Hi everyone, it’s SEO Thursday again and before I continue I’d like to ask you all a question: what do you think of this Thursday series so far? Are you finding it useful? Should I continue with the tips or would you rather see something else? I really appreciate the feedback, and I would rather write something you care about than things that don’t interest you.

Today I’d like to give you a general overview of internal SEO and how you can be growing the strength of your posts resulting in direct traffic (visitors) increase to your blog. After all, everyone wants more people reading their blog right? For this purpose, I will assume you know little or nothing about Pagerank and domain authority.

Ok, let’s get down to all of the dirty stuff!

Your Blog’s Structure is Critical

Let’s take a look and a sample blog layout:

Imagine page rank aka authority that helps rank pages as a river of yummy juice! The red lines illustrate where your “link juice” is flowing to, in our case to every other link on the page.

The yellow areas represent links which you really don’t have to care about ranking. Do you really want your category to show up before your posts in Google? No. That’s why we used Yoast! Plugin in my last post to noindex those pages to prevent them from showing in Google.

The green areas represent the links which we want to send the link juice to. We want to rank our individual blog posts so we send some juice there. We also like our navigational pages and want to keep those free from obstructions. We have some nice friends who were kind enough to link to us before so we send some juice their way with a blogroll link.

Sounds fine and dandy so far right? Maybe.

What happens when we post so often that our last entries drop off the home page? Or when you don’t have post previews and every single post you publish pushes the last one down?

You guessed it – the home page stops sending love to that post. Since we don’t want to use our categories as sort of a border patrol guard to allow link juice to flow to our posts, we have to create a new route: internal links from within already high-ranking posts through interlinking.

Interlinking is the reason you sometimes see “Related Posts” in people’s blog posts (among other reasons) I use them here on my blog. Allowing 1 post to link to 5 others, you are in essence spreading the love evenly. By the time all of the posts interlink, each will have a fairly equal page rank.

I’ll use Jeremy of Modest Money as an example. His home page sends link love everywhere. He also has a featured posts section and a related posts section in the sidebar, helping further spread the love and reinforce the ranking power of each post.

Cornerstone Content

Your blog posts are essential building blocks aka “cornerstone content” in your pyramid (blog) with the top of the pyramid being the home page, like so:

Each depend on one another. The stronger the cornerstone content blocks, the stronger the top. But without the top, your pyramid doesn’t exist (it’s no longer a perfect structure). Does this make any sense?

As your building blocks solidify in strength and begin to link back to the home page, the pyramid looks sturdier and the top is slowly upgraded until it becomes a shiny block of gold.  Hehehe, Egyptians…

That’s basically the gist of internal linking. Get some link love in, spread it out evenly to areas that need it and grow your pyramid. There are some other aspects I didn’t cover but that’s a topic for another day.

This may sound really stupid to people who already know this, but for those that don’t it may be an eye opener and a starting base for something great.

When you set up a proper structure for your blog, your posts will grow stronger and rank higher, bringing in more visitors.

Have Questions?

Because I want you to succeed FASTER, I am offering anyone who shares this post and shows some link love a free review of their blog’s SEO structure. That means free tips, free Q & A and even technical help if you really need it. Please contact me with your concerns.

Disclaimer: … when I have time.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Link Luv Friday and next Thursday’s post on Critical on-sight factors that affect your blog’s quality! (in Google’s eyes)

This is starting to look like an SEO blog!