SEO for the Average Joe

This is part one of “How to optimize internal text links and navigation,” and it includes a short SEO video tutorial on how to easily optimize internal linking using a simple SEO strategy and an Excel spreadsheet.  This SEO strategy can be applied to blog links and navigation as well.

This is just a basic SEO tutorial, and represents ONE way of optimizing internal links.  If you have a different link optimization strategy or have questions about this one, I invite you to comment on this post.  If you are looking for a complex, advanced SEO guide to link optimization, this post is not for you.

One of the most underutilized, yet highly impactful, SEO strategies is optimizing your internal links and site navigation.  An easy and effective way to do this is to use targeted keywords within the link text and navigation throughout a web site or blog.  Like so many SEO tactics, this simple improvement will make a big impact on your overall SEO efforts, and help boost your search engine rankings by enhancing search engine crawlability, sculpting page relevancy, and controlling content theming.  It is also a key factor in improving usability and accessibility, which is very important to search engines.

Search engines, like Google, place a lot of weight on the use of links and how pages relate to each other on the web.  Some consider links as one of the primary factors used by search engine algorithms to calculate relevancy and importance (and PageRank for Google).   By ensuring your internal links and navigation contain keyword focused text, you are giving search engines much more information to properly assign value to each page, as well as your web site or blog as a whole.  If you use images in your navigation, including keyword focused ALT attributes (or ALT tags as some SEO professionals and web designers incorrectly refer to them) will help to accomplish this as well.

Implementing SEO for keyword focused navigation and internal linking
So how do you start applying SEO to internal links and navigation?  As with any SEO improvement you make to your web site or blog, start with a clear goal in mind, and build an SEO strategy around that goal.  Think beyond the obvious reason behind dabbling in SEO (to increase search engine rankings).  For an internal linking strategy to be successful, focus on making your site’s navigation and internal links more accessible and intuitive.  Think about the keywords people may use to search for content on your page.  Do some keyword research using a tool like Keyword Discovery or Google AdWords Keyword Tool.  I’ll cover how to do effective keyword research in future posts.  

Start by building a short list of keywords (5-10 initially) for which you are trying to improve search engine rankings.  Once you are pleased with your list, begin navigating through your web site and identify pages on your site that contain content or topics related to those keywords.  Using your keyword list, match web pages on your site with keywords on your list.  Make sure the content on each page is highly relevant to the keyword(s) with which you have matched them.  NEVER use keywords that are not very relevant to the content on the page to which you are linking.  

I have created a brief SEO video tutorial on how to optimize internal text links & navigation using Microsoft Excel as a simple SEO tool.  If you don’t have Excel, any spreadsheet program will do.  See below for an example.  Keep in mind that this a basic SEO tutorial designed to get you started. 

Also, look for part 2 of SEO for internal links & navigation, which will focus on making sure your links are search engine friendly and your navigation is crawlable and visible to search engines.