Strengthen your site – and make it easier for the search engine spiders to index your pages – by boosting the power of your internal linking.

The term “internal linking” might be new to you. If so, here is some helpful info:

• Link: A link – or a hyperlink – is text that, if clicked upon, electronically takes you from one location on the Web to another location.
• Inbound link: An inbound link is hyperlinked text that starts on a web site other than your own and points to a spot on your web site.
• Internal link: An internal link is hyperlinked text that links from one location on your web site to another location, also on your web site.

The focus of this blog post is on creating internal linking that is effective and strengthens your site. (Here is information about inbound link building techniques, plus an e-book review that focuses on effective inbound link building strategies.)

You might be wondering why creating hyperlinks —and optimizing them with keyphrases – is so important for the success of your web site.

Creating hyperlinks that provide clear direction are important for three reasons:

• These hyperlinks help human site visitors navigate the site and find what they need, whether it’s information or a product or a service.
• When you provide logical site navigation cues with clear internal linking, this makes it easier for site visitors to explore your site for a longer amount of time; as you educate them with your helpful material, it increases the likelihood that they’ll begin to browse your products and services – and potentially end up buying them.
• Optimized hyperlinks offer thematic cues for the search engine spiders. Once the spiders understand the theme of a page, they can index the URL – and then return it in response to a relevant query. In other words, if a URL is not indexed by the search engine spiders, it cannot appear in the search engine results pages.

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