Structuring Your Internal Links

Structuring Your Internal Links

There are two main types of internal linking –

hierarchical and mesh Linking.

Hierarchical linking

Hierarchical linking is where one or more sitepages on your website (such as the main page) are considered more important than other web pages. Important web pages are linked to from all other web pages in the website, but not all web pages cross-links between each other. This concentrate Page Rank (PR) on your most important web pages. Most websites should create a hierarchical linking , whereby the main page and the most relevant service, content pages are linked to more often than other web pages. In this time, you can increases the chance that your most relevant web page is ranked the highest on Google for your most important keyword or keyphrase.

Hierarchical linking – only important webpages get links from every other page.

The home page typically has the highest PR value as this is the webpage most often linked to, both internally and externally. This may not be ideal if your home page is nothing but a contains little content. In this case, you should redesign your home page to include more content and make it more important to Google. If this is not possible, you should relink internally to your most important keyword or keyphrase or relevant content page.
In the figure, the About Us or Home page is only linked to from a one page. This is because the About Us page is not nearly as the other webpages. So why funnel important PR value to it – instead flow PR importants out of the webpage back to the mainpage.

Mesh linking

Mesh linking is defined as where all webpages are considered equally relevant (to topic, theme, and keywords). This is the simplest linking method in that each page on the website links to every other webpage on the website. Most websites use the mesh linking by default without thinking about it by virtue of having the same menu navigation bar on each webpage that contains the same links. This evenly distributes PR among all web pages in the website, which is not ideal. The following figure illustrates this concept.

Mesh linking – each webpage links to every other page

For example, note that each webpage links to the important About Us page. So why funnel important PageRank value to it? Use hierarchical linking whenever possible!

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