The SEO Importance of Interlinking Web Pages

Interlinking your web site pages plays an important role from the SEO point of view. Proper linkage of web pages helps search engines understand the "meaning" of the linked pages as well as the whole website theme. Therefore, this SEO technique should be used to assure that it receives desired attention from the various search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. Many webmasters, site owners and SEO professional spend a lot of time in optimizing the internal linking structure.

To optimize a website, webmasters use both on-page and off-page tactics. The factors that are considered in on page optimization are heading tags, title, keyword density, alt tags, meta tags, etc. On the other hand, the off-page factors for optimizing a web page are based on the number and the quality of inbound links from other websites. Apart from the home-page interlinking, the webmasters should spend some time in optimizing the inner web pages as well, like category or subcategory pages. For e-commerce web sites, on the product page you can display links to similar products. There should be a balance between what search engines will consider similar and what visitors will. For example, the anchor text "red iPhones" is similar for both users and search engines bots an the product page of your White iPhone, but the anchor "rechargeable batteries" may not be a good choice for both types of visitors.

There are many techniques to interlink the web pages. Some of the most used are:

* Image or Navigation links - The ALT attribute of the image tag provides web page interlinking through images. This link is considered to be equivalent to anchor or text links. The image or navigation link is used to create the right keyword density by using appropriate text links.

* Breadcrumb links - The breadcrumb links appears on the top of web-page. Under this technique, the visitor first clicks on the main category then on the sub-category and lastly on the link. With the help of this technique, you can put sub-category under a main category. This link provides keywords as headings for each main category and sub-category.

* Individual links -This type of link is very important in terms of interlinking as they are directly linked with the web-pages. Therefore, each web page is linked to other with the help of navigation menus. For instance, "about us", "contact us" page links are provided on the home page of different websites.

* Subject area link - This link is helpful in the content websites that have information on varied subjects. The subject names can be used as anchor text as it increases link-based SEO relevance.

* Related categories/products/article- useful for e-commerce websites or newspaper websites.

Lastly, interlinking web page helps search engine spiders to navigate on the website and evaluate it in a realistic manner on the basis of keywords and phrases that are used as anchor texts. This improves the page rank of individual web page and decides the overall ranking of the website.