One aspect of SEO that doesn’t get enough attention is internal linking. Recently on one of my blogs, I achieved a PageRank of 4. However, traffic for the blog remained at about 40 uniques a day even after Google adjusted my PR.

Now, I am finally seeing my traffic grow. The reason? I blame internal linking. When I first started the blog, I was only concerned about writing lots of content and getting back links. I didn’t bother to interlink any of my posts or design a proper navigation menu.

What would you say if I told you that you could increase your traffic by simply linking to yourself? If done correctly, you could drive traffic up 110%.

Let’s take a step back and review a lesson in SEO: Google gives your main page a basic PageRank. The Googlebot indexes your site and follows all internal links it can find, to create a map of your site. The more internal links to a certain page in your site, and that page will soak a little PR up from your main page. In essence, your site is a network, and the importance of a page is judged by internal links to that page.

On my site, Google was giving all the attention to my front page and ignoring my individual posts. So, I went through each post and added at least one link to another post from my site.

Now, am seeing a steady increase in traffic and more and more of it is coming from Google. I can’t say there is a direct relationship to the new internal links, but it certainly is implied.