Internal linking refers to the links pointing to other pages within your site. Its importance has not valued as much as external links. But well-built internal links help your site rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs) as well as provide a good user experience. Also, its great advantage is that you have the entire control of how to manage them.
Use these tips to write the most efficient internal links both for your site visitors and the search engines.
1) Make the homepage navigation menu as text links. Images, DHTML, and JavaScript navigation menus look fancy and artsy. But that’s all about looks and the search engines don’t really know how to interpret them. The search engines “read” web pages rather “look” at them. If you’d like to keep your attractive image and dynamic menu effect, make sure that you have text links to those somewhere in the homepage.
2) Use descriptive anchor texts. Make them different from on another even though they point to the same page.
Anchor text is the visible clickable text in a hyperlink. Anchor texts are considered as keywords that user would use to get to the page. Therefore, it’s an advantage when the anchor text describes the content of the page. That is, use the keywords and phrase that would represent the page best.
When you refer to your homepage, give different anchor texts to each link instead of saying ‘Homepage’ all the time.
3) Use nofollow attribute to control which links are more important compared to others. When you add “rel=nofollw” to a hyperlink, the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN don’t count the link in search engine rankings. (There is a debate on Google’s actual behavior on this. It is said Google may still count it a little, or soon it will if not now.)
4) Make the main pages of your website accessible by one or two clicks from your home page. Make them easy to spot by visitors as well. The more clicks it needs, the less important it’s considered by search engines. The more clicks it needs, the more chances there are for users to leave your site. This is user-friendly and search engine friendly design.