What is internal linking and why is it important for SEO? Well the search engine spiders / robots need to be able to crawl your website in order to index it. If you are just getting your head round SEO and are not from a technical back ground, you might not understand what a search engine spider or robot is, I certainly didn’t. Crawling is something children do before they learn to walk or
…for adults
historically after to many drinks on a Saturday night, it was the only option for getting up the stairs, and an index… that’s how you find what you want in a book right?

I will outline a very simple website that I think we can all relate to and then explain how internal linking will help your SEO.

ABC Plumbing. As the hypothetical name suggests
…they’re plumbers who carry out boiler repairs, are Gas Safe registered alongside central heating installation and maintenance.

So if you start to put this together you will see I have made it easy and I have presented 3 logical pages you can optimise:

Home page: Plumbing / plumbers as that is their main service.
Boiler Servicing: Boiler repairs, Gas Safe Registered, combi boilers
Central Heating: Central heating repairs, central heating installation

Hopefully you have 3 pages nicely set out with well written paragraphs about each one of your services. What happens next is the search engine finds your website, eager to gather all the information you have presented to it and take it back ready to present to the world.

Sadly on your home page you have forgotten to link through to all the other wonderful text that you have spent hours putting together, and the search engine goes home with all your information about plumbing, but nothing about your boiler servicing or central heating services.

However if on your home page you happen to mention a phrase about boilers, and something about central heating installation, and you link that phrase to the relevant page. While you are at it you see on your boiler page you have mentioned plumber, and central heating servicing, so you link plumber back to the home page and you link central heating servicing back to the central heating page. Next time the little spider comes to crawl your website for information, it reads the home page, but then it stops! Hang on a minute what do we have here… a whole page about boiler repairs, and while it is wondering around your boiler page it realises you have a whole page about central heating.

Now instead of trotting off home with one page it is trotting off home with 3, and to you that means your 3 carefully optimised pages are now safely stored away ready for people to find them.

I hope that next time you hear the words spider or robot, crawling and indexing, you wont automatically think of the 8 legged black insect, and the inability to climb the stairs after a fateful Saturday night (all be it happy memories of days gone by). Internal linking is solely there to ensure the search engines and people using your site can navigate effectively and taking away the important information they need.

News: In November Google rolled out breadcrumbs display in SERPs. The idea is that when a URL for a listing is too long it will be replaced by a breadcrumb, to help a user understand the context of that web page. Google quotes

“Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of Vint Cerf (Google’s Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result, “www.google.com/corporate/execs.html,” shows that the page is located in a page about “execs,” under “corporate,” which is on the “google.com” site. This can provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information.“

Tutorial : This week we are going to look at the importance of internal linking for both usability and search engine optimisation. We have put together an example together that distributes a set of keywords throughout a simple 3 page website.

References:

http://www.seo-creare.co.uk/examples/internal-linking.html