SEO – On-Site Optimization With Internal Links
Most webmasters dealing with website optimization are focused on keywords, header tags, meta tags, building backlinks, etc. Baclinks have two very important properties: anchor text and “nofollow” attribute. Both properties define quality and value of any link. Website owners spend a lot of time searching for various opportunities to get external links from pages with high PageRank. Those links can significantly contribute to popularity of the website. Usually links with the “nofollow” attribute are considered as less valuable. But this is not the right thinking. In most cases you can easily ignore this attribute–simply focus on the link text. Because link text explains what the page is about, link texts like “click here” or “on this page” are of little use for page optimization. There is nothing you can do if this happens on other websites. Fortunately, there is one group of links where you have all the freedom for anchor text and nofollow attribute–internal links.
Internal links are those which are present on our pages, in menus and various navigations. For all elements on the website we have total control and therefore we can choose anchor texts and whether the nofollow attribute will be present or not. This means that with carefully chosen words we can help both human visitors, web spiders, bots and web crawlers to understand what is on the page where the link is pointing. It sounds simple but most websites are not using the whole power of links. On-page optimization is more than keyword frequency–the whole content describes the page. Every single on-page element, either visible or invisible, contributes to the description of the page.
A typical example of internal link with generic anchor text is the Home button, menu item or link. There is absolutely nothing wrong if you have a quick way to the homepage. But is some cases it would be possible to slightly modify this text to more accurately describe the home page, for example with the name of the website or any other suitable phrase. The same applies to all menu items and other links on the page. Try to use words or phrases that most accurately describe target pages. Avoid links with text “click here”. Modify the sentence to include appropriate text to link to another page. Even for links that point to external pages it makes sense to create meaningful anchor texts. This will never hurt your website and others will appreciate it. Internal links count as externals do. If you have a high PageRank internal page, links on it will transfer this “reputation” to other internal pages.
