Link structure is important for a website. It does more than just lead your site visitors from one page to another. The way you build your website does two things, primarily.
- First, it tells your site visitors which pages are most important. If you have five pages that link from off your home page and each of them have five pages linking off of them then that tells your site visitors that those five pages linking from the home page are a higher priority than the other pages. Otherwise, you would have made them all equal.
- Another thing that your internal links do is provide the search engines with a crawl path. Each of your pages, if linked from another page on your site, will be crawled by the search engines and indexed according to their content. By building your site structure a certain way you tell the search engine robots which pages to crawl first and which ones to crawl more often. You also give them clues as to which pages are most important for each of your keywords.
Keywords within your links are very important. You want the majority of your links pointing to a particular page on your site, no matter which page they are linking from, to use the same anchor text. Anchor text is the word for the words you use to link with. For instance, if you place the words “small business” around the a href tag, the tag used to signify a hyperlink, then that is your anchor text.
Your site’s link structure is very important for ranking purposes. It’s also very important for driving traffic to the pages you want traffic to go. Many new webmasters overlook link structure when building their website and this is a huge mistake. It’s one of the most important things to consider.
