Improve Your Keyword Rankings through Better Internal Linking

Creating Themes through Siloing
If you are having difficulty ranking for your keywords, whether they are your site’s generic keywords or more focused keywords, very often your keyword ranking can be improved by better internal linking strategies.

Many websites have a haphazard internal linking structure between pages, and although they do have internal links from page to page, the links are not organized in a way that makes it clear to the search engines what the theme of the site is about, making it hard for your keywords to gain natural ranking.

Siloing is a type of site architecture that creates strong organizational themes for different areas of your website by splitting the focus of your site into groups and concentrating the groups into distinct areas that can send a strong signal to the search engines for the group of related keywords you wish to rank for. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer who handles cases involving drug recalls, but you also handle personal injury cases like car accidents, construction accidents and wrongful death, each area should be organized into its own group or silo- and each silo should have several pages, each linking to the other in a specific order. This organizational structure is called a silo.

Internal Linking through Silos Improves Keyword Rank

Without getting too technical, once you create a silo for an area of your site, you then create several pages for that theme and link the pages from one to another in specific order. The main category in this case might be ‘drug recall.’ Under drug recall (the parent category) each of the specific drugs would have its own page. You would have a page for Yaz, Accutane, Chantix, and so on. Each page would fit into the category of drug recall, each page would link to the other, and all pages would link to the parent category page. By creating themes in this way, rather than haphazardly linking one page to another on your site, you’ve created a strong signal to the search engines that this part of your site contains information on drug recalls, and these particular pages all belong together, and they all have to do with the same theme- dangerous drugs. The other category, accidents is a totally separate theme and must be dealt with in the same way. Parent categories should be linked to other parent categories, but the children have to be interlinked properly to avoid diluting the theme of your site.

Use Proper Analytics to Test your Results

Always have good analytics in place to test your results. It will take a few weeks to see how the changes you made affect your keyword ranking, so be patient. So record the changes and watch your analytics. As you improve your internal linking strategy, you will see your rankings improve.

Be sure your content is keyword rich and includes all the terms you are trying to rank for. You can read my post on Proper Keyword Targeting to Increase Traffic to improve your content as a reference.