Internal Links and the Power of Three Rule

The Power of Three approach to link building ensures that none of your carefully written article go to waste. Like building a wall, where each brick you lay, supports and strengthens the bricks around it, a good link building strategy uses what you already have to maximum advantage.

Internal links are links within the same domain. For example, a link from www. WidgetShop.com to www.WidgetShop.com/Acme_Widget/. As the content of your website is entirely in your control, these links provide a free and effective tool in your link building plan. Remember how Google works. Its treats every page as a unique entity and this means, in theory, links from one page in your site to another are just as valuable as links from another web site. In practice, setting up hundreds of pages all with a link to your home page will not help you unless the content of those hundreds of pages is unique and relevant.

Link building and SEO content writing go hand in hand. Both are only worthwhile if you are focused on creating good quality, sticky content. There is no short-cut. However, you are going to write lots of good quality content anyway. The secret of effective link building is getting the most out of that content as possible.

In building your internal links, use the Power of Three rule. Ignoring all the incidental links on the page that appear on all your pages (e.g. the links to your archives), the content of each page should have three links. One link in each of the first three paragraphs.

One link should use your major keyword to link to your home page, the second link to the most appropriate medium keyword landing page and the final link to one of your other minor keyword pages. Each link needs to use the right keywords as part of the link. (E.g. the text that is highlight should match the keywords of the target page). By using the landing pages themselves to link to other landing pages your link building is creating a tightly woven net of sticky, quality content. This is what your visitor want and it is exactly the sort of web site that Google wants to list highly in its results.

To be effective, the Power of Three link building strategy doesn't have to be followed exactly. You may notice that this site doesn't stick to it very closely because the Power of Three is just a guide. The number one priority for your web page is to retain your visitors. If it makes a better article to have four links or just two links, then have four or two but remember balance. Lots of links in a short article will look like spam to both Google and your visitors. Too few links and you are wasting a powerful tool in search engine optimization.

In addition to your landing pages, you will need to have other content on your site. When I target a keyword I write a long, carefully optimized article to be my landing page. I will then follow this up over the next week or two, with half-a-dozen brief articles on the same or similar subject. In each one I will link back to my new landing page. This link building strategy quickly creates a cluster of relevant pages linked to my landing page. All of them supporting the network of links that already exists between the landing pages. The important part is that this cluster of new pages is not time consuming to create. You don't need to do any search engine optimization in them or worry about keywords other than making them worthwhile to read and on a related subject to the landing page they are targeting.