As far as everything goes, I am not an SEO, nor will I ever label myself one. I get most of my conclusions from my own trial and errors. So with that I thought I would share something I’ve been working with for a while.

Link Structure.

Maybe you have or you havent heard of it, but the concept is easy to understand. Structuring the links on for your site both internally and externally to better your linking power. I’m going to focus more on the internal.

Now I had a lot of trouble with this and I definitely had my share of faults trying to get the link structure on a few of my sites setup correctly. My sites went from decent rankings to horrible(page 2 on Google to about page 10). Even in some cases the sites were taken completely off the search engines, due to duplicate content issues. So a fair warning to anyone who messes with this stuff. Thats not to say this is hard stuff, just very temperamental.

To start, link structure doesn’t help just yourself, but in some cases it will even help out your site users by giving them a more pleasant time navigating through your site. There are a bunch of methods to setting up your links internally. I’ll focus on what worked for me, the Pyramid method. I made a real crude example of how the pyramid scheme works.

Assuming your home page is the starting point. Thats where you are directing most of your sites authority and generally  where most of your traffic is going. The basics is you take that authority and you spread it evenly around the site. So starting at my “Home Page” I use one way links directed at the “Categories” of the site. When I say one way links I mean take you are linking to the page, but that page is not linking back to you. So in the case of my “Category” page on all links going to the home page I put the “rel=’nofollow’” tag in there. Since just about every single search engine these days follows the nofollow rule, then its safe to say this works. Same goes for the “Category” links down to the “Single Post”.

When the site is setup correctly, you are evenly distributing your linking power throughout the site. Instead of just sending it all over the place. Again, this is for a simple site. The more complex the site is, the more you’re going to have to consider how its linked. Took me a couple hours of drawing it out to get it all down on some of my more complex sites.

Now the big “Magic Trick” of the linking structure is when you have your “Single Post’s” each carrying a small amount of link power, when you use them all together you can have a lot of link power. So what I have had success doing so far is putting a link on the “Single Post” pages and effectively transferring that link to the “Home page”. Giving the “Home page” a ton of authority in the site itself. You could also use those “Single Posts” to link externally to other sites in your network to give them more authority. I should also mention the “Single Post” isnt linking to anything else, except possibly similar posts or other “Single Posts”. It wont link back to the “Category”. Thats why its holding so much link power as a collective.

I’ve had some pretty good success with it. Its brought me up in the SERP’s a few spots just by reworking the structure. If I was a real smart person, I would consider the link structure as I was building the site. That would be the SMART thing to do, but oh well lesson learned for next time.

Give it a shot and let me know how your successes and failures go. Lets face it, not everyone will get this the first time out.