Many dentists who have knowledge of the workings of search engine optimisation ask the question- how many links are going to my site? With this, the majority of them would mean external links from other websites; they completely forget (or are unaware of) the importance of on page internal linking too.
External links are a very important tool in the arsenal of anyone looking to optimise their site for search engines, however if you want to kick start your rankings, start with the easiest links of all- your own!
A good internal linking structure can ensure that your website is properly crawled by Google and other search engines, making sure that all pages are found and appear in search. It also builds the relevancy of a page as a keyword phrase, in addition to increasing the page rank of an internal page.
So how do you create a good internal linking structure? At dental design we do this for all of our new clients during site build anyway, however for your reference, a good internal linking structure does not use images as links to pages. Furthermore, we use the footer to your advantage by adding links to your internal pages. It’s a good idea not to make these links appear ‘spammy’ and to make sure that the links read well to the human eye, so not to alienate not only your customers but the spiders too.
In line links are also good if used sparingly, again be careful not to appear ‘spammy’ to your customers. Instead, be useful and direct readers to related content on your site which they may not necessarily have found otherwise.
By adding internal links in this way, you are likely to increase your PageRank. PageRank is a Google penned term, one way to measure this is the amount of clicks away from your homepage an internal page is on your site. Therefore, a page which is linked to from the homepage is more likely to have more weighting than a page which is four or five levels deep. Although, this does not mean you should link to every single page from your homepage, as this could look ‘spammy’ and actually weaken your page rank weighting.
To conclude, improving your site structure in this way will not guarantee page one rankings for every search term you are targeting, however it will help improve some of your rankings and make it easier for both seo spiders to crawl your site to pick up new content and for your customers to navigate the website.