Does your website structure really affect your rankings?

Your internal link structure allows to you to spread your homepage ranking to the other points of your site. For instance, if there are 2000 outside links pointing to your website, then somehow, your homepage has link power, which you can pass on to your individual pages.  Now, upon disseminating link power to your ‘other’ 100 pages, then each page would get at least 1/100 of this link power.

Your internal link structure also enables you to direct search engines to your other important pages, aside from your homepage. Remember, the more link power the page receives, the greater the chances of that page making higher ranks on the search engines’ results.

I am convinced, but how do I improve my site’s internal link structure?

There are various ways on how you can improve your internal link structure:

You might not believe this, but search engines base their rankings on how deep your links are. For instance, you have to strategically position your most important pages at just a few clicks from your homepage. This way, they will be treated as significant pages.
See to it that your links are related to the page you want to optimize. One of the easy ways to accomplish this is to build links from your own website.

Use only keywords that are targeted and are relevant in the links of these pages.

• Inform search engines of the relevant keywords in your pages.
• Use only absolute links. For instance, do not use thispage.htm but www.yoursite.com/thispage.htm. Many people scrape web contents and if they do, you will benefit from the back links.
• Adding a nofollow attribute to your non-important pages. For instance, your privacy policy page does not need to have a high page rank. This page need not be listed in search engines at all.

Check your links occasionally and remove unnecessary ones.

For whatever reason, you might have duplicated or irrelevant pages on your site. Use the robots.txt or the robots meta tag to boot out these pages from indexing. This way, search engines no longer have to go through the process of analyzing these irrelevant pages. They can now focus on checking the pages that deserve attention, the very pages you want to be ranked.   

You can use the 404 not found errors to redirect traffic to your important pages. You can also use a link checker to occasionally validate your internal site links.

Now you see why optimizing the structure of your pages will affect your search engine rankings. If you already done this part, then the next best thing to do is to obtain more links from other websites. Nothing beats a site with a sturdy internal link foundation!


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