Internal linking is the way you link to other pages within your website.


It is the easiest to achieve and maximize first because you have total and complete control of. Correctly used internal links can be a valuable weapon in your search engine optimization strategy.

There are several factors require examination for improving a website's internal linking:

Website structure
Sitemaps
Anchor text
Footer links

Website structure:

Content represent the key to your website success. But content should be usable by search engine and visitors.

The website structure is how the pages of your website relate to each other. It's the collection of the pages of the website and the relationship between them. On other words, it's how you classifieds and implemented your pages.

Your website structure should be arranged in such way that search engine can easily read it and human visitors can easily navigate.

There are three types of website structure:
Pyramid structure: in which the homepages links to each categories and each categories links to each sub-categories. With this tactic, most of the page rank is focused on the homepage. And the lower you to rest to the other.
Web linking: each webpage is linked to all the other WebPages of the site. It represents the best tactic to smaller website.
Hybrid structure: hybrid structure uses the advantages of pyramid and Web linking

Site map:

Site map is a web page that lists all of the pages on your web site and you want the search engines to find and include them in their index.

Sitemaps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found and indexed. It help both visitors and search engine spiders to find pages on the web site

Sitemap will be a page that includes links to every other page on your site. From the sitemap, the search engine spiders can find every single page of your site. There is no need to include all of these links on your homepage.

Webmasters have been using Html sitemaps to get their content identified by search engines. This type of HTML sitemaps can be interpreted by visitors and search engines.

Website owner must build three types of sitemaps:
Html Sitemaps: building an HTML sitemap linked to and from your home page is something confidence webmasters have been doing for years and perhaps is the simplest to create. This sitemap is simply a list of pages contained on your site and enables the search engines spiders to easily find your pages, especially the ones that are linked unfathomable in your website that they may have trouble finding otherwise. You can add to every link a description to give visitors more information about your website.
XML sitemap: it is an xml file containing a structured list of web pages. After generating your xml file, you locate it on your web server and you allow Search Engine crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed. Google sitemaps is an xml sitemap and it the only search engine how recommended it.
Text sitemap: it is simply a list of the URLs of your site in the form of a text file. These can then be submitted to search engines such as Yahoo! to notify them that all the pages exist and by doing so invites their spider to visit. Best of all, there are many free online generator, they will spider your website and create your XML sitemap file and text sitemap.

Every type of sitemaps has an advantage that can help your website to get more traffic or to have a friendly relationship with search engines. For that reason, it's very important to build all this sitemaps.

Building sitemaps for the different search engines will help your website to the maximum exposure because search engines will allow their spiders to crawl earlier, more methodically and more significantly into your website pages.

Anchor text:

The anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. It's usually used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to.

It can help your website to:
Rank highly in search engine optimization
Give your visitors useful information about the content of the page you're linking to.

To have more advantage of the anchor text you should placed your keyword as an anchor text.

Many website invited their visitors to take action with "click here" or other words, it's recommended to use your keywords such as: visit the affiliate marketing tools (your keywords) for more information.

Footer Links:

Footer links are roughly standard at the bottom of every webpage. Many webmaster pick the opportunity to mention their main keyword.

To have more advantages, you should mention your main keyword at the very bottom right hand side of the webpage and try to mention it in natural way.

In summary, internal linking is one of the most important search engine strategies that can help you to achieve a good ranking. The major factors to accomplish your objectives are valuable content, well designed website, properly structured, build sitemaps and place anchor text.
Lassaad Gasmi: affiliate marketer and owner of http://www.future-affiliate-marketing.com