Your free guide to search engine optimization.
Internal Linking and Site Maps
The most effective way to ensure accessibility by search engines to all of the important pages of a website is through good internal linking. These internal links are links within a website's own domain. Common places for internal links include the sites navigation, embedded within the text of pages, and on a site map. A site map lists important Web pages of a site and links to them directly, where possible. It will also visually represent the websites page hierarchy, letting the user know where they are in regards to your website content.
Improving the global navigation of websites provides another
excellent opportunity for enhancing internal linking and search engine optimization. However if the site's
navigation uses JavaScript links and other non-optimal linking methods, these improvements will not sufficiently benefit spiders,
as they will not be able to follow those type links. The navigation should contain text-based links with targeted keyword phrases
within the anchor text and title tag. The same is true for a site map. If the links on the site map are not text-based or do not
contain keyword phrases, that site map does not help the search engine spiders to index your valuable content.
