Summary:

Internal Linking is very important to the success of a websites for search engines and visitors. If search engines cannot crawl your web site you will not appear in the SERP, which will result in no visitors. If how ever you do manage to get some visitors, you won't keep them for long if they struggle to navigate your website.

This article is intended to help you improve the linking structure of your website, help search engines crawl and index your pages.

There are various different ways to create a link on your website, but not every method will allow search engines to crawl your website. Below is a list of the common methods of linking.

Text HTML Links - This is the most common and the most easiest method of creating a link on your website. This method is also the best for search engines to crawl. It is also recommended by Google.

JavaScripts - Search engines can not yet process Javascript so any links you create using Javascript will be useless in terms of SEO

Flash - This can make your website look nice but search engines cannot index Flash yet so not only will your links be ignored but so will the content. Also if your visitor has not installed Adobe Flash then they will not see the links either, making it impossible for them to navigate your website.

Standardised Links

When you create a link to a web page it is best practice to always use the exact same link because Search engines will see each link as a completely different page, they do not know they are all pointing to the same place.

Below is an example of four different ways you could link to the our homepage:

• http://www.s2h.co.uk/
• http://www.s2h.co.uk/default.asp
• http://s2h.co.uk/
• http://s2h.co.uk/default.asp

You can use different methods to link such as relative (e.g. "../folder/page.asp") and absolute (e.g. "/folder/page.asp") but when you click the links you want the address bar to display exactly the same.

Is this page for Search Engines?

When you create a link to a page on your site you should always ask your self "Do search engines want to index this page?" By this I mean does this page have any content or add any value to your web site?

Example of pages that are not relevant to search engines are listed below:

• Registration and login pages.
• Member only pages.
• Administration Areas.

If the page you are linking to is not one you want a search engines crawling or indexing, either for its lack of value or because they do not have access to it, then you want to add the rel="nofollow" attribute. The example below shows how to add the Nofollow tag to your link:

<a rel="nofollow" href="page.asp">Link Text</a>

Linking With Keywords

It is important to creating text links with descriptive keywords as the anchor text as search engines will use the anchor text to help them assign keywords to your pages. Not only will this help search engines but it will help visitors with the accessibility of you web site, as recommended by W3C.

For example if I was to create a link to the Web Wiz Forums section of the site it would be a good idea to use that as my Anchor Text as it is descriptive and a relevant keyword. It is in nobodies interest to have "Click Here" as it is neither descriptive nor a keyword and you should avoid using such phrases as your Anchor Text.

Below is an example Anchor Text.

<a href="page.asp">Anchor Text</a>