Internal Link Structure & Architecture Of Your Website

Did you just start a business online?

So you've just started a new online business venture and the proud owner of a spanking brand new website!

That was the easy part.

Now the fun begins.

Now, it's all about marketing-

And this includes getting and sending the right type of traffic to your website, creating sales funnels, tracking and analyzing your traffic and website just to name a few.

Traffic as they say, is the lifeblood of your website and ultimately your business.

There are 2 ways to drive traffic to your website and business.

Actually there are 3.

1st way- free (in exchange for time, so it's not really free per se)

2nd way- paid (you get traffic now, no need to wait)

3rd- offline marketing- flyers, brochures, banners, radio and your traditional ways of advertising offline. 

Let's talk about free traffic and specifically, optimizing your website to potentially receive free traffic from the search engines. This is called search engine optimization or SEO.

SEO simply means following a set of rules to make sure that your website receives the best possible treatment from search engines such as Google and Yahoo so that they'll show your website in their search results when people are searching with words related to your products and services.

There are 2 factors involved in the SEO aspect of your website.

Your website's on page optimization and the off page aspect of SEO.

On page SEO is basically adhering and again,- sticking to a set of "technical" rules so that the search engines understand what your website is all about and shows it in the best light to people who are searching a particular word  or phrase for your products or services.

One popular topic about on page optimization is the internal site link structure & architecture of your website.

There's been a lot of talk about internal site link structure lately and how it works to keep or pass page rank to  important pages on your website.

Linking is a way of connecting your websites' pages to each other in a strategic manner and a navigational method to optimize the flow of the ranking potential within your website.

More than just a "technical" means of optimizing your website for ranking potential, it should be first and foremost looked at as a way to enrich your website user's experience-  as well as making it easy for search engine robots to effectively crawl all pages of your website.

Internal linking is a way to you to pass one page's authority to another to objectively increase the ranking potential of that page in particular.

Sound confusing?

Don't worry.

Here's all you need to know to effectively use internal linking to boost the potential of your website's ranking potential.

1. Your users should be able to access all of your pages in just 3 clicks of the mouse.

2. Make sure all of your pages are accessible to each other, so that when a search engine robot arrives to your website from an external link, it's able to access all of the pages on your website.

3. Keeping your site's depth of level to only 3 is a good start. Allow access to your 2nd level pages by means of a navigational bar only.

4. Link pages that help people discover other relevant pages on your website.

5. Add rel no follow tags to comments or websites that you do not want to pass page rank to. 

6. Draw out a map and plan of your linking structure and send "link juice" to important pages or top level pages of your website.

7. If you have a blog (always a good idea to have a blog on your domain),  create posts and link them back to relevant pages (content) of your website.

Here's more information from Google about  internal link structuring and architecture to help enhance website user experience and boost SEO efforts for your website.

If you'd like SEO advice for your business, or have questions about search engine optimization, please visit our website and talk to one of our warm and friendly consultants.

Here's to your success!