The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
June 2006, Volume 5, Issue 6

Internal Linking: Spreading the Wealth

by Timothy G. Fitzgerald, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

Imagine you are in charge of doling out one million dollars to the charities of your choice. You are tasked with the decision to help one charity by giving them a lot of money, a multitude of charities by giving them each a small share of the money, or something in between. The point is, the more places you spread the money to, the less you have to give to any one place. To me, this would be a tough decision. As a search marketer, you face a similar predicament when dealing with link building.

You’ve Acquired the Assets

You’ve submitted your website to all the applicable categories in all the major search directories. You’ve requested and attained a slew of links from smaller directories and websites. You’ve developed valuable linking relationships with your partners. You are pushing rich content out to users with links back to your website. You’ve brainstormed several new creative linking strategies with your search marketing team. All in all, you’ve developed and implemented an extremely sound external linking campaign. Through these efforts, you’ve amassed quite a bit of link “wealth.” The question becomes, what is the best way to spread the wealth internally?

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

For any given website, it is highly likely that the home page has the best quality and highest quantity of external links pointing to it. With that being the case, it becomes the responsibility of the home page to disseminate link value to the rest of the website. Each URL the home page links to gets a share of the link popularity from the home page. The downside is that the more pages the home page links to, the less value there is in each of the links. When thinking in terms of link popularity, your home page truly is the strategic hub of your website.

Bang for Your Buck

There is no magic number in terms of how many links from the home page is the right amount for a website. In order to get the most “bang for your buck,” reserve links from the home page for those internal pages that are second in line, in terms of importance, to the home page. The keyword phrases that you target on internal pages are usually priorities of your competitors as well, so it may be difficult for your pages to attain prominent visibility within the search properties. With a highly competitive landscape, it is essential that the search properties view these internal pages as key to your business offering.

So what steps should you take to gain visibility on internal Web pages? Create a clear path, starting from the home page, which spiders can crawl to access the secondary and tertiary pages of the site. With each successive step down in the site hierarchy, targeted keyword phrases should become more specific in nature. As keyword searches become more specific (try targeting two and three-word phrases that directly relate to the page content), there will be fewer sites competing for visibility. These deeper pages will be indexed, and should rank well based on the merits of their content. By creating a prioritized site hierarchy, you will ensure that all pages within the site receive exactly what they need in order to perform well within search results. Additionally, users will appreciate an intuitive path with which to navigate your website.

Answering the Million Dollar Question

So what is the answer to the million dollar question? The answer (when it comes to SEO – you’ll need to provide your own moral compass for your charitable endeavors) is to be selective. Choose those pages that will have the most impact to the overall goal of your website. Supplement your internal linking efforts through an external campaign for your secondary pages. Develop tools and place them directly on these secondary pages to encourage external linking. Ideally, these pages will become less dependent on the home page, and can start sharing value with pages that are below them within the site hierarchy.

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: June 2006, Volume 5, Issue 6

Internal Linking: Spreading the Wealth

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
June 2006, Volume 5, Issue 6