RSS FeedManaging Menus and Internal Linking on your Website
Suppose you had a non-fiction book with no table of contents? Would you just start reading on page one clear through to end with no idea what is in the book?
Search engines have absolutely no patience with websites that do not provide a “table of contents” and easy navigation to all pages within the website. If you do not provide a logical menu system from the index page to category pages and then to subcategory pages and finally to detailed information pages, you could be inadvertently hiding major areas of your website from search engines and losing out on a lot of search engine rankings.
If you want to test your menu system, see if you can get to EVERY page on your website from index page links to subsequently linked pages. If there are any orphaned pages, they have little chance of being indexed.
So how does one create a great menu or internal linking system for their website? Firstly, take your website subject and divide it into at least 4 but less than 8 “silos” or categories. On your index page provide links to these silo pages and then from them to their subcategory levels and then to the lowest levels, but try to stay at four levels or less. This is really just like outlining that you learned in school.
On each page should be links to the next lower category pages, as well as links upwards for good user experience, but right now we’re talking about search engine spiders, so let’s concentrate on how spiders crawl. Typically, they find your index page first and then “crawl” from it to the pages it links to and from there to the subsequent links, until hopefully they find every page in your site.
When creating internal linking, be sure to name the categories, subcategories, and individual pages with appropriate keywords separated by hyphens, for example, keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html, trying to keep the title on the shorter rather than longer end of the spectrum, so that each keyword will have appropriate weight and won’t get watered down.
Next, use anchor text for each link that displays the appropriate keywords consistent with the page names. For example, instead of the well-worn “About Us” anchor text often found in menus linking to an about-us.html page, why not use your keywords instead, as in “About Our Horse Training” linking to about-our-horse-training.html. Get the idea?
Be sure your links are text links if you want the search engine spiders to be able to follow your internal linking structure. However, if you already have implemented your menus in Javascript or Flash, which search engines skip over, don’t fret. You can put the text links at the bottom of each page. This will enable the search engines spider the links, and it will be useful for visitors who don’t like to run scripts and Flash in their browsers.
With a solid internal link structure and menus, every page in your website has a good opportunity to be indexed and gain high rankings. If you are at all uncertain whether your menu is search engine friendly, be sure to take the extra precaution of including text menus in the footer of your pages with keyword-appropriate anchor text.
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admin @ March 5, 2008