Making Sense of SEO: Lecture 4
Internal linking and information architecture
Information architecture is referring to how you oranize content on your own website.
The information architecture on your website also impacts your search engine results. This is because search engines utilize inbound links as part of their ranking process and a link from one page on your site to another is still an inbound link.
External links are those where another website is linking to a page on yours.
Internal links are those where a page on your webiste is linking to another page on your website.
The pages on your website that have the strongest external links will have the strongest effect when linking to other pages on your website.
Let’s make sense of this with an example:
- Step 1: You publish an amazing piece of unique research that your team spent a lot of time on. It gets a ton of links all over the web.
- Step 2: From that unique research page, you link to other sales oriented pages on your website.
- Results: While your unique research will continue to outrank your sales oriented pages for it’s specific topic, your sales oriented pages will be better off because of the link. With the link, the sales oriented pages have a higher chance of ranking where no other highly relevant content is available.
You want to keep your most linked-to pages high up in your website’s information architecture, which means a search engine should be able to find it in as least clicks as possible from your home page. This way the search engine also gets a hint that it’s an extremely important page for you.
Link building
Since search engine algorithms revolve around links and link quality, having high number of quality links to your website is extremely important.
To work on your link building strategy:
- Identify your audience and their sharing behavior
- Determine what you can create that will be shared by them
- Map your created assets to specific keywords
It’s important to not just create assets that they will consume, but also those that they will feel are worthy of sharing!