Just about any serious online business owner knows that a website needs SEO, or search engine optimization, in order to improve that websites favor or standings with search engines. In fact, many online business owners, especially of the sole-proprietor variety, actively seek out search engine optimization tips and resources so that they can perform their own optimization on their own websites.

This is all fine and dandy, but the sad truth is that the picture painted in webmaster forums and SEO blogs about self-SEO isn’t the full picture - in many cases effective SEO strategies, such as internal linking, are completely ignored.

SEO - more than just keyword usage

Self-proclaimed SEOs and well-intentioned yet misguided website owners tend to sum up on-page search engine optimization too simplistically. Their “to do” lists of on-page optimization include:

1. Keyword focused page titles
2. Keyword focused page names
3. Adding meta keywords and a meta description
4. Using keywords within a page’s content
5. Using heading tags <h1> - <h6> with keywords within them

And this is where the majority end their on-page optimization efforts. However, a major piece of the on-page SEO puzzle is missing from these regularly shared “SEO secrets”, and that piece is the power of internal linking.

Internal links - building relevance and authority one link at a time

Much like inbound links from external, third-party websites, links pointing at internal pages of the same website are counted like votes of approval for the linked-to page. While each inbound link may not equal a whole vote per se, it’s the collective compilation of the full votes, half votes and even fractional votes that work to improve a web page’s overall importance amongst other rankings considerations.

Another facet of internal link building, one that tends to receive even less press than the importance of internal link building for link popularity purposes, is having a “fluid” internal linking scheme. If you look at a website like you would a map of a city - you can probably understand this better. Like a city, a website has many streets and roads (internal links). Most of the roads intersect at one point or another - allowing for fluid, uninterrupted travel through the city.

However, like some websites, cities have “dead ends” (broken links, orphaned pages), which essentially stop the flow of traffic from one point to another.  A website’s “dead ends” are bad for SEO purposes - they prohibit search engines from flowing through websites as they see fit. By constructing a well-defined roadmap using internal links, search engines can flow seamlessly through the website, which can improve overall visibility and lead to the complete discovery of a website by search engines.

Website owners do themselves a huge disservice when they fail to build internal link popularity for their most important pages, fail to address broken links or maintain a poor internal linking structure. While so-called “traditional SEO” such as keyword targeting is pretty important, having a proper internal linking structure is even more so.

The bottom line is this: if search engine robots have a hard time navigating a website’s pages, or high-priority pages do not have enough link popularity, all of the other on-page optimization that is incorporated won’t amount to a hill of beans.