How to optimize count of interlinking by increasing Interlinking count of chosen landing pages and decreasing for less important pages within the site?

[vivekrathore]

We have taken out our interlinking counts (Only Internal Links and not Outbound Links) through Google WebMaster tool and discovered that the count of interlinking of our most significant pages are less as compared to of less significant pages. Our objective is to reverse the existing behavior by increasing Interlinking count of important pages and reduce the count for less important pages so that maximum link juice could be transferred to right pages thereby increasing SEO traffic.

[CleverPhD]

Hello there,

If I understand your question, it looks like you need to look fundamentally at your site structure.  If your most important pages are hub type pages this can help users easily find and navigate items wpages within the site as well as helping Google to find pages. If site structure is done properly your internal links will naturally reflect this structure that will highlight your most important pages.

For example, if you sell shirts, pants and shoes.  Your main shirt, pant and shoe pages will have many subpages with various types of shirts, pants and shoes.  As all products link up into the main pages of shirt, pants and shoes, those 3 pages will be seen with a lot of internal links.  Users will be able to see this as they navigate the site and you are giving a clear structure for Google to crawl.

Good luck!

[Joe.Robison]

Hey Anirban - internal linking is definitely a good tactic for the right sized site.

There's a pretty good overview of internal linking over on this Quicksprout video, one highlight:

"But, to find out how to get the most bang for your buck, you want to find the pages that have the most authority. Those are the ones that you want to link from to the pages you’re trying to rank.

Let me show you what I mean. We’re at Open Site Explorer. What I did is, I put in the home page of my site and pressed the search button. When you’re here, it’ll automatically rank inbound links coming from other sites, but that’s not what we want. We want pages from within our site. So, click on the “Top Pages” tab. When you do that, you’ll see the page authority of all the pages on your site. Starting from highest to lowest, these are the pages that you want to build internal links on, pointing to the pages that you actually want to rank."

Brian notes that you can automate some of it if you have thousands of pages, but you shouldn't rely on it too much since there's not enough anchor text diversity:

"I’m not a huge fan of doing the automated, because if you do it like this, you’re not going to have a lot of anchor text diversity which may get you dings for over-optimization. If you have a site with thousands of pages, you will need to maybe do some automation and at least have some of your internal links done by a plugin or some piece of software."

This Moz Academy lesson also has some good tips on internal linking:

• Make links relevant, and useful
• Don't stuff keyword into anchor text too much, and don't overuse footer links
• For huge sites, you can use sitemaps well and include them in the footer (see 5:00 into the video)

I recently wrote up a summary of ecommerce internal links best practices, but the ideas apply to non-ecomm sites:

• Link product pages together via the description if they're related
• Tell a story in blog posts of your products and link to those product pages
• Link blog post content to relevant category pages (underutilized)
• Make category pages more user-friendly with content, and link liberally to relevant internal pages
• Use user-generated content/curation pages to help you naturally build internal links at scale

Hopefully these ideas point you in the right direction, let me know if you have any followup or more specific questions!

If you haven't used Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to scan your site and show internal linking pages, that can be another great tool to help you out.