Optimizing your internal link structure

Let’s begin by quickly talking about what an internal link is. An internal link is a link from a webpage to another resource on the same domain. That resource may be another webpage (what we’ll be focusing on here) but can also include links to media files, downloads and more.

Here are two primary considerations we need to make when thinking about our website’s internal link structure:

1. Users. Obviously, you should first consider when thinking about where to place links on a page and where they should lead. We want to get users from where they are to where they want to go (or where we want them to go) as quickly and easily as possible.
2. Search engines. Another critical consideration is how a search engine will view the internal links on your site and how they will pass their weight.

I’m going to leave discussions around the first point above to others stronger in design and UX and focus here on what we need to think about from an SEO standpoint when we’re viewing our internal link structure.

I’m going to assume that we all understand that broken links bleed PageRank and are horrible for SEO and UX, so we’ll skip that point and move on to the more technical side of link structures. So, let’s start with …

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About The Author

Dave Davies

Dave Davies founded Beanstalk Internet Marketing, Inc. in 2004 after working in the industry for 3 years and is its active CEO. He is a well-published author and has spoken on the subject of organic SEO at a number of conferences, including a favorite, SMX Advanced. Dave writes regularly on Beanstalk's blog and is a monthly contributor here on Search Engine Land.