I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to SEO. Now I know I’m certainly not a guru or expert in it, but I feel that I know enough to get a low to medium level phrase to rank well in Google. But what I didn’t really predict was how well internal linking would work at improving my rankings.
Last week I did an experiment on one of my niche sites where I was ranking #5 for a term that gets searched for quite a lot. I got ok traffic from that term, but I wanted to see if I could improve it. But instead of the usual linkbuilding that I do (article marketing, web 2.0 marketing, other link building), I wanted to see if I could move it with JUST internal linking. I wasn’t that confident.
For the experiment I wrote four new posts and in each post put a link back to the page I wanted rank higher using the phrase as the link text. I added each new post one day at a time to see if the rankings changed after each new post.
At first it didn’t budge, but after the fourth post (on the fourth day) my ranking moved up to #2 for that phrase.
I was pretty astonished (and happy).
Of course this rank improvement could be due to a few factors since the posts are still quite new so they are on the front page of the website – which eventually will get pushed lower as I add new content, but I’m really quite excited about what this could mean with getting other phrases to rank higher without having to do as much work as I used to.
So I want to continue this experiment. I currently have another term on the same site that I’d like to get ranked higher (it’s currently #11) so next week I will try to see if I can move that page higher with ONLY internal linking – and also whether adding more content that pushes my other posts down will cause the first term to drop in rankings as well.
We will see …
Tracey Edwards (<< my rankings have started to drop for my own name, so I better try and get that back up as well 
LOL )
Cool experiment, I do an awful lot if internal linking for double listings and it is good to see some proper experimenting to see just how important it is. And it certainly beats having to go hunt down backlinks.
And I do believe a thank you is in order, for the blogroll and the tippety tip too. Very cool.
I will get round to my blogroll some time but it will be better when I get some serious levels of content on.
Dave,
Your welcome
It’s because I find your blog very entertaining as well as having good info. Keep up the good work.
t
I’ve always interlinked my site pages like mad on most of my sites. I’ll have to see if it makes a difference on some of my newer sites, which I haven’t done as much internal linking on except for the menus. Thanks for the tip.
I’ve just done that – actually after reading about it more in an e-book (Amazonian Profit Plan – Dave’s fave! lol), I also underestimated the power of it.
Then I just kept hearing about it. SO
I loaded up new reviews – and I use my WP sites like static sites, so all posts are on their own – and I did it differently.
I used my #1 ranking page (in spot #1) to link out to the new reviews.
Results are in: from spot #8 on day one (the site was already ranking for this product), to spot #1 1.5 weeks later.
Well..I did have two Ezines to it, too, though. Oh well.
Another review had a decent climb of 15 spots to land at #30 – it will need more work obviously.
Thanks for the good tips, btw!
Cool! Yes I underestimated the power of internal linking too thinking I had to get all my links from outside, but a few good internal links really can boost your pages. Oh I haven’t read the Amazonian Profit Plan – is it any good? t xx