Finally it’s time for part 4 and this time I wanted to write a bit about internal linking in your web application. For many small or login-based sites this is less important, but as soon as you start creating communities, directories and other software with a lot of content that needs to be crawled and indexed for long-tail searches, you will need to create a good internal link structure.
First of all I expect you to know at least the basics of PageRank and how it flows. Go read up on it on SEOMoz or just Google around for it so you get a basic understanding of how it works. This is the basics of why and how we make our link structure.
There is several ways to organize your content, and make a map of the link structure of your application. Some people create “graphical maps” with an easy overview of the pages and the “virtual sitemap”. Personally I create a kind of “technical sitemap”, but that is usually also something I use when building the technical description of a project. This especially helps me when dealing with a lot of dynamic content like in directories. In most cases you want focus on getting PageRank and crawlers directed to your content pages, to make sure they will rank on long-tail keywords as well as get crawled and indexed more often by Google.
At the MozCation in Lima last Friday, I got a few tips that I hadn’t thought about before; Tom Critchlow was talking about SEO for Enterprises, and mentioned one of the things he doesn’t like is pagination. Instead it’s better to use some kind of tags or other content-related to sort your content pages. Based on this I will try to make some updates on BusinessPeru as we have always used pagination on categories with a lot of entries. I will be testing several things to see if they affect the rankings and traffic we receive, as well as the crawl rates from Google.
The same thing goes for my other project, FeedOrganizer, where I am working on a smart way to categorise and sort the content automatically, instead of using basic listing and paginated pages.
I will probably return with a more specific result about my tests and the results thereof, once I actually get to complete all the updates above. Now to get back on track with what the article is actually about…
Internal Linking is both for your users and for the search engines! Like Google time after time is saying, the most important thing is creating good content and making a good experience for your users. But while your users is important, there is no need to make it harder than necessary for the spiders. Make sure that every content page is easy to get to (I usually have the rule of thumbs that it should be max 2-3 clicks away from your home page), and that there is some logic in the structure. If you are trying to rank on specific phrases, make sure they are available directly from the index page of your site; but don’t fill it up with links. Another rule of thumbs is max 100 links on each page, otherwise it might be looked as a spam. Another is to remember the rules of PageRank; filling your pages up with lots of (internal) links, will make the PageRank flow being reduced.
I hope this can help some people to get a better idea of the Internal Link Structure and why it is so important to think about before you develop your web applications. Please throw some comments at me, especially if you have some experience with ways to avoid pagination or just other tips for managing lots of dynamic content in terms of SEO.
This is part 4 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.
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