Thrudigital

The importance of existing links has depreciated now, because everyone wants to see their site linked to from high-quality sites. Many companies will offer to mount a link-building campaign for you, but they often forget about cross-linking with your own content. Moreover, it’s a common feeling that the navigation menu is sufficient in this respect.

Why are links necessary?

Just like all links from other domains, links within your website tell the search engine how much weight is carried by each page. Now imagine your website as a link-model where objects (pages) point to other objects. Basically a page with the least links pointing to it will be recognised as a less important one, and the page with the highest number of links will logically be viewed as carrying more weight

How should you cross-link your web pages?

The most primitive way of creating logical structure of links is via a navigation menu. However, the more pages your website contains, the harder it is to give weight to all pages. For example, you can place 1,000 links on a navigation menu. Web designers have developed JavaScript, DHTML, CSS and Flash-based applications which can handle “large” menus, but be realistic: no page should contain 500 different links. First, because the amount of code is enormous, and second because the weight of all links falls as the number of links increases.

Naturally, your next choice is probably a sitemap. Creating a sitemap (either dynamic or static) is very useful in terms of telling a search engine what is on your site. So, now that your website has a sitemap, you may now choose to place a small link to the sitemap on each page. Unsurprisingly, the sitemap’s importance in Google will be drastically increased. When you will type site:yourdomain.tld into Google’s search box, you will eventually see your sitemap ranked 2nd or 3rd in the list. While this isn’t a bad thing, we’re not trying to increase the importance of your sitemap.

Cross-linking that works

An easy way of creating links between pages is creation of categories to store internal pages. This way you get a logical-looking system, though one which is inherently flawed. The ability to link is limited because there must necessarily be rules which determine what links go where. So, it’s easy to cross-link pages within a single category, and it is easy to cross-link different categories, but it is not possible to cross-link pages which are logically similar. There are three ways to link between related pages:

The first option is very tedious: use the HTML code and create links manually. This will prove problematic if your site contains a large number of pages you want to link together. In addition, imagine the situation when you update one page, and all existing links become irrelevant.

The second option is more useful, but doesn’t guarantee 100% precision. If you’re using databases for storing the content of your website, you can easily analyse any page’s content. You can pick five or ten most frequently-occurring terms (after filtering out terms such as “I”, “me”, “as”, “like”, “such”, “do”, “don’t” and so on) and save the result to the database. Once a visitor visits a page, the script will find all pages containing the largest number of similar terms. This method usually works fairly well, but the number of links is still fairly limited.

The third option is the best one. Imagine a page as a set of words which can be cross-linked automatically. Now you can easily set up a connection between the word “service” and the page where you’re offering services. Naturally, this method requires some programming skill, but once you’re done and once you define 100 or 1,000 words which point to pre-defined URLs, your site will be much more effectively cross-linked. What’s more, it’s good for visitors too. When a visitor opens a page with plain text, it feels very flat, but if there are links, users can discover pages they may not have arrived at previously.

We have developed a function for automatic cross-linking, which will soon be available as a WordPress plugin.