Internal linking in a website is extremely important in getting high ranks in the SERPS. This is actually related to the internal structure of the site rather than the incoming links. But why is this important when we are trying to focus so much on inbound links and getting visible in the search engines?

When robots from Google and other search engines come crawling your site, they need to find all the pags and all the items on the pages very fast so they can index them. If they can’t find them, the pages will never be visible in the search engines.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when working on your website, way before you start backlinking strategies:

• Deep linking – Make sure that you don’t have a very deep linking. What I mean by this is that each of your pages should be easily accessible from your index page or at least from the second page. If you find you need too many clicks to access the page, then the robots won’t find it either.  Google considers that pages that can be accessed with one click from the main page must be important so it gives those pages the importance as well. From an SEO perspective the site architecture should be as flat as possible.
• Internal linking – The pages should be linked to each other on your site. You should cross link between relevant content. For example if you are talking about dogs, and you have two main categories, one for dog barking problems and one for dog aggression, the pages within dog barking should be linked to each other with relevant keywords, but they don’t have to be interlinked with pages from dog agreession, since that is somewhat of a different subject.
• Don’t forget to use anchor text. This is not only important for inbound links but also for links within your own site. Try to avoid using too much the phrase ‘Click here’.

Don’t forget, before you work on your offsite SEO you need to take care of your onsite factors that make your website pure gold in the eyes of Google and other search engines, and proper intenal linking and internal page structure is crucial in getting there.