In the process of building and developing a new e-commerce site, I’ve been putting lots of internal linking strategies to the test.

Internal linking for search engine ranking is one of those things that is rarely discussed.   There’s lots of rumble about how to get backlinks through social marketing, directories, article writing and the other 20 plus methods of creating backlinks to your site.

But there’s a lot of hush about the internal linking structure of your website and how important it can be to your search engine rankings.

So What Is Internal Linking

Internal linking is how your site links “internally” to it’s own content to tell the search engines how important and relevant your information is.  I’m not an SEO expert, but with all of the testing I’ve been doing the past few months it appears that internal linking can be as important if not more important than external linking and backlinks.

If you’ve ever been to a well optimized website such as a newspaper website, you’ll notice how they refer you to “Related Topics”, or “Other Articles On This Topic”.  On e-commerce sites you’ll see something like “People who bought this item also bought these” (with links to the other product pages).

This is internal linking and believe me it matters a whole lot to your search engine ranking.

As I said, I’m not an SEO expert…just someone who has seen the power of internal link building in my own website building and felt it an important matter of discussion.  I’ve spent a lot of time researching the topic recently and wanted to share with you what I feel is one of the best posts I’ve found on the subject.

Have a look at this post from Reality SEO: Internal Linking Strategy, SEO Self Reflection.

If you’re not using correctly optimized and relevant internal link building in your website building, you’re losing out on what is in my opinion one of the easiest ways to get higher search engine rankings and links.

Still studying this subject and attempting to learn more, so if you’ve got a story or idea I’d love to hear it here.