Internal linking is a practice that most companies use to help ease the navigational structure of their
sites, and also to create links based on important or keyword text. Plan to use internal linking on your
site, but don’t allow it to have so much power over your SEO strategy that you don’t include other
elements of SEO.Judging the Effectiveness of Your Links
After all of the time that you’ll put into creating a link strategy and a link structure that you hope
will increase the traffic flow to your site, you should still take some actions to ensure that you have
the most effective links possible.Don’t ignore the importance of monitoring your links for successful linking. Remember to avoid
broken links, and maintain the ability to change links when your content changes. Manual moni-
toring can be a pain and very time-consuming. That’s why it’s so important to keep up with your
links. This is usually done through a link analysis program. You can use link analysis software, like
NetMap (http://www.netmap.com). Link analysis programs, once set up properly, can handle
everything from placing new links to monitoring the links that you already have in place. It simply
requires that you set the software and then allow time to work on your links in the ways covered
by this chapter.207
Understanding the Role of Links and Linking 13
75002c13.qxd:Layout 1 11/7/07 8:57 AM Page 207