Importance of Internal Linking

[John Scott]

Directory type.

[BingoBalls]

Would you use alt tags on internal links or doesnt it matter?

[John Scott]

I love ALT tags for image links - they are very powerful.

[BingoBalls]

Yeah thats something that I am making sure gets done as I have seen you talk about this many times before.

[Webfu]

If your using ALT tags to link into your internal pages, do you think its going to far by naming your pictures your keyword?

ie... keyword.jpg or category.jpg

I think some might consider this spam ?

[John Scott]

I don't consider it spam.

[ScottFish]

nope not spam at all! ATL tag usage isn't spam either, I get tons of traffic from google images due to nice ALT tag and image keyword usage.

[freetraff]

I think the importance of wise internal linking is the smarter navigation on the site. So that the visitor is not lost on some pages. Internal linking can glue the reader to your site pages.

I know that search engines are not sure on how exactly different aspects of internal linking should be estimated. But I always think about how this will help my site and my business, and only then how search engines will view on this.

[dciseo]

Originally Posted by ppokyh

Lately I have been wondering how important internal linking is... I know mine is very pathetic.

Is it as important as external linking?

Hi,

Yes, internal linking is very important. Also you should add one-way links to your website to increase SE rankings

[Web Gazelle]

Originally Posted by JohnScott

I love ALT tags for image links - they are very powerful.

Do you think the alt attribute of image tags helps influence how images rank in image searches?

[John Scott]

I'm guessing they do. I also know that the file name helps a lot.

[Webfu]

Seems like both the ALT and the image name hold a fair amount of mojo when trying to rank a page or site. Nice to see a lot of people haven't caught onto this concept yet. Often {not always} when you do a google image search for a keyterm the images that rank the highest, are from the websites that are positioned well on the first 2 pages for that term.

[manca]

Originally Posted by colinfu76

where do i can get the sitemap to link all my internal link?

and how site map work..thanks

Hey colinfu,

Google has a Sitemaps service ( http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ ). You can build your XML sitemap and submit it to google. Their service will provide you very nice stats about when crawl accessed your site, which pages have errors, what rankings you obtain, etc...

You can build your classic HTML sitemap as well though. That will help bots crawl all your internal pages which is cool...

Either way you do it, just do it

[manca]

Internal linking is one of the main things to keep in mind when doing a SEO for a complex website with many pages. Linking to all your internal pages (from the main one) and vice versa not only helps crawls find your pages easly, but also give some extra points to your site, because it contains some depth and not just one page. You might notice some good rankings of blogs, that's why they have regulary updated content and very well internal linking (from main page to categories, and perm. links to all posts)...that's the main point.

So get your sites link to all pages which are on domain and I am 100% sure you'll obtain some nice rankings and google will love your site. Make sure you don't have dup content though, as this could trigger content dup penalty.

My 2cc...

[Thomas Schulz]

I think internal linking with good anchor text can actually matter quite a lot.

If you have a well-established site, good PR etc. it seems, from my experiments, it can help you get certain pages (e.g. articles) to near-top in most SERPs.

[John Scott]

Internal anchor text is still useful, but nowhere near as powerful as it was two years ago.

[gfriedm1]

Originally Posted by JohnScott

I wrote something on Internal Linking quite a while ago.

Basically, site-wide links are not ideal. A directory type internal linking architecture is much better for SEO.

just read through your internal linking article. good information, but here is what i didn't understand.

in the beginning you used monster.com as your example saying that the word jobs does not appear anywhere on the site. but if you view source the meta tags read:

<meta name="description" content="Welcome to Monster, the biggest and most comprehensive internet job search engine on the web. Find a job that will make you happy with our extensive job/career search database.">
<meta name="keywords" content="job, jobs, job sites, job vacancies, find a job, search jobs, resume tips, monster, job search engines, internet jobs, it jobs, computer jobs, retail jobs, healthcare jobs, sales jobs, finance jobs, engineering jobs, legal jobs, human resources jobs, HR jobs, admin jobs, customer support jobs, customer care jobs, career advice, careers, technology jobs, managerial jobs, diversity, equal opportunity, career search, job descriptions, temp jobs, part-time jobs, contractor jobs">

plus the title tag has the word jobs in it.

but here is my real question. I am developing a site www.prepaid-cards-phonecards.com. On the homepage is my calling cards and at the bottom i have another link to each calling card page. If the link already exists on the page, does adding another link to the same location weaken the power of the link?

[brookswould]

I think when it comes to having a high quality site, before you go seeking IBL's it's really important to have a strong foundation with your internal linking... Am I right, people?

[web10]

Originally Posted by brookswould

I think when it comes to having a high quality site, before you go seeking IBL's it's really important to have a strong foundation with your internal linking... Am I right, people?

Not really, both are important.
You can get IBLs without doing any internal linking, your home page will still get the PR

[brookswould]