The link struc­ture plays a very impor­tant role in the rank­ings of a web­site where two dif­fer­ent seg­ments are being appraised by the search engines; inter­nal link­ing and the link struc­ture of the web­site and exter­nal link­ing (incom­ing back­links). Links are one of the pri­ma­ry rank­ing fac­tors for all the major search engines, and for this rea­son, you should­n’t under­es­ti­mate their importance.

Internal link structure

The inter­nal link struc­ture has sev­er­al func­tions. The pri­ma­ry func­tion is help­ing vis­i­tors to find the con­tent they are look­ing for as soon as pos­si­ble. A good prac­tice is hav­ing all impor­tant pages a vis­i­tor wants to reach (con­tact, reg­is­tra­tion, about us, order product/service) no more than two clicks away from the home page or the land­ing page.

The links, how­ev­er, are not only roads between cer­tain geo­graph­i­cal points on your web­site. Links are also the indi­ca­tor for search engine bots which pages you deem are the most impor­tant for your con­tent as well as an indi­ca­tor to the healthy and well func­tion­ing frame of the entire website.

You can improve and opti­mize the inter­nal link struc­ture on your own web­sites. One way to opti­mize it is cre­at­ing sitemaps that have a dual func­tion, show­ing both search bots as well as human vis­i­tors the struc­ture of your web­site and how to best nav­i­gate it.

How to examine the link structure

There are sev­er­al fac­tors that are high­ly impor­tant when exam­in­ing the link structure:

• Anchor text
  That is the text that is used as a descrip­tion of the link. It should be descrip­tive and sim­ple, along with the lines of “con­tact us” instead of “click here.” With the help of anchor text, both search engines and humans will have a clear­er image of what they can expect when they click on the spe­cif­ic link
• Num­ber of links
  It is wise to avoid a huge num­ber of inter­nal links lead­ing all over the page. Have in mind that each link pass­es on link juice or SEO rank­ing. By hav­ing sev­er­al hun­dred links point­ing from your home page means that you dilute the SEO juice on sev­er­al hun­dred dif­fer­ent sub-pages. Try to keep the num­ber of links small.
• Posi­tion of links
  The links that one can find high­er up in the code are links that have a stronger impact on search engines and over­all rank­ing. A link in the foot­er will, accord­ing­ly, always car­ry a small­er weight than the link in the header.
• Type of the links
  Links can be embed­ded in dif­fer­ent places. Most com­mon­ly they are in the text or the image. It is impor­tant to know that they have dif­fer­ent val­ues. Links com­ing from with­in the edi­to­r­i­al text with a well-formed anchor text car­ry the most weight for both, search engine bots and humans.

Types of internal link structures

There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent meth­ods when it comes to estab­lish­ing the link struc­ture, and not all of them are rec­om­mend­able. In fact, opt­ing for the wrong link hier­ar­chy of your web­site can seri­ous­ly dam­age your SEO efforts.

Link all pages to all other pages structure

This type of struc­ture is sim­ple; every page links to every oth­er page on the web­site. While it is still viable for small­er web­sites with a lim­it­ed num­ber of impor­tant pages, it is not rec­om­mend­able for big­ger web­sites. This kind of struc­ture will pro­gres­sive­ly keep pil­ing up links and spread the SEO rank­ing too thin for any page on the affect­ed domain to rank properly.

Deep link structure

This is an invert­ed tree-shaped hier­ar­chy where the home page is the lev­el zero; the first is the main cat­e­gories, sec­ond the sub-cat­e­gories and so forth. While it pro­vides far more order than the pre­vi­ous method, it has sev­er­al draw­backs. First, the struc­ture can run very deep, with users need­ing to under­take 5–6 steps to reach their des­ti­na­tion, which is not an ide­al user expe­ri­ence. Also, while the top pages have a lot of SEO juice, the low­er ordered pages get hard­ly any SEO trac­tion at all.

Flat link structure

This tech­nique attempts to min­i­mize the num­ber of link lev­els as low as pos­si­ble. It would appear some­thing like:

Home page – cat­e­go­ry – sub­cat­e­go­ry – page

Essen­tial­ly, every page would be no more than three clicks away from the page. How­ev­er, the prob­lem shows with very large web­sites that may have up to tens of thou­sands of pages on each sub­cat­e­go­ry. Vari­a­tions of this sys­tems are among the most pop­u­lar online.

Overlapping link structure

In this sce­nario, there is an over­lap­ping struc­ture in the sense that, for exam­ple, the main home page links to cat­e­gories, but also to the most impor­tant sub­cat­e­gories of a spe­cif­ic cat­e­go­ry, and so on while descend­ing the lev­els of the web­site. This method gives the web­mas­ter more free­dom in direct­ing the SEO rank­ing to the most impor­tant cat­e­gories and pages and is often found in direc­to­ry-like websites.

Conclusion

Link struc­ture is a para­mount issue for both, the usabil­i­ty of the web­site as well as one of the key fac­tors in search engine opti­miza­tion. You should choose care­ful­ly which struc­ture to employ depend­ing on the needs and require­ments of your website.