking for the words used in the anchor text. For example, take a look at my wife and her friend’s website: http://www.delightfulchild.com/

Notice how all the links on the left hand side are text links that describe what that section of their website is about. The text link counts more towards their website’s rankings than a graphic link would. To see this in effect, type in “Organic Gifts for Mom”, into Yahoo®, MSN®, or Google®. Notice that their website comes up in the top 10 in each Search Engine for that term (#1 in Yahoo and MSN at the time of this writing). In less than a month of adding this page to their website it was ranked number 1 in all three Search Engines for the term “Organic Gifts for Mom”. There are several reasons for this, one of which is the fact that their internal links use the anchor text “organic gifts for mom” to link to the organic gifts for mom section of their website.

Internal link structure is also important in passing Page Rank® from page to page. While I don’t believe in hording Page Rank®, it is important to interlink as many of your like-minded pages as possible. This will distribute Page Rank® around your website more evenly and more importantly indicate to the Search Engines what each page is about. That is what anchor text does for the Search Engines, it helps the Search Engines know what each page is about.