Okay, I’m sorry.  In this particular instance, what’s on the outside does count as well, let’s not fool ourselves.  Incoming links from the outside do matter; I’ll be the first to admit that while I’m on my weekly Sunday jaunt through BookPeople, certain covers catch my eye and I buy (like this one.  And, as it turns out, Snoop was a solid purchase).  Anyway, back to the inside.  We’re here to discuss the importance of link architecture and how it relates to usability (visitor interaction) and crawlability (search engine interaction).

Recently, Google kicked off a series of posts on their Webmaster Central Blog called Links Week. The second post in this series is entitled Importance of Link Architecture and it provides three guidelines for ensuring Google indexes your site’s pages and visitors are able to easily navigate your website:

• Keep important pages within several clicks from the homepage
• Use descriptive anchor text
• Verify that Googlebot finds your internal links

Let’s start with “keeping important pages close to homepage“.  Search boxes can be helpful, but search engines rarely, “type into search boxes or navigate via pulldown menus.”  Instead, step into character and attempt to find information on your website from the homepage.  Or better yet, bring in your kid, your grandma, your spouse or significant other and ask them to find information on Product A, contacting sales, etc., you get the point.  Why would they not be able to find the information you asked for?  How are search engines going to find your Product A page and provide this page within search results?

Maybe a visitor hits your gifts website on a random walk through the Internet.  He or she lands on a sub-category page four levels removed from the homepage and wants to get to the homepage.  Outside of making a Home link, another way to improve the link architecture of a website is to provide breadcrumbs.  If the visitor landed on the Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts page, the breadcrumbs on that page might read:

Homepage > Gifts > Father’s Day Gifts > Colorful Father’s Day Gifts > Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts.

Not only does this enhance the website’s effectiveness and usability, but these breadcrumbs help improve keyword relevancy to pages within your website – a perhaps minuscule piece of the pie, but a piece nonetheless.  Text links are easily navigated by both users and search engines alike.

Additionally, according to Coremetrics’ Benchmark Industry Report the average time a visitor spends per session (the entirety of the visit) is 479.87 seconds, that’s 8 minutes.  How many pages do visitors traverse during those 8 minutes?  11.  So, approximately how long does a visitor spend on each page?  How much time do you have to make sure your website is easily navigable, usable, effective? On average, 43.62 seconds.  Would you like some breadcrumbs on that internal link lasagna?  While you’re at it, create a sitemap that centralizes all the links of your website – users will appreciate its efficiency and search engines will reward its efficiency by crawling all of your pages.

How about descriptive anchor text?  You don’t have to write Seamus Heaney descriptions when deciding on what the text of your internal links should be.  However, linking to the Purple and Green Father’s Day gifts page like this is less than optimal:

Check out our awesome Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts <a href=”http://www.gifts.com”>here</a>.

Instead, make the text of your link the name of the product, <a href=”http://www.toys.com”>Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts</a>.  This not only explicitly lets the user know that he or she will find the Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts page, but search engines will crawl the link and associate Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts with the page – “The more Google knows about your site—through your content, page titles, anchor text, etc.—the more relevant results we can return for users (and your potential search visitors).”

Finally, Google Webmaster Tools provide website owners with information regarding the internal links the search engine has crawled.  As Google mentions in the post, this tool is particularly useful for websites utilizing Javascript with navigation (Javascript isn’t always executed).

Thus, the Leviathan has spoken – optimize your internal links.  Provide a great user experience through effective link architecture and not only will users potentially extend their 43.62 second stay per page, but search engines will sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider as they crawl, crawl, crawl your website.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 10:28 am by Cory Barbot and is filed under Natural Search (SEO), Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.