Contextual Internal Links – Even Out the Link Strength

It’s quite common for certain pages of a website to receive disproportionately more inbound links than other pages of the site. These pages tend to rank well compared to other pages of a site. Use Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, or your analytics program to find which pages have the most link love and which ones have the least. You can strengthen the weaker pages by pointing some contextual links from the strong pages to the weak ones. It’s usually best not to link to them from every page of the site, just from a few that have strong linkage.

Internal links don’t carry as much weight as links from other sites, but they can still make an impact.

Usability Benefits

When done right, contextual internal links also can help improve the usability of a site. By adding links to the content of your site that are relevant for the user, it provides another path to the destination you’re trying to lead them to. Multiple paths are a good thing in site navigation. Usability studies have shown that users are more likely to click on a link in the text of a page instead of those on a navigation bar, because it feels more natural.

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