It’s the internal links, stupid….

Everybody on the net seems to be link crazy these days. People whoring themselves out for a link here and a link there. Much like politicians selling themselves for votes (great analogy, now that I think on it…), they think of bold and even risky (I don’t use the tired old black hat and white hat cliches because life is a business decision–not a cowboy show.) schemes to pull in external links in order to impress Google.

When all is said and done, it matters how many external links you got, true. BUT as was said in a recent US presidential election, It’s the Economy, stupid. When the economy is working right, the votes will come. In the SEO world, It’s the internal linking structure that pushes the link love around and when it is properly optimized, provides the best SERPS for the amount of external inbound links you have.

John Scott addressed it in April of last year. I read it at the time, thought I got it, and filed it away “for future use”…the future is now and it is time to pay attention. With external links becoming increasingly valuable, and the time that it takes to build them more costly in terms of time (read: money), it only makes sense that the person making the best use internally of those external resources wins. It was true then, but it is both true and CRITICAL now.

Jim Boykin’s treatise of internal linking was a damn fine look at the basics of it and his tool is pretty cool as well. He offers some good suggestions on where to start.. Allow me to throw in some specific ideas on it as well…

Defensible Internal Linking

1) THINK about your Nav bar and other links from the index page. PLAN which pages and ONLY which pages are going to be the ones which rank for you.

2) If you don’t need to rank with it, put enough internal links to it to keep it out of the supplemental index, but CONSERVE where you don’t need the juice. Having a site with all equally strong pages link juice wise gets you NOWHERE if none of them get you to your goals. Remember that it takes more now than before to stay out of the supplemental index. Using proper internal linking helps you spend less time whoring for external links.

Methods of spreading the link love:

• Nav Bars limited to pages which you expect to rank.
• Ummm..Sitemaps
• Directories
• Glossaries
• Archives
• Breadcrumbs (properly designed)
• Appropriate content linking (you can link to references in your own site just as well as other people’s. You are an authority, right?

Check out your ratio of internal links to external ones. I have seen VERY successful sites with almost 15 times as many internals as externals. (You can find this with Google Webmaster Tools) Most sites are FAR from that number. Most have far less internal links than external inbound links. While in my opinion the STRUCTURE is far more important than the number (read that twice-it is important), the idea is that most webmasters spend far too little time worrying about the internal links. They are too busy trying to buy, beg, borrow or bootleg the next external link, only to put it to marginal use.

There are only so many external links to be had without making yourself a huge spam target above the radar…let’s practice link strength conservation and good management. (grin)

Have a great day!