• Search Engine Guide, Monday, June 16, 2008 1:31 PM

Most link-building articles focus on ways to generate inbound links from other sites--as the quantity and quality of external links play a big part in a site's overall rankings. But as Scott Allen notes, "contextual internal links can also be effective in helping to improve a site's rankings for targeted key phrases."

The logic behind internal link building (called "PageRank sculpting" by some) is that each page in a Web site has a given amount of link juice it can transfer. By directing it, you can strengthen a particular page's overall ranking (i.e. your homepage or a particular product page) and also give users a streamlined path to the site's most important information.

Start by assessing each section and page of your site and see where it would make sense to have some contextual links from a user perspective. When setting up these internal links, be sure to use the keywords you're trying to rank better for. You may also need to tweak the surrounding copy to ensure that the link makes sense (and improve the contextual value of the link itself).

Allen says to remember to spread the contextual links around, and drive more traffic to a page that needs better weight for a particular keyword. "Use Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, or your analytics program to find which pages have the most link love and which ones have the least," he says. "You can strengthen the weaker pages by pointing some contextual links from the strong pages to the weak ones."

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