Internal Links – They Are Important !

Links, Links and Links !! Most of the Internet entrepreneurs who have atleast some idea about the search engines are often engrossed about links. Yes, Links do play a very important role to affect a website’s search engine rankings and the business it does. However, in most cases, I have seen that webmasters are more concerned about getting inbound links from external sites and often tend to ignore the internal links.

We need to understand while external links are important, internal links are actually the life line of any web based business.

As a webmaster you would definitely want your visitors to be able to visit every part of your website and for that they need a easy navigation path. Your need to set up your internal links in a way that they guide your visitors in a logical path throughout the website. Though a cool flash menu or an equally atractive Javascript menu might be pretty interesting for some visitors, think about those visitors whose browser do not support scripts or flash – It is most important that you provide a simple HTML links for all your pages.

Besides, this ensures that search engine bots are also able to crawl your site properly. Search Engines hate flash or JavaScripts and they would not crawl the links you set in them. Feed the bots with plain HTML links and your pages will definitely be indexed.

To add to it, if you are using suitable anchor texts to link to relevant pages that adds more value to your internal links. For example, in your site about Widgets, you can have a particular page about Red Widgets – linking to that page using the text “Red Widgets” is much more beneficial compared to using “Widgets1” or “Other Widgets” etc for the anchor text. This helps your visitors to understand where the link leads them to and also the page gets benefit in terms of search engine positioning.

In addition to enhancing the navigation system and facilitating search engines to crawl the site properly, your links can also help to increase your conversion – Yes, Links can affect your sales.

Think of a big retail shop, you have just picked a shirt that you like and have almost made up your mind to buy it but you dont see a salesman anywhere — you might just consider looking for a few other shirts and in the process forget about the one you thought you would buy 🙁 Yes – this happens in web too !!

If you want to increase your conversion add links stratezically; if there’s a page giving small intro about the various products you sell make sure all of them have a link directly to the page that gives details about the products and from there it should have a prominent link to the order page.Make your links attractive and easy to recognize so that more people clicks on it.

When I say, “Make your links attractive and easy to recognize” – I really don’t mean something flashy or zazzy.. it has been observed that most Internet users are more likely to click on the same old Blue Underlined Links compared to the fancy ones that we blend in with other content using our CSS skills.From the advent of Internet that was how a link used to look originally and in my opinion its basic e-ntuition that people tend to click or hover their mouse over any Blue and underlined text on the web. I am sure most of you have already done that to the above phrase , even though it is not linked.

Dan gives a lot of good stuff on this and also how to track which links are more effective for your website. He has mentioned quiet a few analytics tools and stresses a bit on measuring “average page views per visitors”, though click through rate on a link is probably a more accurate measure for the links effectiveness (because a page may be accessible through multiple links and you might just change the link at one place for testing purpose). I personally find Google Analytics pretty handy for this. The “Site OverLay” link found under Executive Summary section will show you the click through rate for any link on a particular page of Your website. You can very easily compare the click through rates on a link blended using CSS and later by putting it back to the blue and underlined form.It is important that you do the testing on a measurable amount of traffic (atleast 1000 visitors) to get proper identifiable results.