We hear all the time about how important inbound links are to our website, but that the most valuable ones to get are the ones that we can’t influence ourselves. Those are the random links that appear just because someone has found something you say to be linkable. They are great but unpredictable.
Now your own website might have some great navigation in it, maybe even you’ve built some search engine friendly nav bars with text links and drop down boxes that don’t use JavaScript, but how much thought have you given to the other link structure in your site? By this I mean all the links within the text.
Overlooking internal linking is a crime that a lot of us commit. It just seems like an extra hassle at the end of writing a long page when you just want to get your page published. Spend 5 or 10 minutes though on each page, finding text within the body content that you can link to other pages and it will pay dividends. Maybe not quite as great as a good inbound link with great anchor text, but not far off it.
By choosing selective terms within the text and linking them to appropriate pages, you are giving a search engine a much better idea how to categorise those pages other than just with the main navigation in your site. On top of that you are creating a navigational overlay that works in a very different way from standard site-wide navigation.
If you think of creating internal links like that as part of the process of building a page, just like adding a title or a heading, you are stnading your site in a much better position to be correctly indexed and categorised and that can only reap rewards in terms of listings.
