Ways to build good internal link structure for SEO of a blog or website

Been writing a lot about SEO these days. Here is one more post based on SEO for a blog or a website. The importance of PageRank is being taken over by many other factors nowadays but PageRank has not lost all its importance because PageRank is directly associated with number of links to a webpage and the number of links to a page is important for the purpose of faster crawling and maintaining freshness of a webpage. Links can be internal or external, just to elaborate for newbies  , internal links are the links from your own website – domain and external are from other websites - domains. Building quality external links is a lengthy process but internal links can be achieved by maintaining a good internal link structure. Internal link structure is extremely important from the perspective of search engine optimization. This article shares some useful information and tips to build a good internal link structure.

Understanding internal link structure

Internal link structure means the way in which links are maintained on pages within  a domain , a blog or a website. This can be by keeping links to own pages on a webpage , by using recent/ latest post , popular post widgets etc. Internal links  structure help fast indexing of new pages and keeping the freshness of old pages on a blog or a website. Search engine crawlers reach a webpage by just crawling or by a sitemap submitted to the search engines or  by links on other pages. When search engine spider reach the homepage or any other page of a website or blog , they look for links on that page and follow links that are not attributed by the HTML “nofollow” attribute. While doing these search engine crawlers also index pages that are linked to a page. Using widgets like latest post will help faster indexing of pages. Widgets like popular post will lead to regular crawling of pages that are popular.


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What to achieve from internal link structure ?

From a good internal link structure we have to achieve the following;
1. Quick indexing of latest posts or new pages
2. Regular crawling of already indexed pages so that search engines understand that the page is live.
3. Regular crawling of popular pages so that we continue receiving traffic to those pages.
4. Arrangements to make sure that search crawlers reach every page on a blog or website when they reach any of the sites page.

Tips to build good internal link structure

Better internal link structure is the need of a website with more pages and frequently updated websites like a blog. These tips are intended to be more useful for such websites.
Tip 1 - Use a latest post widget on your blog.
Tip 2 – Use a popular post widget.
Tip 3 – Use a random post / related post widget .
Tip 4 – Use labels or tags widget.
Tip 6 – Use archive widget in its most simple form.
Tip 7 – Create a page on you website or blog that harbors links to popular posts , latest posts and possible all posts on your blog. Use a feed reader widget that provides possibility to display larger number of posts. Keep a link to these page present on all pages of you blog /website.
Tip 8 – Well known trick but I still mention here is that use “nofollow” attribute to external links on your page.
Tip 9 – Us breadcrumb on you blog.
Tip 10 – Include links to your categories, archives and page groups in the upper part of your pages.
Tip 11 – Keep all important link on you home page because home page is the most popular page of a website.
Tip 12 – Use Open Site Explorer to evaluate most linked pages on your website and keep links to these pages on all pages of your website.