One of the biggest SEO mistakes that you can possibly make is designing your pages in a way that kills the internal linking between them. Doing so is a one-way ticket to horrible rankings.
Internal links are more important than anything else, even page titles and content. Without good linking, how is the search engine suppose to find your pages? As I have said numerous times before, search bots are stupid. They are very very stupid.
This is one of those topics that I think “regular” “non-seo-savvy” people are better at than 99% of the webmasters out there. While SEOs focus on all the extra stuff like optimizing your pages for your niche, getting external links, etc, they fail to focus on the internal structuring of our site.
Here are a few simple guidelines for completely avoiding this problem:
Every Page Should Be Linked To
A bit of a “duh”, but still important. No matter what, every single public page (eg: not in a user management panel), must have at least one internal link to it. Preferably more, but one does the job pretty nicely. Many CMS’s already do this, WordPress, for example, automatically generates archive pages for your blog as well as your categories that point a few links to each page.
Make Your Pages Easily Accessible
Basically what you want to do is not have your pages be 10 levels deep. Depending on the structure of your site that may be impossible, but you should really try to make each page as easily accessible as you can.
Don’t make your links like this: home->page1->page2->page3->page4,
Instead make this like this (if possible): home->page1->page4.
Better Anchor Text
Just like with external links, bots love it when you use good anchor text for your internal links. Generally I just use the page title of the page I’m linking to (assuming your titles are good).
Use A Sitemap
No, not the XML-style sitemap, I’m talking about good ol’ fashioned HTML sitemaps that link to your most important pages. Don’t link to every page, only the important ones.
Please take note, some types of sites (like blogs) don’t work well with regular sitemaps.
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