Let’s assume that you have a website, and you’ve also got a list of keywords that you’re trying to get your website to rank for. You may or may not realize this, but it’s much easier to get each page on your website to rank for a few keywords than it is to get your entire site to rank for an entire list of keywords. That’s where the power of internal linking — specifically, organized on-page blog posting — comes in.
People assume (correctly) that getting a link from Page A on Site A to Page B on Site A doesn’t do a thing to help Page B’s authority in the eyes of the search engines. No amount of internal linking is going to make your page rank for a keyword if your site doesn’t also have solid incoming keywords from as many different root domains as possible.
But what people don’t realize is that the total authority of your site can be manipulated so that Page A ranks for different keywords than Page B — through the power of internal linking. This is the deepest levels of organic SEO, but it’s worth learning.
Let’s say, for example, that you have a site that’s all about nutrition. You’ve got a bunch of solid incoming links from a bunch of other root domains, but right now your site is all over the place in terms of what page is showing up under what keyword. If you have a blog in a subfolder or subdomain of your main page, you can easily produce a bunch of content that is strongly bound up in a small cluster of related keywords. Then, you link each content page to the specific page of your site that you want to rank for those keywords.
For instance, you might write a blog post all about low-carb dieting, and pack in keywords like “Atkins”, “South Beach”, “low-carb”, “low carbohydrate”, “Gary Taubes”, and so forth. Then, you link the blog article to your site’s page about the effects of low-carb dieting and how it works.
Essentially, what you’ve done is to tell Google that, while your whole site is about dieting, that specific page is really all about low-carb dieting. As your site builds authority as a whole, your individual page about low-carb dieting will score higher than the rest of them will regarding those chosen keywords, and the searchers will go to the page most relevant to the terms they are actually searching for.
That gives you a boost in conversions as well as a small overall boost in rankings (because each page on your site is specific to a certain cluster of related keywords, it will rank more highly on those keywords than an identical site without the solid internal linking structure that your on-site blog provides.) As if there weren’t already enough great reasons to have a custom blog created for your website!
