Good Internal Linking Is Vital To The Success Of Your Website

As the volume of pages on the Internet continues to balloon, search engines must continue to become more and more discriminating in choosing which pages to include in their indexes. Proper linking is vital for SEO since it's the internal linking that every site uses that tells the search engines about what pages are the most important. Now are you sending search engines the right message? Put differently, are you telling them your About Us page is just as important as your primary money page? You need to put the focus where it needs to be. This means using both free and paid keyword tools to find the right keywords to target. Then organize those keywords into related groups.

For example if you have a pet supply site you might organize your keywords into a group of dog related keywords, a group of cat related keywords, a group of fish related keywords, etc. Use your homepage to link to the main page within each category. Within those categories, you then develop your individual pages designed to rank for the various keywords in that group. Ideally, pages within each category will link primarily just to other pages within their category not to link to pages in other categories. This keeps each category tightly themed on its keyword group and makes it much easier for search engines to identify which keywords your pages should rank for. And make sure every page in each category links back to its main category page and to the overall site's homepage.

Reinforce the rankings of your most important product page by linking to them from within each group as well. Be consistent in how you link your pages together. Always use the same URL format when linking to your own pages and it's best to use the full URL.

How you structure your directory tree is not especially important but the way you structure your internal linking is. You should know what pages you want to get ranked like product pages, article content etc. and which pages you don't really care about like the TOS, About Us page, Privacy Policy, etc. Besides targeting your internal linking to promote your most important pages and reinforce your site's themes. You also want to place your targeted keywords on those pages to increase their chances of ranking well. Each page should be targeted to a specific keyword phrase. Using modifiers, synonyms, related keywords and long-tail secondary keywords is fine, but you should always have a primary keyword or keyword phrase in mind for each page you're optimizing. Avoid optimizing more than one page for a given keyword. This just confuses search engines as to which page on your site they should rank for that keyword.

Title tags are your most important on-page element, so be sure to get them right. Give each page a unique title tag, and make sure that your keyword appears in the title tag of that page. The ideal title tag is both keyword-rich and enticing to your customers so they'll click your listing.
Keep your titles below 65 characters in length. This is the maximum to use if you want to make sure the complete title gets displayed in the search results on all the major engines. While it's true that character length is not a ranking factor, it's also true that a good looking title in the search results is more likely to get clicked on. So, even though some search engines will display more than 65 characters, if you want your complete titles displayed in all the engines, go with the under 65 character limit.

Give each page a unique meta description tag. Since meta descriptions are not a critical ranking factor, keyword placement is not as important. But, a well-written and customer-oriented description meta tag can greatly increase the number of clicks you get on your listing in the search results. Also, search engines will bold the keywords in your description tag that match those used in the searcher's query, automatically drawing the searcher's eye to them and increasing clicks. So be sure to include your keywords in your description even if they don't impact rankings. Be sure you stick to 160 characters or less to avoid having your descriptions chopped off.