Internal links are the links that point to the contents that are distributed in different pages of your websites. Thus the internal links all possess the same domain name. The number of internal links increases as the number of pages of the website increases. There are certain strategies to be followed in order to make your website effective in creating internal links, without affecting the optimization of the website.
Search engines use specific algorithm to segregate the websites on the basis of the relevance of the contents in each page. According to the Pagerank specifications, your website should not contain more than 100 links in the home page. This is the maximum number, and obviously you need not include 100 links. It is ideal from the search engine’s point of view to include a maximum of 20 links in the home page of a website. If you supply more links in your home page, you would be sacrificing the search engine index of your website. The website may be ignored for having ‘too many internal links’ in it.
There is certain order for giving internal links in the websites. According to the search engine, each page of the website is considered as a stand-alone website, and each page is indexed separately based on the content value in it. Therefore it is very important to include the contents as well as the links that is very much relevant to a particular page. Thus the home page should contain the most important contents and the primary level links. The primary level links lead the user to the secondary page, where the secondary information is contained, and this page contain the secondary links that directs the user to the tertiary information, and so on. In addition to these forward linking, each page in your website should contain at least one backward link or a link to the home page.
This structured design of your website will enable it to become more friendly to the user as well as the search engines. Another important attribute to be focused is its content. In effect, every page of your website should reflect different content, but related to the main theme in some manner. This will help you to get more inbound links from various other websites that share different contents. Thus, the systematic arrangement of the internal links itself will help to improve the performance of the website as well as the scope for procuring valuable inbound links.
According to the latest search engine strategies, all links of a website may not be listed under the root directory. It is because the current search engine methods start indexing a page with a zero rank when it is freshly added to a search engine, and later on its ranking improves according to the quality of the contents and the internal links in it. Thus the directory in which the links are located does not anyway affect the performance of the website.
Appropriate internal links, thus, are inevitable components of an effective functioning of a website.
