The best practice for a successful SEO campaign is none but aligning your internal link connectivity. In many cases webmasters implement their maximum efforts in page content, title tags, Meta data and maximum time they consume in earning the external link. But they missed the most important thing that is how to navigate search engine into their website. I implement my most of the time in designing interlinking structure for many of my sites and believe me all my efforts helped me in gaining effective search results Interlink structure for your site success is extremely important.
Interlinking also helps to improve PageRank as it works on Links = Votes concept defined by Google. Suppose page A link to Page B so in other words Page B is getting voted by Page A as it is relevant to the words which is used in link text for connecting these two Pages. In the same way if Page B get voted by other pages the chances for getting better ranking for keyword which are targeted for the Page B also increases. Google Engineer Matt Cutts had defined the three most important internal “link structures” they are “global navigation template”, “breadcrumb navigation”, “alternative link structures.” So here is the best explanation why all these are important and techniques to optimize them.
1) Global Navigation Template-
From the optimization point of view especially for big sites global navigation template including the logo ALT tags plays the most important role in Internal Link Structure.Because of Links = Votes as all the pages provides their votes to your template.. It’s critical but very important to plan a Text links at a most beneficial place and also verify that those links get indexed.
Tip- Never make your template in Java or Flash because search engines are unable to read their links and this will snatch an opportunity from you to get credit of your internal links. Use CSS Template for the Help.
2) Breadcrumb Navigation-
Breadcrumb Navigation is the second most beneficial internal linking structure especially for sub pages which are linked to main page. Breadcrumb Navigation can pay you a really big SEO bonus for those pages.
Links in the Global Navigation Template take place in the source code before Breadcrumb Navigation links that means the links that are in the content Spot. That’s because the content links comes after the Global Navigation Template atleast in Google.
So as Global Navigation Template gives all the priority to the main page so there is no need to make a text link for home page because it is totally useless. So here you can snatch a opportunity to give vote to other page. It would be more effective if those page would be relevant or informative to the Keywords they are linked with. It will also help to navigate traffic and also search engine. As a result the page that got voted high would be considered a important page for a website. Hence they get more attention from search engine and this will also helps them to earn Google currency (Page Rank)
3)Alternative Link Structures-
This is last but not the least Alternative Link Structure that defines the set of the links situated anywhere on the page in the form of template or in any other way that targets the group of pages with common or relevant keyword. This type of optimization is really helpful to highlight the high priority pages. We all are very familiar with this kind of Link Structure but still people miss the exact concept that I mention here. Most popularly they are represented as “Related Topic”, “Recent Updates” or “Most Popular Pages” or any type of arrangement of the links that are relevant to the User of that page.
Conclusion: The main purpose of this type of optimization is to help users to navigate their site more and more effectively for the information they are looking for. Be sure that the text link used in structure is keyword focused as you are helping search engine to navigate by the relevancy and also assist users by making your site surfing easy.
Always remember Keyword research is not an SEO research. It is a User research. Implementing that user research into your content and your site structure inspire a perfect SEO.
