Many bloggers focus so much on implementing a backlink strategy, they somehow fail to create an internal-link strategy. Link-building isn’t an either or proposition. If you're looking to build a strong working strategy for search engine optimization (SEO), it’s both and situation.

Links add quality and value to your website by helping in:

•Visitors to move forward beyond the main index page.

•Enabling the sharing of useful, relevant content that’s deeper on your site.

•Broadening paths to guide search engine finders or bots so they find your content more easily.

All this has SEO implications: The easier you make it for both humans and search engines to search and navigate through your website, the better and faster it will index in search results.

Internal links: A Road to site content

Internal links have ability to form pathways to content within your own website. Like roads through a forest, they help site visitors and search engines to a meaningful destination. Consider site visitors' navigation path: let us imagine that the visitors land on sites from the index page, they can actually enter into website from anywhere: the "About" or "Services" page, a blog post or even your contact information via an online directory. 

SEO and internal links

More importantly, the internal links help engine spiders or bots to find and index content. Internal links provide a web like structure upon which spiders crawl among your site's interlinking URLs. Once spiders or bots find the content, they can add it to their enormous database of information used to fetch pages that match a searcher's keywords.  

The easier you can make the bots' job, the better they will like you. That’s a simplified paradigm, but you can also think of it this way: If a search engine has thousands of pages to search and it gets to the end of a page without finding another link, it’s will move on to another site. You might have more pages to look, but it will take the search engine a long time to search them.

Linking tips

To get the desired results from your internal-linking efforts, you can follow some rules: 

•To understand your site’s current link structure and profile, run your site through a free tool such as Open Site Explorer.

•Consider linking any orphan pages to at least one other page within your site.

•Try include at least one relevant, hyperlink within your each blog post to another post on your site. This simple trick ensures your blog posts always landing to other pages on your site.

•Always create links from relevant anchor text. Keyword rich anchor text will surely improve your profile and help the spiders to do their jobs with less efforts.

•Don’t worry about links from Flash, JavaScript or other plug-ins. Spiders usually can’t read them, anyway. That’s another good reason to use them sparingly.

•To avoid confusion, use a standard linking color format on your site. Most websites use blue or green to indicate a hyperlink. If you do use any color, use it everywhere, so readers begin to identify links.

•Avoid overwhelming a page with links. Padded sites look like spams to visitors, and search engines typically stop reading links around the 150 link-per-page mark. If you have too many links on a page, you risk your site being considered as poor or spammy. 

•Always make your links natural for human readers first, rather than search engines prioritizing.

•Links must add value to the page itself and to the user experience. Never add links just for internal-linking purposes. 

The net effect on your SEO

Tweaking your internal-links strategy isn't likely to produce an immediate effect on your search-engine results pages (SERPs) indexing. But fabricating an internal-link plan does have a fruitful effect on your overall SEO work. Managing internal links, keywords and other elements will help search engines locate and index your content. This is the real key to being found online. 

Tell me about your views and results if you applied the techniques in the comment box below.