How to maximize your internal backlinks for better search engine ranking!

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You and I do not have much of any control over how others link to our sites and what anchor text they use in those incoming links but we can exert complete control over the anchor text we use between our internal site pages.

By increasing the number and quality of our on-site backlinks we can improve our search engine ranking.

Here's how to do it.

Many web sites have a set of navigation links that go something like this...

All well and good but notice that the anchor text being used is not very useful with respect to backlink relevance.  We can improve the backlink relevance and the usefulness of our internal backlinks by making a simple change.  We can change the "Home" anchor text to describe the subject of our home page instead.

If our web site is about Black Tuxedos for example, we can change the generic "Home" to be "Black Tuxedos"...like so.

Much better.  By making this small change we have now helped the search engine to know that our home page is about "Black Tuxedos".   We have improved the backlink relevance of the link to the home page on our site and gained some SEO value.

But we're not done yet.  What about the link itself?  Instead of just pointing to "/" (which the server evalutes as a link to index.html in the root directory of our domain) we can change the link to point to "/black-tuxedo.html".  We have thus improved our backlink relevance not only by using a more descriptive and keyword appropriate anchor text but now we have added to the backlink quality even more by pointing to a file which we have designated to be the home page.  A file whose name is much more keyword relevant to our site's theme than "/" (I won't go into the details here but you can set the home page to be whatever you want it be through the SWME system.  It does not have to be the usual index.html file.)

But...that's not all!  Not by any means.

At the bottom of most web pages we find a copyright statement.  It usually goes something like this...

I am no lawyer but it is my understanding that we do not have to use our own name in the copyright statement (at least in the U.S.)  We can in fact use an alias that points to us.

What better alias than the web site name itself!  We are the Administrative owners of our domain.  The domain is definitely ours and there is no question about this.  So the domain name serves as a suitable alias to us.  We can use this to leverage the copyright statement and get more backlink relevance for our internal backlinks through it by changing the name to a live link to our domain!  Like so...

We have now created another relevant backlink with keyword relevant anchor text by simply changing the copyright holder to our domain name and have thus gained an additional, internal backlink, SEO benefit.

But there's still more!  Many web sites make the header a linkable image that leads to the home page on their web site.  Instead of making the header image linkable why not use an image for the background of the header and then superimpose on that image a text link with keyword appropriate words pointing to our home page!

Our header will look just like it did before but we will have gained some more backlink relevance and SEO benefit by making our web site title in the header an actual text link to our home page.

One more tip that I would like to pass along...

We should be interlinking to each of our relevant site pages within our web sites from within the text content of each page.

For example on an internal page about Black Tuxedos we might find the following text...

We can get SEO backlink benefit by changing relevant text to links that point to different pages on our site.  Like so...

Notice that we turned the words "Black tuxedos" into a live link.  It now points to "http://www.blacktuxedos.com/black-tuxedos.html".  Search engines will see that link and will readily detect through such internal linking that our home page is about...you guessed it...black tuxedos.

While I have pointed mainly to the home page in the above examples such internal linking and use of relevant anchor text can be used to point to all our internal site pages that add to our site theme.

There are other things that can be done to improve the SEO benefit of our internal links but for now I will leave it at that.  

If you have any comments or questions be sure and leave them below.

Thanks.

Carlos