Also keep in mind that link building is time-consuming. You’re not going to populate the Web with
links to your site in one week or even one month. Once your site is built and ready for customers,
link building will be an ongoing process that you’ll work at for the lifetime of the web sites.Using Internal Links
One linking strategy that’s often overlooked is internal linking.Internal links are those that lead people
from one page to another within your web site. This is different from the navigational structure.
Internal links are more natural links that occur in the text on your web pages.Without a good internal linking strategy, you run the risk of not having your site properly spidered.
It’s not enough simply to have a navigational structure or a site map (though site maps help consid-
erably). You should also have links that lead from one element (like a blog post) to other important
elements (like an archived article or news clipping on your site), so site visitors find that moving
through the information they’re examining on your site is a natural process that takes place without
too much difficulty or thought.The most effective methods of internal linking are text links, links within the footers of your pages,
and inline text links. Text links are those with which you can use anchor tags and keywords. These
links most often appear in the text of a page, though they can also appear in other places within your
page, so long as the text links are relevant to the content of the page.Links within the footers of pages are a common practice now. Figure 13-3 shows how some web
pages use links within the footers of pages.Finally, inline links are those links most often contained within the body of some element of your
site content, such as articles and blogs. These links can either be proper names or descriptors that
are relevant to the pages being linked to.FIGURE 13-3
Footer links are common among linking strategies and they usually take visitors to some element of the
administrative functions of the site.206
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